Posts by Mark Baker
The reasons may be economic. I'm speculating here, but the golden age of the short story was the golden age of the magazine. If a magazine wanted to publish fiction (and most of them did back befor...
The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution. But I think you need to stop thinking in...
Betrayal elicits stronger negative emotions than mere villany. The traitor, the false friend, we hate more than we hate an honest enemy. The betrayer adds the wounding our our pride to their other ...
The paragraph is the most indistinctly defined unit in all of writing theory. In the 19th century it was common for paragraph to run on of a page or two. Today, they often run only a few lines. Fo...
Only everyone ever, to the point where it is a classic cliche of the writer: the writer sitting in front of a typewriter beside a large wastepaper basket overflowing with bits of crumpled paper, an...
You can turn Zeus into a flower pot if you want to. It's your book. The myths are public domain and the vast majority of the population has no idea of the details of any of the myths.
Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for ...
I don't think you have a point of view problem, I think you have a storytelling problem. You are trying to introduce a character without introducing them, identify them without identifying them. ...
I doubt many of these terms have very precise definitions, and I am probably not the best authority on their meaning, but here is what I would take these terms to mean: Serious fiction: Not genre ...
Well, more to the point, no agent is going to want to read a sequel to a book they don't represent because no publisher is going to want to publish a sequel to a book that they did not publish. The...
Stories "ripped from the headlines" are always good sellers -- the interest in their subject matter is being actively aroused by current events. Writing a novel is a long business, so to be able to...
I think you have to start by making a fundamental distinction between good and conformant. Obeying a set of rules makes something conformant but it does not make make it good. A Lada is conformant ...
There is always a temptation to be didactic. At least, that is always a temptation for me. Having got your character into some sticky situation, there is a temptation to treat them as you would a c...
There are certainly people who will perform a substantive edit on a manuscript and give you an evaluation of it. They generally advertise themselves as editors or literary consultants. However, f...
You are the author of the work. Authorship means you wrangled the words. It does not mean you originated the ideas. If you composed the words, selected the quotes, and put it all in order, you are ...
If you mean how much work you will have to do between when a contract is offered and when the book is published, the answer is that it will vary depending on how good the MS is and how well it fits...
The fact that you have never seen an ad for a book should tell you something. Advertising doesn't sell books. If advertizing sold books, you would see lots of advertisements for books, because publ...
Apparently not, according to this study (https://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-reading-level-analysis-will-change-the-way-you-write/) which found popular authors spred all aco...
At the heart of every novel (or almost every novel, at least) is someone who wants something and some form of opposition, internal or external, that stands in the way of their getting it. The novel...
If people are telling you that your writing is very descriptive, I would take them at their word. I have been in many critique groups with many very nice people and they do not say that about every...
Just because a scene is written from a character's point of view does not mean it is written based only on information available to the character. The first responsibility of the narrative it to ma...
There is no substitute for experience, but when a story feels forced or inaccurate the root of the problem is almost always motivation. Authors can and do divert wildly from how actual places loo...
One of the worst things that happens in advice given to writers is that individual criticisms get inflated, either by the speaker or the hearer, into iron-clad universal rules. Thus, a perfectly re...
There are multiple citation standards. If your teacher or your school has a particular citation style they prefer or require you should consult the guides for that style. In not, one approach you c...
Character dynamics come through story. There really isn't another way. You can simply tell the story in brief form to establish the dynamic, or you can dramatize it in full, but in the end, charact...
