Posts by Mark Baker
Stories are inhabited by archetypes. That does not seem to be a choice. It seems to be what the human psyche craves. One has to ask, after all, why we like stories at all. We can suggest some pra...
A story is like a person. Many people lead similar lives and yet each person we meet is unique. Every fireman we meet is a different fireman. Every nurse is a different nurse. Every teacher is a di...
All stories are moral. That is, all stories are about a choice between values -- a choice that the protagonist does not want to make but is eventually forced to make. Saying that stories are moral ...
The em dash does not mean pause. There is no piece of punctuation that means pause. The em dash is a more emphatic substitute for the comma, colon, or parentheses and can be used to indicate omitte...
In addition to what GGx and robertcday have mentioned, it is because the submissions you are talking about, the over the transom submissions, are their lowest priority. Publishing houses, agencies,...
For us to be interested in your protagonist, there must be more at stake than mere survival. Survival is merely a technical problem. The physical action of an escape story is usually used to explor...
I knocked several times but no one answered. No more than that. Any emotional response to knocking and getting no answer has to be set up in advance. Show us that a reply was expected. Show us...
Neither your individuality or your creativity is precious, no matter what they told you in kindergarten. Your story may or may not be precious, depending on whether it is any good or not. Creating ...
At the heart of every story there is a moral choice -- a choice about values. The hero will be brought by some means to a point where they must choose between two things that they love. They may ch...
If you want to say something to the reader, just say it. You are writing a novel, not a movie. You are narrating the whole thing and everything in it is said by you to the reader. In LOTR, Tolkie...
I love critique groups. I have belonged to a number of them. I have good friends I met because of them. But if you are concerned about your storytelling, it is vital to realize what they can and ca...
I think it is a mistake to think of your story as a set of reveals. A story has a shape and the reader remains interested if they sense that the story is making progress. Tension is not created by ...
It very much depends on what you mean by "real people". You can, of course, make people from history into characters in fiction, as writers of historical novels do, and you can base characters on p...
Remember that experiment you did back in grade school with the iron filings and the magnet. I think that is a good illustration of how a good piece of writing works. It is not that everything lines...
This is another version of this question: Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal? In other words, it is a how do I tell something given that I have chosen a n...
Everything in a story has to matter. If you write alternate history, the alternate has to matter to the story. If you put in a detail that is obviously and deliberately contrary to history (as oppo...
This is one of the great debates in technical communication. Do you need to be a technical expert or is it enough to be an effective communicator? Different tech writers, and different employers, c...
The sad truth is that today, resumes are read by machines. Machines don't care about aesthetics. In fact, machines can be confused by the characters you insert to achieve aesthetic effect. If human...
Point of view is nothing more than it says it is. The place where the story is viewed from. In movie terms, it is the position of the camera. To have a single POV is equivalent to shooting an entir...
Nothing. Everything. In the end, fiction is not about what you have researched, it is about what you have lived. Of course, writers of historicals or space operas have not actually lived in those e...
There are no original plots left. There are no myths that have not been mined and exploited a hundred times over. And coming up with a new mythos is nigh impossible because the elements of myth are...
To answer this question you have to consider the purpose of detail. The purpose of detail is to refine the picture in the reader's head. Readers pull images from their own stock of experiences to b...
I don't think you quite have the sense of what a red herring is. It really isn't a general plot device. It is more a specific technique in a puzzle kind of plot, such as a who-done-it mystery. It i...
Human being have a inbred psychological need for stories. Like all our other needs, there are specific receptors that have to be matched for the need to be satisfied. If the body does not recognize...
You are either presenting real science principles or you are writing a novel. You can't do both. You might as well say that you are presenting a symphony concert but first you are starting off with...
