Posts by Mark Baker
I haven't used it in years, and it may be better now, but my experience was that it would periodically misinterpret whole phrases. The problem was not that it made more errors than I did typing -- ...
What you are experiencing is the natural rhythm of human productivity. There are even techniques designed to help you optimize the use of this rhythm. One is called the Pomodoro technique in which ...
First, the KJV is most definitely not in Old English, a tongue that had not been spoken for centuries when the KJV translation was done. It is written in modern literary English. Modern English has...
I suspect you may be miscalculating where your story begins. A story arc whose climax has a massive impact on a relationship generally begins with the beginning of that relationship, with all the t...
People clearly differ in the amount and type of planning they do. But I think it is important to bear in mind that in the end a novel is an expression of a vision. Its function is to create a vivid...
IANAL, but questions of this sort fall under the doctrine of fair use, which may differ from one jurisdiction to another. Generally, fair use says that there are certain exceptions to the protectio...
There are examples of separate stories connected thematically. I think the question is, when is such a work a collection of independent stories on the same theme and when is it a single novel. One...
This is generally inadvisable (which is not to say that it is not done sometimes). The reason it is inadvisable is that every artform has its palette, its set of devices and conventions by which it...
I think the closes you are going to come is "narrative irony" or "dramatic irony", but that does not name narrator specifically. I can't think of any case of transmuting this into "Ironic narrator"...
There is a lamentable process by which averages become aphorisms. That is, we see a common pattern and turn it into an absolute rule. Adverbs are often used badly, so don't use adverbs at all. Writ...
There are no rules. There is a lot of advice. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. A lot of it is generalized inappropriately. There are also a lot of conventions which it is safer to follow unle...
A character that is not lucid enough to see or interpret what is going on around them is not lucid enough to have a POV. If they are not lucid and you say: Something poked her shoulder. Then ...
Theme is not necessarily a message. It is more the thing that you are exploring. If the theme is love, for instance, you don't have to take a position on love, you don't have to have a covert messa...
I'm not sure if what you are describing is unreliable narrator at all. An unreliable narrator is not one who is mistaken about facts. An unreliable narrator is one who is deliberately deceiving the...
Most works of art bear the artist's name. Most works of craft do not. The person who paints your portrait signs their work. The person who paints your house, or your sign, does not. Using a ghost...
A character is a bundle of desires. They are defined first by their primary desire: the thing that is driving their action in the story. Second, they are defined by their secondary desires, the thi...
I think the answer to this is, almost anything. More characters, fewer characters, different setting, different ending, longer, shorter, rougher, gentler. People get asked for all of these things a...
Dialogue consists of two characters trying to get something from each other. Each has a desire that they want the other to fulfill. Each has some reluctance in fulfilling that desire, or else has d...
There is a kind of brainstorming process that some writers seem to go through when trying to come up with something to write about. It goes something like this. Can I take two apparently incompatib...
Words individually do not give the feeling of any genre. It is how you put them together to create a picture in the reader's mind. Just as a painter may use the same pallet of colors to paint a uni...
There are two basic uses of magic in literature. One is as a catalyst for a cautionary tale on the dangers of power. Examples of this include The Lord of The Rings and A Wizard of Earthsea. The for...
Rhetorically speaking, your conclusion should not be a mere summing up of arguments already presented. Rather, it should build a rising tide of emotion and conviction to carry your reader irresisti...
The point of fiction is not to make statements. If you want to make statements, write an essay. The point of fiction is to give the reader an experience. The reader may, of course, reach a conclu...
The notion of "willing suspension of disbelief" is one of the most misleading phrases in the literature of writing (right up there with "show don't tell"). It is very much worth reading Tolkien's O...
A story must always be a story, which is to say that it must have a story arc. The arc of a story is fundamentally built around desire and the things people will or will not do to achieve their des...
