Posts by Mark Baker
Copyright covers the expression of an idea. The author of the software has copyright on their code. But the result of that code is a subject in the public domain that anyone is free to write about....
I think you may be making too much of the idea of a flaw. To have an Achilles heel, you must first be Achilles, and who among us is? Most stories are not driven by a single flaw (which would imply ...
Joseph Conrad was one of the greatest novelists ever to write in the English language. He was born in Poland and did not become fluent in English until his twenties. It can be done. But writing a...
If you are looking for effective techniques for producing an effect on the reader, you will not find them in writing so much as in storytelling. It is in the juxtaposition of people and events that...
Plots twist. Stories don't. Sometimes a plot twist will show that reader that the arc of the story was something other than what they were expecting. But the story still needs to have a satisfying ...
The best way to give the reader the sense the the character speaking is angry is through the words they say, not through the description of how they say it. Make the word angry and you don't need t...
What is needed is a definite story shape. Stories are not merely a sequence of incidents. There is a definite progression. The protagonist has a desire. That desire is frustrated. The protagonist a...
There are an infinite number of plots. The claim is that there is a limited number of types of plots. This list that Aaron Digulla quotes is a list of types of plots. Being an orderly species and...
Not every novel has an antagonist. Basic story structure is about desire and the things that frustrate desire. The thing that frustrates desire does not have to be a person -- an antagonist. In man...
You are telling a story, not a history. There are times in the history of the character when the arc of the story is not progressing. That really does not matter as long as the story arc continues ...
Most slogans and rallying cries are banal in themselves. Terri's example of "Remember the Alamo" is a case in point. Unless you do remember the Alamo, and unless you care about what happened there,...
I would make a distinction between linguistic drift and anachronistic references. You cannot write a story about the middle ages in Middle English because no one speaks Middle English anymore. That...
The diary format gives you a lot of liberty, as Lauren suggests. But I believe that there is a reason that this format is seldom used in fiction. It can be difficult to make a set of diary entries ...
Different writers have different approaches. Some plot everything out in detail before they begin. Others begin with an idea or a character or even just a picture and start writing to explore from ...
If you are worried that it is too complicated, it is probably too complicated. Not there there is not a place for narrative innovation in literature, but the basics are the readers want to be immer...
A character does not have to be named, but they do have to be identified, otherwise the reader gets lost. If you don't identify them by name, then you should identify them by some defining characte...
You don't cites the source for a paragraph. You cite the source for an assertion. Each assertion should be cited, regardless of whether it occurs in the same paragraph as another assertion, and reg...
It rather sounds like what you are writing is not a platonic relationship but a frustrated romantic relationship. There are, of course, millions of stories of frustrated romantic relationships. And...
I would suggest looking for professional editors associations in your country. Here in Canada, for example, we have the Editors Association of Canada. Such associations will likely have referral se...
It used to be common practice in scholarly works and in popular works aimed at educated audiences to quote works in the the language they were written in, at least for major classical and modern Eu...
From what you have described, it seems pretty clear why this does not feel like a climax. Prior to this, the hero has come to terms with the sacrifices he as made and the people he has lost. But in...
This is one of the many cases in which advice about writing is misstated. Long sentences are not bad. Convoluted sentences are bad. A sentence can be long without being convoluted. A sentence can b...
Ultimately this is a question of psychology or perhaps neurology. How does human memory work? But I think it is reasonable to suggest is that what people remember is a novel is story and the things...
There were various methods for estimating words from the number of pages in a typed manuscript, since typewriters don't count words, but tend to have very consistent fonts and spacing. All modern w...
Stories are fundamentally about people, not places. The psychology of why we like stories has been fairly well worked out, and the archetypes of stories are fairly well understood. At its simplest,...
