Posts by Mark Baker
No. A story stands or falls on the completion of the story arc. POV is simply about camera angles. You choose the camera angle that best frames the part of the story you are telling at the moment. ...
This is an example of direct quoted thought, which is a construct that only occurs in fiction. (Actually, direct quoted putative thought, but that is beside the point.) I do seem to recall seeing...
The sentence that gets away from you is almost always the result of starting in the wrong place. Look at the first clause in your sentence. Everything that follows has to align with that clause, bo...
Show vs tell is an overblown and misunderstood idea imported into fiction writing from screenwriting. It was originally coined to train novelists to write for the screen. (You can see how novel-lik...
Names are part of language. However, they are normally not translated. A Frenchman named Pierre is not referred to as Peter in English, he keeps the French version of his name. We presume that En...
The tense used in a story is relative to the temporal POV (point of view) of the narrator, not to the actual calendar date. The modern novel arises from traditional storytelling, meaning that the d...
Let's say that you wanted to become a circus performer. You want your act to be juggling flaming batons blindfolded while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a tiger cage. You recognize that yo...
"moreover" and "in addition to" are the kind of connectors that occur to us when we think of another idea as we are writing. It often happens that as you are writing one idea in support of a point,...
No one can know the writer's reasons but themselves, but I would point out a couple of things: If the detective is the star of of the show, you want them in frame. When you see a scene from a cha...
I think that the hidden question here is, does writing require teachable skills. Of course writing requires skills. You have to be able to make marks on paper with a stick, etc. The real question s...
If you don't have an idea for a story, you can retell an existing one. There are a few ways to do this. One is to take a song that tells a story (a lot of folk songs and ballads are small stories) ...
IANAL but, as an anthologist, you automatically own a copyright on the anthology -- not on the passages themselves, but on the particular collection and arrangement of those passages you have made....
It's not that it's not acceptable, it's that it is orthogonal. What editors care about is compelling stories in the current taste. There is nothing to say that cannot include scientific detail. Tha...
The fallacy here is the idea that there are general rules at all. There are no general rules about what is allowed in an academic paper, or any other kind of writing. There are specific style guide...
You have to make a distinction between good grammar and what we might call the grammar of the good. Or perhaps I should say between grammar and the grammar of the good. Grammar is the mechanics o...
Three words: Pride and Prejudice We could name many others, but P&P is by most reckonings, one of the finest novels ever written, and it is not about death. But it is easy to see why the que...
A program can only show you information that it records as part of its file format (metadata). If LibreOffice records the data on which date each line is written as part of the normal file format,...
First, you need to decide if you are looking for someone to fix your story, someone to fix your language, or someone to fix your typos. These are very different things requiring very different skil...
First, that is not an onomatopoeia. A slap does not sound like the word slap. Second, this technique is ineffective either way. You can't turn up the volume in prose using caps and asterisks. Nor...
It very much depends on why it is New York or Chicago. Do you want the specific flavor of the city? Do you want locals to find your portrayal convincing? If so, Lauren is right. But if the particul...
While Lauren is correct about the grammatical difference, the actual impact on the reader is virtually nil. It isn't at this level that texts have impact on readers. The levels on which text chiefl...
Third person is not just a grammatical category, it is the whole angle of attack on the subject matter. Most particularly, the third person brings the protagonist into the frame (assuming, of cours...
When you sell a novel to a publisher, you sell them specific right to publish in certain languages and certain countries. Whatever rights you don't sell, you retain and can sell to someone else. Us...
I believe you are incorrect. If anything, writing in the first person distances you from the character. First, consider the characters from fiction that you feel like you know well. Harry Potter?...
If you have so many pauses that you feel the need to vary how you describe them, chances are that the reason it feels repetitive is that you are reaching for the same device too many times, not tha...