Posts by Mark Baker
A story is an experience. The reader has to trust that experience. If they stop trusting the experience, they essentially drop out of the world created by the experience, and once that happens, the...
First, understand what a character is in fiction. A character is not simply a person. A character is an instrument for making a story work. You can't simply sit down, dream up a bunch of people, an...
Avoid the imputation of naiveté. In the real world, of course, all most all people hold their beliefs reflexively and naively. Most atheists have not thought through or are even aware of the epist...
I would take this as an expression of what I think of as knowing the difference between history and story. Every story is embedded in a history. A history is a sequence of event connected by causal...
No character is irredeemable. If professional wrestling teaches us nothing else it teaches us that any character can make a face turn just as any character can make a heel turn. But authors don't...
You don't. Turning a life into drama will almost certainly cause pain to those who remember that life. Life is more subtle than drama. Drama needs a definite shape that life lacks. That is why we v...
There are two theories of character. One, to which most people give lip service (at least) today, is the one that Galastel has expressed: characters, like people, are complex multidimensional const...
I would definitely not recommend using Word for this. It is just not what it was designed to do. There are multiple documentation systems that have been developed specifically for the purpose of ...
Writing is a stupid waste of time. It will make you lonely, but it won't make you rich. I can think of only two legitimate reasons to write: A profound and unshakable regret for not having writte...
It depends what your goal is. If you want to build a readership and make money from your writing, then paying anyone to publish you is not a good idea. If a so-called publisher makes money by charg...
First, real publishers don't advertise. It is really as simple as that. No legitimate publisher advertises for submissions because any real publisher is bombarded with manuscripts on a constant bas...
I'm not sure that it is a given that the numbering needs to be different from the original footnote numbers. Footnotes numbers are not necessarily a canonical part of the text, and since it would b...
Setting is character. That is, setting functions in a story very much the way secondary characters function: it shapes and reflects the character of the protagonist, and it functions to propel the ...
Recounting events that the reader has already seen is almost never OK. It is repetition. It is boring. The essence of drama is tension. Writing a novel is difficult precisely because it is diffic...
There is always an issue in literature with how strength, or any other human trait, is portrayed. In movies and TV in particular, that which is within can only be shown by external action. Books ca...
To build on Galastel's point, bathos is not simply about the juxtaposition of tones. It is about the unworthiness of the emotion expressed to the event that has occurred. So if you present a seriou...
Subversion is not just a way to introduce literary variety. It is actually subversive. It overturns the established order. So you have to ask yourself, why does the established order exist, and wha...
In any work in which you use symbols, you have to establish the scope of each symbol when you use it. There is nothing to say that you can't use the same symbol to mean different things in differen...
Closest I can think of, though perhaps a little archaic: "Harumph, you're quick on the uptake I take it." But, like DPT, I would be more inclined to keep it out of dialogue tags.
First, TV serials are virtually impossible to end in a way that satisfies the audience. The whole dramatic structure of a TV drama militates against bringing it to a dramatically satisfying conclus...
Your readers are not going to imagine what LILLAHI birds look like. At best, this sort of technique calls forth the impression of an exotic location from their memory. For a westerner, for instance...
The chances of getting a three volume set of 400,000 word novels by an unknown writer accepted for publication are as near to zero as makes no difference. Such a project would be extremely expensiv...
My rule of thumb has always been, don't quote anything unless you are going to comment on the quotation. If all you are doing is citing an information source to support an assertion, make the asser...
There are, fundamentally, two kinds of problem: technical problems and moral problems. A technical problem requires working out a workable technical solution. It is subject matter for a technical m...
This is the first ever draft of your first ever novel. If you were able to simply pick up where you left off and bring it to a successful conclusion, you would be a phenom. The novel is a highly ...
