Posts by Mark Baker
Any decent text editor will have a function to unwrap lines. For example, you can download Notepad++ and install the TextFX plugin. Then highlight the text and choose TextFX > TextFX Edit > U...
Think of a sentence like a Venn diagram. Each word you add to the sentence is like a circle added to the Venn diagram. Each circle added to the diagram should reduce the area that is common to all ...
The simple answer is that you don't. You don't tell the reader anything that is not needed to support the plot of theme of the story. There are a lot of people who enjoy world building as a hobby...
Publications don't explain why they reject things because: a. It takes time. b. If they do, people will argue with them and call them names. c. If they do, people will try to fix the piece and s...
For the sort of poor soul who can only enjoy themselves if they are rooting for one side in a fight, then I suppose that a story that does not take sides will be boring. But that is not and never...
First and foremost, I would suggest that you resist the urge to describe everything that happens in a scene. In a movie, all the actions of a scene like that are acted out and are visible on screen...
From a marketing point of view, books are classified according to the type of pleasure they give. Stories can give different kinds of pleasures. Some readers are more open to a variety of pleasures...
I don't think I would count Han Solo as an antihero. He may take a little longer to cross the threshold, he may resist the call to adventure a little longer, but in the end he becomes a traditional...
It really comes down to merit. The heart of every story is moral, it is about the character making a choice about values, and the reader has a basic desire to see virtue rewarded and vice punished....
Well if your style is immature, only two things will fix that, reading with attention, and writing. Do not neglect the reading with attention part. Francine Prose has a good book called Reading Lik...
The tense is not wrong. Guessing as to why you are being told it is wrong: English grammar is a system of explanation, not a set of rules, and it is incredibly complicated, and even as complicate...
I can only speak to personal taste, but in the interest of generalization, I will try to justify my personal taste in this. I think serials should consist of stand alone novels that can be read ind...
Publishers will accept anything that they think people will buy. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
You use the full narrative pallet that the novel form makes available to you. Different emotions manifest themselves in different ways. Some are very overt, some and entirely hidden from external v...
This is a pretty broad question and therefore this is a pretty broad answer. It all comes down to what is called the "telling detail". The word "telling" emphasises two things here. First it means ...
The best place to get critiques is in a critique group or a writing class. In these settings you will get feedback from other writers, or from a writing teacher. These are people who are (to one ex...
I think your premise is a little flawed here. The convention of the novel since its inception is that the narrative is addressed by the narrator to the reader, and that the narrator is free to rela...
It is perfectly acceptable to switch tenses generally, using each as it is appropriate to the thought being expressed. One thing to note in regard to tenses is that the choice of tense has nothing...
Two thoughts: As an author, your job is not so much to show that your character is afraid, but to make the reader afraid for them. The physical expressions of fear are far more often played for c...
The number of publishers that will even accept unsolicited fiction manuscripts is very small, so unless you are submitting to some very specific niche market, it is hardly worth talking about. Mo...
Cowardice. Villains who are bold and brave like Darth Vader have a cool factor because of their boldness and bravery. However evil their deeds, they display characteristics that we admire and would...
The problem here is that you are conflating two separate things: the syntax for parameters in a function expression and the list of available parameters. The syntax itself is straightforward enough...
Well, the obvious answer is Project Gutenberg. All the material is there and searchable. The question would be how to confine your search to just the works that fit your definition of classic Engli...
It seems to me that what Pinker is describing at the sentence and paragraph level is substantially what most books on story are describing at the level of a document as a whole. Stories have a cohe...
Yes, it is called Amazon Digital Services. It is where authors publish manuscripts that have been rejected by publishers, or which they have rejected themselves by not bothering to submit. Writin...
