Posts by Mark Baker
In this answer, Amadeus makes the case for happy endings based on their far greater popularity compared to unhappy endings. This leads me to wonder, what exactly makes an ending "happy"? Before I...
Well to start with, "Adverbs are the devil" is not a rule. It is not even correct. Adverbs are a perfectly peaceable law abiding part of speech like any other. That many people use adverbs poorly...
There is a distinct use of "this one" in English which is a matter of usage rather than grammar. It is used by one person to refer to another person (often, though not always, an inferior), who has...
A character is not a human being. A character is a construct created entirely by the author for the purpose of telling a story. This works because stories are much neater simpler things than real h...
Characters seem natural when they pursue their goals in a way that is consistent with their values. (Their actual values, not necessarily the values they give lip service to for the sake of social ...
Every propositional document (that is, one that is not telling a story) consists of three parts: the conclusion, the argument, and the evidence. The native or intuitive way that most people write s...
There are multiple ways to approach a character's emotions, each of which may be appropriate in context. First, you can simply name the emotion. This is appropriate when their emotion is incident...
If your book is fiction, it must be finished before an agent or editor will consider it. They are not going to invest any time or effort in an unfinished project by an unknown and unproven writer. ...
The conventional term is "programmer writer" or, sometimes, "programming writer". It is generally used to describe someone whose training and focus is programming rather than technical writing, but...
Even if you could find a way to format dif output in HTML, that in itself would not give you the dif navigation tools that you get from a dif tool (next change, last change, etc.). One way to very ...
I spent so much time trying wrestling with just this problem that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web. (https://xmlpress.net...
Please understand that "third person limited" and its ilk are categories of analysis applied to works after the fact by those who find it entertaining to categorize everything. They are not rules t...
What Chris said, but with the concomitant point that solutions must be merited. They don't have to be probable. Little in most stories is truly probable. Stories basically run on coincidences. Thei...
In any life, there are moments when you can turn one way or another. With fictional characters, largely untrammeled by the cares of real people about where they are going to sleep or what they are ...
No, you should not expect to feel your outline. An outline, by its nature, strips away all the particular details that create an emotional response. Our emotional responses are naturally regulated,...
At the core of every story, there is a moral choice. That is, a choice between values. Circumstances force the protagonist to the point where that choice must be faced and made and lived with. Such...
A story is like a person. Many people lead similar lives and yet each person we meet is unique. Every fireman we meet is a different fireman. Every nurse is a different nurse. Every teacher is a di...
Yes, it will be disappointing, but that disappointment will not likely occur at the end, but much earlier when the reader begins to get the sense that the character they are following has no arc. O...
By and large, yes. thought it does depend on what you mean by story. Every story is unique. It is a particular set of words that tell a particular tale about particular characters, and it is the to...
If something is a quotation, you put it in quotation marks. If you are replacing part of a quotation with a paraphrase, you put the paraphrase in square brackets. "[Faith] can be active and effe...
Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use ...
Remember that all stories are moral. They deal with moral conflict, both within the individual and between individuals. Questions of what it is most effective to do to address a given problem as th...
This is a complex question -- complex enough that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web from XML Press (https://xmlpress.net/p...
Not too lazy. Your work habits really have nothing to do with it. The question is, can you make it interesting? Providing context is difficult because it is a chicken and egg problem. No one care...
Pick up the phone and call them and say, "Hello, my name is X. I am a writer and I am researching a piece on Y for Z. I will credit you, of course." This pushes the I'm-gonna-get-my-name-in-the-pap...
