Posts by Mark Baker
Pondering this, I wonder what the point is of improving questions/answers that no one is reading. Is writing new answers to those questions going to make then suddenly start turning up in searches?...
This place is not exactly lively yet. That is not a surprise. But one quickly loses interest in visiting just to find nothing new day after day. Pretty soon you don't come back at all. What would...
In any scene, you need to look at what story values are at stake. Narrative is interesting insofar as it develops or changes story values. It is boring insofar is it does not. Technical description...
I don't think you do keep them balanced. Or, at least, I don't think you should. If their goals are incompatible, the reader has to choose whose goals they are going to root for. And at the end, on...
Exposition is a problem for movies, because movies, generally, do not have a narrator. The audience sits and watches events unfold. But if the story needs the viewer to be aware of events that woul...
The problem with your names is not that they fail to be distinct, but that they fail to be sticky. The stickiness of a name is a measure of how easily the brain can retain it and assign it to an ob...
Some of the stuff you write is going to suck. Some of it is going to be without substance or inconsistent or just dull. And some of it is going to be brilliant in conception but dreadful in executi...
The way you do this effectively is through dramatic irony, which is where the reader knows something that the protagonist does not know. There is a fantastic scene in Upstairs Downstairs where one ...
Dr. Johnson is supposed to have said that you cannot reproduce the effects of dullness and garrulity without actually being dull and garrulous. Being slightly less 18th century (I'm more of a Victo...
I'm all one for structure, and awareness of structure, but some of these paint by number descriptions of the three act structure strike me as going a bit far. Just as you say, one gets stuck trying...
It's not the end of the world if this is not possible, but I would like to reclaim my content. The problem is, I no longer have an SE account of any kind. I asked them to delete my main account bec...
I just heard about this place (thanks icanfathom). Willing to give it a try. Of course, the first thing I checked on was the code of conduct and, no surprise at all, the only item of contention in ...
Your story is resolved too easily because no one pays a price for the ending. People face all kinds of practical problems every day and they resolve them in practical ways without much drama. Stori...
If you are going to refer back to something that a character used earlier in the story, give it some significant characteristic that will help the reader identify it when it comes up again later. T...
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...
I had to think about this one for quite a while, but finally I realized that there are two distinct kinds of patience, which I will call anticipatory patience and enduring patience. Anticipatory ...
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...
Is this bad writing? Yes. A great description should be precise and evocative. Food neither runs wild not explodes (both would have unpleasant consequences for the eater). They are just the wrong w...
Yes, it can be confusing. The basics are simple, through commonly misunderstood, but there are grey area along the borders. The first and most basic rule of copyright is that you cannot copyright...
With all due respect to Lauren's answer, there is a fourth rule. 4) Speech that is incidental to action stays with the paragraph that describes the action. That is, if the character runs, jumps, y...
Interesting question! Here's what occurs to me as the first principle of distance: From a distance, you can't see the small stuff. At a distance you can see fear of dragons, but you can't see fear...
Panics have deep roots. They don't come out of the blue. They arise out of our need to make sense of our lives, to find patterns in randomness. Pattern finding is how our brains work, and it serves...
Distance is an important element of the design of a story. In some cases you want the story to feel very intimate, as if the reader is right there with the protagonist, in their thoughts, in their ...
There are two roads from Santa Fe to Taos, New Mexico. One runs through the gorge of the Colorado river. The other runs over the mountains through pine forests. The one through the pine forests is ...
Comma, dash, and brackets are not simply different degrees of parenthesis, they are different types of parenthesis. Comma parentheses denote modification or clarification of the main point. ...
