Posts by Mark Baker
I think this is a false dichotomy. To be sure, there are many reasons to write. You may be writing only for your own amusement or catharsis, in which case merely getting your thoughts down on pap...
You may or may not be able to pull this off, but this is the danger you face: You may end up writing scenes that you fall in love with as scenes but which do not fit the arc of your story. Robert ...
The vast majority of the fiction produced in any age is of the type that would generally be called pulp or potboiler. It is simple non-challenging stuff meant to occupy a vacant hour for an reader ...
You are telling a story, not writing a manual. Everything goes in the story. The order in which it occurs in the story is the order in which it matters to the story. There are two ways to introduc...
From a purely stylistic point of view: "any combination of: apples, oranges, pears" But you say this is for a legal document and lawyers may construe ambiguity where ordinary reasonable people wou...
You can set a story anywhere. The challenge is not to make it consistent with our world but to make it self-consistent within itself. And I think this is a universal literary problem (and therefore...
I think this very much depends on the narrative tone and style that have been used up to this point. If this is the first time you have done such a digression in what has otherwise been a straightf...
Falling in love has the quality that you are often not fully conscious of it while it is happening. The moment where you articulate to yourself that you are in love with someone can often come as a...
There are no jobs that pay well for which the only requirement is writing. This is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are lots of people who can write well enough for commercial purpose. T...
Other answers assume that the problem you are having is inertia, and perhaps they are right. Perhaps you just need to start writing and keep writing. But perhaps inertia is not the problem. Perha...
This question really comes down to the definition of story (and, to a certain extent, of fiction). If we take story in the broad sense of a sequential narrative and fiction in the broad sense of an...
There are two places a novelist may find a character: inside of themselves and out in the world. The desire to write may come from many places: sometimes from a desire to "express oneself", sometim...
Every protagonist wants something and is struggling to get it. Every plot point in a story consists of the protagonist's attempt to get the thing they desire and the things that frustrate that desi...
The classic example would be The Arabian Nighs (AKA One Thousand and One Nights) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights) in which Scheherazade tells her husband an new story eac...
Well, a true utopia would have no room for story. Story runs on desire and frustration and the moral challenges that result from the frustration of desire. A true utopia would leave no desire frust...
When we give credit to a designer for an article of clothing, we do not caveat our praise by pointing out that they did not weave the fabric or grow the cotton or design the sewing machine or smelt...
The sexual act can be tender or it can be violent. Its violent aspects can be consensual or non consensual. There are many different words for it, reflecting each of these connotations. F*** is one...
Harry Potter was not original. Anyone who grew up reading English Children's books would recognize that it is a pastiche of virtually the whole canon of 20th century English Kid Lit, in which train...
Certainly a story can have this structure. But your analysis of it seems to assume that the antagonist is a role equal to that of the protagonist in story structure, and that is not the case. Story...
Freelance writing, as a career, is enormously oversubscribed. At the bottom of the market there are far too many writers chasing far too little work, and therefore prices are rock bottom and market...
Prices are set based on supply and demand. Cost of production has nothing to do with it, except to determine whether a product is worth producing.
One small point in addition to What's excellent summary: It is important to make a distinction between story and plot. In Aspects of the Novel E.M. Forster says that story is what happens, and plot...
A story should start with the revelation of the desire that will drive the main character. In the case of an exile story, the desire is usually either revenge or to return home (which may mean to f...
The climax of the action of a story is not necessarily (or even usually) the climax of the moral arc of the story. The climax of the action is the crucible in which the hero is tested and purified....
There is no universal public opinion of any author. People read of pleasure and for edification. There are various pleasure you can get from reading, and various forms of edification. Some hold tha...
