Posts by Mark Baker
I think this is what separates the pros from the amateurs and the unpublished from the published. Writing is hard. Getting it right can take a huge amount of work and many writers report being roya...
Plot is the servant of character. One of the most common mistakes of beginning writers seems to be to start by inventing a plot -- essentially an imaginary history -- and then peopling it with char...
We tend to have more and simpler words for things we talk about regularly than for things we talk about seldom, so there probably isn't an exact equivalent to "human" for ants, at least, not one th...
Redundancy in prose is often useful because people forget things and because the real world relationships implied by the grammatical relationships is not always clear. One often finds that overzea...
The human perceptual system runs on anticipation. We understand things that play out in predictable and foreseen ways. We are disoriented by things that happen suddenly, violently, and out of the b...
Stories create experiences. Stories that are heavy on setting create an experience of that setting. People sometimes simply receive an experience for what it is. We are experience junkies. Stories ...
Your subtext2 is what is generally called foreshadowing. That is, it hints at something important that is yet to be revealed: the clouds on the horizon that hint at rain. It is not really a form of...
On the old typewriters, there was no ! key. To create an exclamation mark you had to type a single quote, backspace, and type a period. That was a good system. Exclamation marks should be hard to t...
I suspect that most reader expect the narrator is not going to die. But you should not look on the device of the involved narrator as requiring the maintenance of strict logic about when the story ...
It is the lure of the fine phrase. We all want to create fine phrases, phrases that are a thing of beauty in their own right. But the lure of the fine phrase can often lead us into the verbose and ...
While words with multiple syllables do have an internal stress patterns, stress is more a matter of the role a word plays in a sentence. Often a writer who is sensitive to this will recast a senten...
What distinguishes YouTube is not the number of contributors, though that is huge, and essential to its success, but the number of viewers, which is extraordinarily large. What makes a content pla...
This is absolutely a problem with critique groups. On of the fundamental facts for 90% of critique groups is that your critique partners are not your natural readership. Most of the critiques I giv...
This is an interesting question. The answer, I believe, lies in remembering that people read for pleasure. And when it comes to our pleasures, we value predictability very highly. This is not to sa...
Going to writing conferences will increase you chances that a literary agent will read your manuscript, compared to the chances if you simply submit over the transom. It will not make it a more pub...
Fix it now vs fix it later is a perennial question in writing. Often the answers given are absolutist one way or the other, or come down to "whatever works for you". But I would suggest a different...
There are two reasons for a reader to read something, because they are interested in the subject matter and because they like how it is written. The risk of using humor in business or technical w...
I think it is important to remember where these creatures came from. They are all religious in origin, and as such represent fundamental religious themes that have a corresponding resonance in the ...
This is a very common technique among aspiring writers. It feels like playing tricks with the narrative line solves all kinds of writing and story problems for you. But this is largely an illusion....
The purpose of fiction is to give pleasure to the reader. The use of profanity, like anything else, works when it gives pleasure to the reader. Of course, certain profanities will displease certa...
The term writing is kind of like the word walking, except that writing gets used as a collective term in a way that walking does not. Lots of people walk as a major part of their jobs: letter carri...
It strikes me looking at this that what the difference between true self and false self here can be summed up as contentment vs discontent. I would like to think that contentment was the true sel...
If you are using POV characters to explore a world, you are not doing storytelling, you are doing world building. That is a perfectly legitimate hobby, but it is not literature and the normal conce...
There are three basic reasons for using figure references in a document, rather than just putting the figures inline in the text next to the point where they are referenced: You are referencing a...
There is no real way to tell if you are doing enough, of doing the right things, just from a brief description of your product and your users. The questions you really have to come to grips with ar...
