Posts by Mark Baker
To answer your question, I have to talk about the difference between a plot and a story. A plot is a sequence of events that happen. A story is an arc of rising tension leading to a resolution. (Th...
The reader is going to form an image of a character or a scene by putting together bits from their own experience. They do this based on the clues you give them, but they use those clues to select ...
Everything is boring unless it has a function in the story. It it is irrelevant, it is boring. There is nothing you can do with language to make irrelevant stuff not be boring. Conversely, if somet...
My answer is a variation on my answer to the question you linked to: In prose, you cannot act out dialogue. Prose is recieved by the reader asynchronously. Things that take minutes can sometimes be...
Conflict in a story arises from desire. The basic structure of any story is that the protagonist has a desire and there are forces or people who oppose their attaining that desire. The story procee...
Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of consecutive words. It is not limited to consonants, and there is nothing in the definition that speaks to its purpose ...
Few realistic choices are that hard in themselves. What makes them hard is history. Does Spiderman save Mary Jane or a bus load of schoolkids? Easy, save the school kids. The needs of the many,...
I have four. I now profoundly wish I only had one. The idea of a "site" is now becoming moribund anyway. The essence of a "site" is a home page, but the importance of the home page is diminishing...
In classical theory, this character is known as the trickster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster They are the chaotic character. They create problem for the protagonist because they cannot be...
English does not have an allergy to adverbs. Bad writing teachers sometimes tell their students not to use adverbs, perhaps because they are not skilled enough to teach them to use them well. Dif...
How can you tell whether "yes, this is good" or "okay, this needs work"? These are objective artistic judgments. Emotional distance from the work is certainly part of what you need to make them ab...
Every story has a bootstrapping problem. You have to establish characters, a world (fantasy or not), a problem or desire, and the obstacles to that problem or desire, and the story cannot really ge...
Neither of the above. You can't act a scene in prose. Nor can you describe your way into a reaction. What you have to do to get the reader to have a reaction to events it to set them up properly so...
Yes, it can be done. But I would think twice about it. A novel should be about telling a story. It should not be about seeing if you can pull off an unconventional storytelling technique. People ...
This is the sort of question you can best answer with a stroll down to your local bookstore. But consider: thrills come from danger. You need to be strapped in to ride the roller coaster. A book le...
Generally speaking, quotation for purposes of criticism is an allowed use under copyright law. That does not necessarily mean all quotation in a review is permitted usage, though. You should make s...
Quite honestly, if you do not read widely and voraciously, you have no business trying to be a writer. To do otherwise would be like a chef who only ate once a week and only at McDonald's. It would...
Well, consider the term cookie cutter. Now imagine that you love cookies and you want to go into the cookie business. Which do you think would be the best strategy: Bring out a totally original l...
There is not one answer, as others have said. But I would suggest the following: How many rewrites it takes to make a competent writer is a very different question from how many rewrites it takes...
The acid test is this: Will the reader behave differently if they know this? If not, leave it out. The aim of user documentation is to enable the user to act correctly. Any detail that does not con...
Let me approach this another way. The idea of a maturation plot occurs in more than one of the various schemas for classifying plots by type. Those schemas divide plots into multiple types, but the...
I would challenge your assertion that the journey is a metaphor for maturation. In today's highly (one might almost say pathologically) individualistic society we do tend to think that the story is...
The term "subtext" seems to be used for a least four things each of which is distinct, and only two of which I will suggest are on topic for this site. It is used as a catchall for literary devi...
In this question about creating subtext, Where in the writing process do you work in subtext?, the question of what the word subtext means was raised. This question is to address this issue. Of co...
First, I think we need to make a distinction here between what we might call Easter eggs -- little in jokes of the sort of which Stephen Moffat and his cronies are particularly fond. Sherlock and D...
