Posts by Mark Baker
I hate to try to divine motive, but are you sure this is a story question? It sounds more like you are trying to make an argument than tell a story, more like you are trying to find a way to convin...
I believe that many if not all of the small literary magazines are edited by volunteers. How those volunteers are selected I am not so sure, but I would begin by scouring their websites looking for...
You are worrying about the wrong thing. No one wants to steal your stuff. Unpublished fiction on the web is of zero commercial value. There are far more people writing it than there are reading it....
I don't see anything wrong with the construction per se. It's just how English works for a structure that is action followed by consequence. It is far more important that your prose should seem nat...
Philipp provides a good answer, but I think there is more to say. First, "show don't tell" has kind of become the touchstone of all advice about storytelling but it is good to remember that it or...
Because God does not have a story arc. If story is the conflict between desire and what stands in the way of the fulfilment of that desire, God cannot have a story arc because nothing can frustrate...
It is not difficult to think of fantasy novels that don't have big battles (Voyage of the Dawn Treader). The battles, the strange creatures, etc, are set dressing. Sci Fi and Fantasy are often lump...
Genre is a marketing tool. Publishers are marketers of books. That is why you seek out a publisher rather than publishing yourself -- because you want the services of someone who knows how to marke...
As you say, there are many stories that work that start with dialogue. Far too much advice about writing is much too mechanical in nature. Dialogue is just a mechanism for telling a story. Rules ab...
A disoriented character does not have a perspective. A perspective is what you have when the world makes sense to you. When you are disoriented, you don't have a perspective. You have a whirl of se...
I think we need to make a distinction between a stereotype and an archetype here. The two are often confused, as illustrated by Wikipedia's unhelpful definition of a stock character: A stock ch...
The various parts of a novel may be tied together in different ways. They may be connected by the threads of plot. But equally they may be thematically related to each other, or provide thematic co...
Is there any other reason to use this device in a narrative, beyond "to build tension"? Yes. In Story Robert McKee describes the structure of a story as a series of attempts at a goal met by ...
Characters are defined by what they want and what they are willing to do to get it. The specific details you give about them are there to justify what they want and what they are willing to do to g...
I think it is a mistake to try to define literary fiction in terms of themes, language, or the primacy of plot vs character. I would suggest that it can be better understood in terms of the pleasur...
This strikes me as a semantic quibble. You can have a section in which the stories of various main characters are told before some larger action commences. Lots of novels have multiple parts, often...
I think it depends on what the main problem is in the novel. If the main problem is technical in nature, the reader needs to have some sense of what it technically possible. If the main problem is ...
Sounds like you want to write a philosophical novel. Two examples that I can think of are Walker Percey's Lost in the Cosmos and Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both of t...
It depends entirely on whether your voice is an interesting one. We all tend to believe our own voices are more interesting than they really are. Despite all the talk about expressing oneself, what...
The best approach is to query the agent first and ask them what their preference is. It is unlikely that they all have the same policy. Asking them first shows them that you are aware of the issue ...
Every human being strives to establish a place in the world, to be seen and accepted in a certain way. Their voice, the way they react to each situation, is developed in an attempt to establish an...
Surprise is the cheapest of literary devices. People often reread their favorite books and re-watch their favorite movies. They would not do so if their enjoyment of them depended on surprise. With...
There really is no convention for indicating the end of things in text. You are asking for a way to move up the hierarchy of the document without a title to indicate the change. There really isn't ...
As others have said, the main conflict is what the main character wants and can't get. But I think the point that needs making here is about what plot is. I think it is all to easy to get into th...
Does something need to happen in every chapter? Yes. Something needs to happen in every paragraph. Something needs to happen in every sentence. The story must advance. A story needs more to adva...
