Posts by Mark Baker
"I want to hook the reader by displaying the danger and darkness of my world" This is a very common idea about how to engage the reader, but it has a fundamental flaw: Darkness and danger are not ...
In real life, we experience emotions ourselves and we observe them in others. Thus some emotions are observed but not felt and that is fine. As far as felt emotions are concerned, we feel emotion...
You are writing a story, not a psychology textbook. Stories appeal to our hopes and to our sense that the world is (or our wish that it should be) a fundamentally orderly place, by which I mean a p...
IANAL, but this is one of those questions where you can start out by asking, are other people doing this. If not, there is a good chance that the answer is that you can't do it either. This is es...
There is no background in prose. The reader receives every word and they receive them one at a time. Thus there is no place to hide anything. Where you can be more subtle is in the connections be...
A story is an experience, but it is an experience in which all the threads of that experience point at something, like the pattern the iron filings assume around the head of a magnet. If you have...
The answer to this is crushing simple. You tell us that they are brother and sister. "Pass the butter," Pamela said. "Get it yourself," her brother replied. Don't try to slip information...
A good story creates an experience. The reader draws their own conclusions and has their own emotional reactions to the experience it provided. Some will therefore find your ending more of a downer...
There is no copyright on ideas. You can retell the ideas from other books freely, as long as you are actually creating new words to describe those ideas from scratch. If you are taking chunks of ...
I was in just this position as few years ago. Extensive comments from an editor at a top house, mostly critical. I did a rewrite and got a "better, but not quite" back. No invitation to try again, ...
In this context, I would take it to mean someone who cannot be reasoned with. When dealing with a mountain or a rainstorm, you can't reason with them or reach a deal or a compromise with them. When...
That approach is fine for a landing page. But what you have to bear in mind is that people don't use landing pages. This is true across all categories of information. There has been a steady declin...
An annotated edition of a work is essentially a book within a book. The inner book is the original text and the outer book is the volume of annotations. Cite the book you are citing, inner if you a...
You are not writing a history, where you are obliged to fill in the details of all the day, months, and years that pass. You are writing a story. You are obliged to write only those incidents that ...
It has become fashionable in recent years to base the appeal of a novel on personal identification with the protagonist. That is, enjoyment of the novel is supposed to consist in a personal aspirat...
In addition to Lauren's excellent points, I would refer you to this question: "The flux capacitor--it's what makes time travel possible." When to keep world-building explanations short. Whether you...
I would suggest that there is a very simple rule of thumb here: if it is revelatory of character, it is a story. If it is revelatory of ideas, it is a philosophical essay in disguise. We debate p...
There is one key fear that all young men share, and most older men, if we are honest: The fear of appearing weak. Men have an instinctive need to project strength, and will find any way they can to...
The simple answer to this is that this stuff works when it is revelatory, when it shows the reader something they care about, when it draws them in. That is not about quantity, it is about aptness....
The heart of a story is neither physical conflict nor emotional conflict, it is moral conflict. That is to say, it is about the character being made to face a choice about values. Does pride and pr...
One of the things that seems like a good idea to many beginning writers is trying to deceive the reader in some way or another. There is one problem with this idea: readers don't like it. And why...
I think your revised question reveals a confusion of two different things. There are works with strong and enduring followings, and there are works that inspire roleplaying. There may be some inter...
If you don't think Pride and Prejudice has cult status, you are looking in the wrong place. It's cultists are called Janeites. And I think you may be overestimating the staying power of Star Wars ...
I haven't read your samples because we don't do critiques. But there is a general question here that may be of use to other people. If you have too many flashbacks, it it probably a structural pr...
To paraphrase your question slightly, "How do your lie to the reader?" Answer: you probably shouldn't. Once the reader distrusts you, it becomes impossible to achieve any effect at all. What you...
