Posts by Mark Baker
The part that is most obviously missing from what you describe is "why?" Character provides the why. But equally importantly, the why provides the character. A character is a person who would do th...
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...
By rewriting the book so that the four main characters are not introduced all at once. There is a good reason that most books introduce characters one at a time or two at a time (in the form of a c...
I think Dia, which is a general diagram editor, checks most or all of your boxes. http://dia-installer.de/
There have been significant changes in technical communication style over the last 20 years, and particularly in the last five years as increasing volumes of evidence have shown that simple friendl...
To make money as a freelance writer you have to have expertise in something other than writing. Anybody who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke. That can be expertise in addressing a particular a...
Almost anything will scare off some readers in some contexts. That does not make them wrong things. It just makes the things that appeal to one person more than another. No work of art or communica...
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...
By their very nature, such templates tend to be specific to individual publications. For example, the general shape of a recipe is universal and well known, but the details like whether to include ...
If your question is, can you set a story in an imaginary place without telling the reader that you have done so, the answer is yes, but the reader will not know that you have done so. The problem i...
We hate those things that keep us from the things we love. If a character hates being a member of a wealthy family, it is because that family, or its wealth, or its responsibilities, keep them from...
Here's how to fix your problem. Pick up your grammar books. Hold them over a fire. Let go. You can't write out of a grammar book. You can only write out of a fluent grasp of usage in the lan...
It is a quotation so it goes in quotation marks. It is not the function of punctuation to indicate when a speech was uttered. If you need to make that clear, then you must do so in the text.
I don't think it is wise to try to do this online. You have no idea who you is giving your the critique. Some people will just always be nice. Some will just always be nasty. You can't tell who are...
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...
