Posts by Mark Baker
This is all about where you want to direct the reader's attention. As a writer, you have almost total control over where the reader's attention is focused in a scene. If you write: A rabbit s...
Editors care if you have a good story to tell and can tell is reasonably well. No manuscript was ever or will ever be rejected on the basis of spaces around an ellipsis. Four spelling errors on the...
I very much doubt that there was any such thing as a degree in journalism in George Orwell's time. There has been a huge proliferation of degrees over the last half century or so, responding, I gue...
Most of the marketing for content is by word of mouth. You build an audience by writing good content that people want to read. Slowly, the natural audience for that content will find it and will sp...
It should sound very far away from your internal voice. Your internal voice is the voice you use to talk to yourself and it has all kinds of advantages that your public voice cannot share, since yo...
A good review means the reviewer liked it. It does not mean anybody else did. Something can be intensely liked by a small group of people and ignored by everyone else. It can be a very fine example...
This is essentially a question of libel. Is what you say about these athletes libelous or not. The laws governing libel different from one country to another, so it is impossible to give a definiti...
How many Harry Potters do you think there are in the phone book? Or James Kirks? Literature would be full of some truly strange and wonderful names if no character could have a name borne by any re...
Well, it's a very old question, and one that is not likely to get a definitive answer. It is perhaps worth making a distinction between poetry and verse. Verse is a literary form that is characteri...
If you can't adequately develop sympathy for a character over the course of an entire book, then there is little hope of your readers ever reaching the end of that book. Of course you should be a...
In principle it works. Great magazine writers do it all the time. The thing is, at every turn of a story, you have to make the reader care. Detail for the sake of detail is just a distraction. If y...
Virtually none. Both the beginning and the end of a sentence are prominent positions to emphasize something. English allows for many variations of word order with the same semantics. The only effec...
Well, it is impossible to tell from what you have told us which of these problems you have, but there is a fairly easy test you can do to find out. Write character descriptions of real people you k...
Here's the thing about Watson: he is a fully developed character. If you met him at a party, you would say to yourself, isn't that Doctor Watson? This is even more true in the Sherlock TV series (i...
There is story development and there is narration. You need to compose a story before you can narrate it. Some people are naturals at story development. For them the story flows so naturally that t...
You are writing a story, not a history. Were the characters of your story real people (which they are not) many things would happen to them in their day to day lives that are not in any way relevan...
One of the most common forms of dating in the pre-Christian era was by regnal dating. That is, events were recorded as occurring in such and such a year in the reign of king X. (For that matter, Ch...
I'm going to dissent from the spin straw into gold argument that others have made. It's not that I don't see merit in it, its just that I think prose rhythm is a heard thing, by which I mean that s...
Prose cadence has mostly to do with making the emphasis in a sentence fall on the most important words: But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ...
The ending is obvious in most books. In a romance, will the heroine get the guy? Obviously yes. In a detective novel, will the detective get the bad guy? Obviously yes. Wanting to know how it end...
Stop worrying about this stuff. English tenses are enormously complicated, but they are tools of analysis, not composition. If you are a native English speaker you will have learned how tenses are ...
I would suggest that rather than thinking in terms of external conflict rather than internal conflict, you should think in terms of internal conflict caused by external conflict. In a romance, th...
I just hate the common categorization scheme for point of view and voice. It is so misleading and causes so much unnecessary anxiety, not to mention awkward narration. To begin with, point of vie...
Stories are not about proving points. A novelist may have a point they want to push, but if the point overwhelms the story than the result can only appeal to the people who already agree with the a...
At the heart of every story (or most stories, anyway) is a character arc, and in the center of a character arc is a decision, a hard decision, a decision that will cost the character something valu...
