John Baker’s Blog

A blog post on Satoriworks makes reference to an article in the New York Times and muses on the present state of the publishing industry.
Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines [...]

Hermione Lee’s essay in the New York Review of Books discusses works by Milan Kundera, Jane Smiley, Edward Mendelson, John Mullan, John Sutherland, Franco Moretti and Patrick Parrinder. There’s some good stuff in there.
The year 2006 also saw the publication, in America and Britain, of a number of books on the novel, as widely varying [...]

There is no novel without character. You can have all of the other ingredients, plot, thematic content, pace, action, style, psychology, tension and poetry, but if your characters aren’t credible and if they don’t live with each other then you don’t have a novel.
Characters are what hold the different parts of your narrative together and [...]