Posts by Mark Baker
All stories are morality plays. That is, they all deal with moral questions and moral choices. They may express very different moral viewpoints, but to make a satisfying story, they have to speak t...
Prices of goods have nothing to do with cost of production. They are entirely determined by what people will pay for them. Goods that cannot be produced for less than people will pay for them simpl...
There are several techniques for doing this, as Lauren Ipsum illustrates, but consider that the first person narrator is also a character and how they narrate the story is part of how their charact...
There are only a few basic storylines. Some say there are only seven basic plots in all fiction. What differentiates different works is the telling. If the telling of your work reminds people too s...
I don't think in medias res should necessarily be understood as jumping into the middle of the story. I think we should look at it more as a story is embedded in a history. You may need to understa...
Relationships are contrived. They are contrived by the people in them. They are formed because one of the parties sets out, more or less deliberately, with more or less forethought, to create the r...
These are probably evolving terms rather than hard and fast divisions, but what I would say distinguishes fairy tales from fantasy is that a fairy tale is a tale about a human being encountering fa...
Because evaluating an author's work is expensive. It consumes time that could otherwise be spent finding other authors. That time is a dead loss if the author signs with another agent. In the end ...
The impact of any turning point in a story depends not on how the scene is written but on how invested the reader is, in how much they are hoping for or dreading or startled by the turning point. ...
Avoid making him a caricature. Don't make him villainous simply by having him espouse a caricature of political ideas you oppose. Remember that no one thinks of themselves as a villain. He is a hum...
I think we should distinguish between what I would call a personality flashback and a plot flashback. A plot flashback occurs when, for whatever reason, the narrative begins after the events of t...
I don't think soften is quite the right word for what these kinds of words do, nor is filler. I think of them as signal words. They indicate to the reader what direction the text is about to take. ...
The key to good tech writing is not style. Style helps with clarity, and that is useful, but it is not enough. They key is to present the right information to enable a particular user, with a parti...
I would say as the two variables named c are not part of the same field. Even if technically acceptable, any form of cs is hard to read. Italics applied to only one letter, especially a roun...
Travel stories are about the longing for something with a counterpoint of fear of the unknown and its dangers. To make your story interesting, find the object of longing and find the the source of ...
The ring in LOTR is not a symbol. Because of the timing of its publication many took the ring to be a symbol for the bomb, but Tolkien denied this, and the history of composition makes it impossibl...
