Posts by Mark Baker
If you don't have a middle and an end, you don't have a beginning. I don't mean that you have to work out all the details of the middle and the end before you begin, because you can work those out ...
Science and faith are not opposites. They are different modes of knowing. They are other modes of knowing as well, such as logic, mathematics, ethics, and the historical method. Each of them addres...
You have to understand what show vs tell means in the context of prose. In a movie, you can show something by pointing the camera at it. In prose, all you have is words and all you can do with word...
This is essentially a business problem, which is not to say it is off topic, because technical writers exist to solve business problems. But it is not a problem the writer should try to solve on th...
First of all, if your firstnamelastname.com domain is available, claim it now. Even if you don't decide to use it immediately, it is a valuable asset that you might not be able to claim later. I ...
What a fascinating question. I suspect that the answer is that you can't with perfect certainty. There will probably always be readers who will pick up your book hoping for one thing, thinking in t...
I think that there is a very strong case to be made that this distinction between marketing voice and tech comm voice should be avoided entirely. There are two main reasons for this: In ancient t...
Legally there is no issue. It is your work. You own the copyright. You can licensed anyone you like to make copies no matter how many copies have already been made (subject, of course, to any right...
There is always the temptation these days for a writer to try to act out a scene as they imagine it playing on a movie screen. But this does not work in prose. It is impossible in prose to have two...
Just as a technical matter, a theme is not a message. Love is a theme. Love sucks is a message. When you say you want to get across a message in your writing, what you are saying is that you want...
Does it actually matter to the story that the language they are speaking changes? Most of the time in international stories, the difference is language is not germane to the plot in any way and is ...
You are not writing a history, you are writing a novel. In a history, the temporal sequences of events is generally the mainspring of the narrative. In a novel, the story arc of the protagonist is ...
You should never write in the tone of ordinary speech. Ordinary speech is unreadable. It is repetitive, broken, trivial, and largely mindless. Dialogue is not speech. Dialogue should be crisp, rele...
On one project I worked on, we did reviews via a work- in-progress server, which was an HTML version of the current state of the docs. We created a modified build script for this server which inclu...
Dialogue is an action like any other action in a novel. The amount of dialogue in any given novel should be a function of how much of the action of the novel -- the working out of the story shape o...
I disagree with Amadeus on the matter of becoming the protagonist. I don't think that is what literature does or why readers turn to literature. I think there is always a narrative distance. We are...
Not necessarily, but the propensity to indulge in internal monologue is itself a character trait. Fundamentally, the way we assess the character of someone in fiction is the same a how we assess th...
First let me say that the notion that a dead face cannot be beautiful is nonsense. Some may never has seen a dead face they found beautiful, but many have, and I see no reason not to believe them. ...
I doubt the issue is whether the desires are stated explicitly or implied by actions. I suspect the issue has more to do with story shape. If we use the hero's journey model, and novel opens in the...
I hate the word hook (in this context, it is useful for talking about fishing). It implies some kind of violent capture (fishing again). Who wants to be hooked? Fish? Drug addicts? The problem wi...
Well, to start with, what you are describing is not subtlety. Subtlety is paying attention to the small but significant details of something -- making a subtle point or a subtle distinction. What...
This is where the show don't tell doctrine becomes particularly pernicious. It is all telling. All you have is words. All words can do is tell. To apply show don't tell to prose, you have to show...
First, make sure that you are not subconsciously trying to write a movie fight scene. Movie fight scenes are all about movement and noise (and generally far too long and tedious for anyone older th...
This is all about recognition. The user may recognize the component being mentioned by name (verbal) or by sight (visual). Recognition by name is sufficient in most cases. If you are going for re...
The novel is one of the most complex pieces of art that humans create, and the enjoyment of novels can be based on many different characteristics. Without trying to be exhaustive, we could distingu...
