Posts by Mark Baker
The sexual act can be tender or it can be violent. Its violent aspects can be consensual or non consensual. There are many different words for it, reflecting each of these connotations. F*** is one...
I think this is a false dichotomy. To be sure, there are many reasons to write. You may be writing only for your own amusement or catharsis, in which case merely getting your thoughts down on pap...
You may or may not be able to pull this off, but this is the danger you face: You may end up writing scenes that you fall in love with as scenes but which do not fit the arc of your story. Robert ...
In the end, every technical document should contain whatever information the users need to get their jobs done. This takes precedence over any template or convention. To the extent that there are...
The vast majority of the fiction produced in any age is of the type that would generally be called pulp or potboiler. It is simple non-challenging stuff meant to occupy a vacant hour for an reader ...
You are telling a story, not writing a manual. Everything goes in the story. The order in which it occurs in the story is the order in which it matters to the story. There are two ways to introduc...
I think this very much depends on the narrative tone and style that have been used up to this point. If this is the first time you have done such a digression in what has otherwise been a straightf...
Other answers assume that the problem you are having is inertia, and perhaps they are right. Perhaps you just need to start writing and keep writing. But perhaps inertia is not the problem. Perha...
There are two places a novelist may find a character: inside of themselves and out in the world. The desire to write may come from many places: sometimes from a desire to "express oneself", sometim...
Every protagonist wants something and is struggling to get it. Every plot point in a story consists of the protagonist's attempt to get the thing they desire and the things that frustrate that desi...
Well, a true utopia would have no room for story. Story runs on desire and frustration and the moral challenges that result from the frustration of desire. A true utopia would leave no desire frust...
Harry Potter was not original. Anyone who grew up reading English Children's books would recognize that it is a pastiche of virtually the whole canon of 20th century English Kid Lit, in which train...
The classic example would be The Arabian Nighs (AKA One Thousand and One Nights) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights) in which Scheherazade tells her husband an new story eac...
Not every novel has an antagonist. Basic story structure is about desire and the things that frustrate desire. The thing that frustrates desire does not have to be a person -- an antagonist. In man...
By purest serendipity I came across a reference to a book on writing in the classic style just yesterday. http://classicprose.com/. I have not read it myself, but it was recommended by an acquainta...
Certainly a story can have this structure. But your analysis of it seems to assume that the antagonist is a role equal to that of the protagonist in story structure, and that is not the case. Story...
Freelance writing, as a career, is enormously oversubscribed. At the bottom of the market there are far too many writers chasing far too little work, and therefore prices are rock bottom and market...
Prices are set based on supply and demand. Cost of production has nothing to do with it, except to determine whether a product is worth producing.
In the classic model of a story, the protagonist pursues their desire to the limits of their endurance, concluding in some profound change or revelation (depending on whether you think people can c...
The climax of the action of a story is not necessarily (or even usually) the climax of the moral arc of the story. The climax of the action is the crucible in which the hero is tested and purified....
There is no universal public opinion of any author. People read of pleasure and for edification. There are various pleasure you can get from reading, and various forms of edification. Some hold tha...
Joseph Conrad was one of the greatest novelists ever to write in the English language. He was born in Poland and did not become fluent in English until his twenties. It can be done. But writing a...
Plots twist. Stories don't. Sometimes a plot twist will show that reader that the arc of the story was something other than what they were expecting. But the story still needs to have a satisfying ...
The best way to give the reader the sense the the character speaking is angry is through the words they say, not through the description of how they say it. Make the word angry and you don't need t...
What is needed is a definite story shape. Stories are not merely a sequence of incidents. There is a definite progression. The protagonist has a desire. That desire is frustrated. The protagonist a...
