Posts by Mark Baker
At the heart of every story is a choice about values. The protagonist is brought to a point where they must choose between two things they value. This requires the ability to actually make the choi...
At the core of every story, there is a moral choice. That is, a choice between values. Circumstances force the protagonist to the point where that choice must be faced and made and lived with. Such...
By and large, yes. thought it does depend on what you mean by story. Every story is unique. It is a particular set of words that tell a particular tale about particular characters, and it is the to...
Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use ...
Remember that all stories are moral. They deal with moral conflict, both within the individual and between individuals. Questions of what it is most effective to do to address a given problem as th...
This is a complex question -- complex enough that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web from XML Press (https://xmlpress.net/p...
Not too lazy. Your work habits really have nothing to do with it. The question is, can you make it interesting? Providing context is difficult because it is a chicken and egg problem. No one care...
It is certainly permissible because outside of specific educational programs, there are no prohibitions on paragraph structure that would make it impermissible. That topic-sentence etc. model is si...
Pick up the phone and call them and say, "Hello, my name is X. I am a writer and I am researching a piece on Y for Z. I will credit you, of course." This pushes the I'm-gonna-get-my-name-in-the-pap...
Stories run on anticipation. A reader keeps reading because the anticipate that certain things are going to happen, and that we are making progress towards those things happening. By and large, the...
There is not really much you can do in a situation like this other than to clearly alert the reader to the situation up front. If there is no way to verify the next five actions until you have comp...
An archetype is a role. A stereotype is a bundle of characteristics. Thus the wizard (wise man, not necessarily magical) is an archetype character because he plays a specific role in the hero's j...
The number of characters in a novel is probably not a number you can fix. The number of characters in a scene, and in an arc, however, can be significant. Essentially, each character in a scene sh...
You were right about your own taste. You may have been right about the taste of many other people as well. But as a general principle, you were wrong. Fiction is fiction. Fiction is all the stuff...
Stories are not written all in one tense. Even sentences are not written all in one tense: I think I will go to Paris tomorrow, the place where I was born. The only thing that the concept of...
Lamentably, a great many authors today are mentally acting out scenes in their heads because they are subconsciously directing a movie rather than writing a novel. Both the screen and the page ar...
There is a very simple rule here: don't describe emotions; create them. You are creating an experience for the reader. If you describe emotions, you are creating a clinical experience, one that is ...
Watch much less TV and read far more books. TV/Movie storytelling is different from book storytelling. If you are thinking in terms of facial expressions, your storytelling apparatus is running in ...
While there are injustices in every society, and the rich and strong oppress the poor and weak in every society (including our own), current ideas about what is biased or unfair treatment can't be ...
Our speech and writing is full of anthropomorphic language. We ascribe actions to inanimate objects and abstractions all the time. It is almost impossible to communicate effectively without doing t...
In classic story theory, a story begins in the normal world, the world from which the hero will be forced to depart and to which they will attempt to return, often transformed. This does not mean a...
The alternative is to stop listening to people who say silly things like that. There is, unfortunately, a sub-culture of writers who obsess over the minutia of prose without having any actually s...
Personally, I would regard this more as a critique of the notion of a topic sentence than as and evidence of skilled writing. The theory of the topic sentence is part of a theory of paragraph desig...
The paragraph is a very ill-defined unit of composition, and the rules of paragraph writing that they teach in schools (which is a kind of mini-essay format) has not a lot to do with how actual wor...
You can do almost anything if you make it a story. Want to foreshadow something that will happen in chapter 5. That's fine, as long as you do it in the context of a story in chapter 1. A novel is a...
