Posts by Mark Baker
You can most certainly write a nonfiction of 80 words, but, as Galastel says, it won't be an essay. An essay is an argument. It martials evidence in support of a point of contention. You can't do t...
If you are a bestselling novelist, you can pitch an outline. Otherwise, you have to have a finished manuscript. Nonfiction is different. You pitch a book proposal, which usually includes sample ch...
A useful way to think about this is, every story you write is set in a world of your own invention, that sits in some relationship to the real world that we live in. The real world that we live in ...
Showing physical reactions to things works for immediate reactions. But stories are not built on immediate reactions. They are built on the long term desires and goals of the characters. It is hard...
We often use the word "sympathise" to mean agree with or approve of. But that is not what it means (or not what it should mean) when we are talking about the reader sympathizing with a character in...
It might be useful to compare this to what doctors do. Doctors first establish symptoms. These are the facts of the case. Notice that it is possible to miss or discount a symptom. The data being ga...
This is simply backstory, so the rules of backstory apply. Backstory should only be given when the reader wants to know the backstory. Backstory slows the forward momentum of the plot, so it should...
You can't. You can't describe pain. You can't describe what things taste like. You can't describe much at all about our physical sensations of the world. Language just does not seem to work like th...
Metaphors must be apt. They must make the reader's experience of the scene they are reading more vivid. The problem with many metaphors, particularly those created by inexperienced writers, and mos...
How does that travel change your characters? The iron law is that every scene should leave your characters in a different state from when they began, or, at very least, leave the reader with a diff...
Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. I...
Essentially, you do need a speech tag if the reader can easily tell who is speaking. Under what conditions can the reader easily tell who is speaking: There are only two people in the conversatio...
The way you make a character sound condescending it to have them say condescending things. That's it. That's the whole of the recipe. But I suppose you knew that. I suppose you must have tried tha...
Stick them in a file called Snippets. This has one function and one function only: to make it easier to excise all the stuff that does not belong in your story. Tell yourself that this is good stuf...
I think this would work great -- in a movie. But books are not movies. VR is a visual experience. It engages the sense of hearing and sound, and essentially turns everything else off. It is a world...
For what purpose would people publish their work here? If it is for critique, this seems like too public a forum for it. It will look like publication and that will make the work ineligible for p...
