Posts by Mark Baker
It strikes me that this difficulty in deciding how to format all of these languages is just a canary in the coal mine keeling over to let you know that this is all going to be too confusing for the...
There really is no way to indicate that you are using a term in a non-technical sense if you use it in a context in which the technical sense would normally be inferred. The best approach to avoidi...
In story, character is desire. Character is the things you want and the things you are willing to do, or not willing to do, to get the thing you want. Some stories hang a lot of rich detail on thes...
Thought experiment: If Dan Brown had required the permission of the Vatican to publish The Da Vinci Code, do you imagine it would ever have been granted? Do you think the Pentagon or the White Hous...
Writers often indulge a charming fantasy that publisher and agents are looking for originality. They are not. They are looking for works that fit into a well established sales channel and that habi...
It is well said that there are no rules in funny. A traditional story needs a specific story shape in order to work because the payoff is in the climax and denouement. But comedy, though it can con...
Stories are an attempt to endow life with meaning. Where ordinary life seems possessed of a terrible randomness, we look to stories to assure us that there is actually meaning and purpose in life. ...
This is the reality of the thing: there are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to have written a novel. Many of them are willing to spend a considerable amount of money to advance their...
You can certainly have an ensemble cast, and you can certainly send a team on a shared quest. Hundreds of novels and movies do exactly that. But while a team can have a shared plot, a plot is not t...
Actually, most stories that have a specific antagonist depend on the antagonist being stronger than the protagonist, so logically the antagonist should win most of the time -- unless they do someth...
The danger you can run into with that kind of detailed planning (there are dangers in all approaches to a large piece of work) is that it can lead you to focus on plot at the expense of conflict. ...
There is nothing terribly wrong with the sentence structure per se, but it has an effect that may or may not be desirable, and probably is not desirable quite as often as you are doing it: it chang...
As you rightly perceive, the moments that have a potential for gut emotional appeal are well known, but merely creating the moment does not always produce the emotion -- precisely because we all kn...
IANAL, but, you own all the rights to work you create. No one else acquires any rights to that work unless you grant it to them through an explicit agreement. By sending them your articles to publi...
You should follow normal paragraph rules, which are, essentially, that a paragraph contains a complete thought. Of course, this is a fuzzy definition. What makes a thought complete? A sentence, a c...
Well, if you garner enough attention to get any critics interested in savaging you, you will already be doing well. But critics qua critics are unlikely to savage you for it unless you do it clumsi...
There is probably nothing you can do that will get publications like the Economist to review a self published book. Major outlets like this are bombarded with more book review requests than they co...
I would suggest that the key question you should be asking yourself is whether you actually have a story to tell. The heart of any story is a decision. The protagonist (and possibly other character...
In that period, education was not the province of the nobility but of the church. A intelligent and idealistic young man or woman would have a very obvious outlet for their intelligence and idealis...
This questions is unanswerable except in regard to a specific market. We live in an age of taking offence, and also in an age of giving offence. Certain things will close doors to certain segment...
Good stories are not created by withholding information from the reader. They are created by constructing a satisfactory story arc, by creating the desire to know what happens next. The desire to k...
You can create an average of any data set. If you average out enough story data than you can describe an average story arc and assign names to all of the moments in that arc. This exercise is not w...
Artistically, each book should be as long as it needs to be. Commercially, there are certain limits determined by salability and risk. A thin book may not be perceived by the reader as value for m...
There is nothing wrong with serendipity in a story. Our lives are like that anyway, governed largely by chance. What matters in a story is the moral arc of the characters. What chance occurrences s...
The basic material for a close reading is the text itself. Literally, you read it closely, line by line. Is it clear what is being said? Are there allusions to things outside the text that may affe...