Posts by Mark Baker
I'd venture to guess that you are caught in the worldbuilding trap. Worldbuilding is a perfectly fine hobby. You can make up characters and people and kingdoms and creatures. You can draw maps. You...
That is what secondary characters are for. If you conceive of a story as the arc of a principal character, then every event and every secondary character exists to define that arc, to push the char...
Start with a wind blowing through the normal world As others have stated, you need to start in the normal world because we need to understand who the main character is, how they live, what they lo...
How a time change is indicated in the finished film is up to the director. You just need to indicate to the director that the time has changed, not specify how this is shown.
Different publishers will have different preferences about this. An academic press is likely to prefer a more academic style. A popular press will prefer a more popular style. Ultimately, this deci...
Writing is all about conditioning the reader's expectations. All the big effects in writing come from an appropriate setup. If you want to show a result contrary to the narrator's expectations, you...
A character has to have an arc and be seen to move along that arc. You can't show the reader the same thing they have seen before, you have to show them development -- which may mean development of...
This is definitely a high wire act. I had to do it for one scene a novel where I had two lovers who were both misunderstanding the other's motives and actions. The only way to make full sense of wh...
Foreshadowing. Basically, anything you do, any coincidence, and personality quirk, that you introduce in order to move the plot in the direction you want it to go will appear as transparent manipul...
Yes, there is an objectively better place to start, and that is with character. This is not to say that it is the only place to start. As long as you put all the bits together in the end, it doesn'...
Well, I think you need to start by reading Lolita -- not because it will give you a clear answer to your question, because Lolita is hugely controversial to this day -- but because it will give you...
You should punctuate dialogue exactly the way you would punctuate the same sentence if it were not in dialogue (excepting the typographic rules around the placement of quotation marks). A sentence...
Just because markup preferences are personal, I will mention the markup system I developed for writing my last non-fiction book. It is called SAM (Semantic Authoring Markdown). It is a general purp...
As it stands now, your question seems to boil down to: how can I write a story that no one will criticize? The answer to that is, don't publish it. If you publish it, with any degree of success, so...
I think the issue of translation is largely beside the point here. What you are seeking is the right to publish the book in a new form for a new market, presumably one that the current publisher do...
Is there a breaking point where people say, "that makes no sense"? Certainly there is, but I don't think it is anything you can quantify. In fact, it is demonstrable that that point is different fo...
You may be interpreting McKee too narrowly. "Design in time," for instance, does not have to imply a strict sequence. But I would suggest that you look at the word "plot" in much the same way as ...
Placing foreign languages phrases in italics is a well established convention that extends outside the bounds of fiction. It is always vastly preferable to stick with established conventions since ...
In the end, the story you are creating will either be convincing or not. But being logically coherent has little to do with making a story convincing. (The fact that there is an entire YouTube subc...
At this point you need one of two things, either time or someone you trust to tell you the truth. The problem with most beta readers is that they are friends or acquaintances and they don't want ...
The short answer is that you can't. Symbolism is really a property of a culture, not an individual work. Symbols are a kind of second order language, and you can no more make up symbols out of whol...
This notion that a novel has a meaning that we can ferret out and interpret has been a staple of English teachers for decades. Essentially it is an attempt to turn a novel (or any other work of art...
Every writer should understand the Hero's Journey. Not everyone agrees on whether it describes the archetype of all stories or just a particular genre of stories, but either way it provides a lot o...
In this particular case, don't, because the term NASA is more well known than its expansion. Sometimes acronyms evolve into words, such as scuba and radar. Once they become words, use them as words...
I think you need to make a distinction between horror, which runs largely on anticipation (like every other genre) and splatter porn (which relies on the perverse titillation that some people feel ...
