Posts by Mark Baker
"this isn't what I thought I was reading"? This is the key phrase. The reader needs some idea of what kind of book this is. But this is where genre conventions come to your rescue. Each genre ha...
One thing I really miss from SE is the ability to see what answers of mine got upvoted since I last logged in (or in the last day). In other words, where did my rep increase come from. Because va...
Everything Monica said, and then this: There are, at very least, three components to this. Are your ideas exceptional? Most people's aren't, of course, but some peoples are. No one can tell you h...
I think you need to make a distinction between a change of character and a change of heart. Characters, inherently, don't have changes in character, because they are characters and character is all...
By their fruits ye shall know them, but the works of their hands. What follows a character, despite the many masks they may wear, is their goals and their modus operandi. If the character acts th...
This question presumes are rather economic view of redemption. If the number of good deeds exceeds the number of bad deeds,the characters is redeemed. If their assets exceed the debts, they are red...
Birds of a feather flock together. This is a universal truth and one that you ignore in a story to your peril. A story which ignores this truth may check a bunch of ideological conformity check box...
One of the most important aspects of writing both fiction and non-fiction is managing the reader's attention. Parts of a scene are for atmosphere. They are meant to flesh out the setting so that it...
Light vs darkness is not and never had been the only theme in novels. In fact, in the simplistic sense in which it is practiced today in things like post-Tolkien fantasy novels, it is a pretty new ...
It seems like this place has ground to a stop. I have been trying to do what was suggested earlier of going back to old questions (as surfaced by the Lottery tab), but that seems to be all that is ...
Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. I...
Magic and Wisdom share a common root, but have since diverged. The Wise Man became the Wizard. The natural philosopher similarly diverged to beget the scientist and the alchemist. Our notion of mag...
Having thought much about this question since I proposed it, I am going to suggest a somewhat abstract answer: A happy ending is one in which perfection meets desire. That is, the ending which is ...
Why do baddies have to be bad? (Because that is the question you are really asking here.) Baddies have to be bad because baddies serve an important literary function. Robert E. Lee said, "It is w...
You are trying to turn a critique into a movement. Is that possible? Sure. That's how all movements start. But critique is easy and it is everywhere. All the cranky old men who write to the newsp...
For many of us, our first dive into writing consists of writing plot-driven stories peopled by one note characters, characters who are just types with a name assigned to them. That's fine. Writing ...
It depends on what you mean by evil. There are many characters in fiction which exist only as the personification of evil. They are not people, they are evilness in trousers and a mourning coat. Yo...
The thing you have to understand about writing a novel is, it's impossible. It can't be done by any method known to science. Sure, you can try writing an outline. It won't have any heart. Your ch...
Every scene should produce a change in story values, which almost always means some change of state for the character. From the beginning of the scene to the end, the character should be more in lo...
You can call the cat a minivan but you still can't drive it to Costco. A story is what a story is. If you create an object that has none of the characteristics of a story, it is not a story. You ...
Author royalties depend entirely on the author's contract with the publisher. If the contract says they get royalties, they get royalties. If the contract says they don't get royalties, they don't....
The point of view of a story is the point from which the reader experiences the story. What you do with point of view should be based on what the reader will want to experience at any given point i...
How does that travel change your characters? The iron law is that every scene should leave your characters in a different state from when they began, or, at very least, leave the reader with a diff...
The way you make a reader feel anything about a character is by how he acts. You can try telling the reader stuff about him that is contrary to how he acts, but it won't work. The reader will still...
I think you need to distinguish four aspects of writing and focus on the ones that you most want to improve on. They are: The mechanics of writing: Sentence structure, punctuation, etc. For this ...
