Posts by Mark Baker
The problem with plot armor is not false safety, but false peril. The central peril of a story is always moral, not physical. It is about what a character wants and what they are willing to do to...
I think Lauren's suggested reformulation may be a better way to express the phenomena. YA is a very popular genre today, and much of YA seems to be in the fantasy/sci fi realm. So there is a lot of...
The thing about writing is that everything has to be accomplished with a single stream of words. A narrative can only ever be doing one thing at a time, in stark contrast to movies, where many thin...
That's a pretty broad question, but they key thing about horror, or any other strong emotion, it that it is all in the build up. What creates the tension in a horror movie, for instance, is not the...
No one is a rival. Lots of people have a rival. The distinction is crucial. Your protagonist's rival does not think of himself as a rival, and neither should you. He thinks of himself as having a r...
You need to think about where the reader's attention is supposed to be. You are painting a picture with words, asking the reader to build a picture in their head based solely on the words on the pa...
Switching to present tense in the epilogue would suggest that the story is in a frame. That is, the story is a narration in the present of events that took place in the past. The narrator is not re...
I think your real question here is not about the format of a bibliography but about the requirements for citation in various kinds of work. Some fields have very specific requirements both for wh...
I assume that you have googled for outliners and have rejected all of the many version available out there. So here are a couple of thoughts on alternatives. Trello, or something similar. Trello ...
Grammatical formalisms (as opposed to fundamental grammar) do not apply in dialog. Dialog is a report of what someone actually said. In fiction, what characters actually say and how they say it is ...
It is hard to be sure from such small samples, but I would guess that the problem is not really abruptness. All chapter endings are in some sense abrupt. The action simply stops. The problem is, w...
Once you get past the ra ra enthusiasm of the forums, you need genuine criticism, both of your own work and of literature and the writing process in general. That is hard to find online, in part be...
Sci Fi and Fantasy are perhaps the genres least concerned with character. Worldbuilding (so called) is often the central obsession of authors in those genres. (Historical can just the same sometime...
Let's come at this from a different angle. There is a difference between the ending the reader wants and the ending that they find satisfying. An happy ending can be emotionally empty. A sad ending...
Novels are about people. This is true for Christian novelists such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, or Flannery O'Connor, just as much as it is true for novelists of no faith. When a n...
A movie can establish a scene very quickly based on visuals. Once a scene has been established visually, you can cut back and forth between scenes very quickly because the viewer instantly recogniz...
This sounds like you are describing a literary device known as Deus Ex Machina (The God in the Machine). It is a device use to get an author out of a plot hole for which there is no satisfactory re...
There are names and there are brands. Lots of people have the same name and it is not reasonable to expect that no fictional character to have a name that no one else does. Brands, on the other h...
I would suggest starting with three very basic questions: What does he want. Why does he want it? Why can't he get it? If you can't give clear and consistent answers to those questions, you don...
It does not matter if the reader expects them to die or not, it matters if they care whether they die or not. Suspense is not mathematical in nature, it is moral. It is not about how likely an even...
This does strike me as a general ethical question. A publication represents an interest which sponsors its publication. A journalist who accepts employment at that publication is working for hire t...
It is called a frame. A frame is a literary device in which one narrative is contained within another, the outer frame being used to in some way set the scene for the other. A frame has nothing to ...
Human life is ultimately terrifying. We are all going to die, and the thought of our own extinction horrifies us. But it is not just the fact of death, but also the fact that death (if it is not pr...
While we may be able to break down a successful long sentence analytically, I'm not sure that this is going to help you write them fluently. Language is about rhythm and balance and how the reader'...
You need to be very conscious of the difference between history and story. If you have multiple sub plots that are not obvious, there is a good chance that they are more history than story. Histo...
