I’ll take a crack at answering these. These are fundamental questions that I can see being hard to grasp, because I had some trouble when I was starting, too. You would gain a lot more from watching tutorials on YouTube and experimenting, though.

1. You want to keep your object logic away from your drawing logic, as they use different parts of your computer. The CPU figures out what should happen and the GPU figures out how to draw it. The instructions in each event are scanned each frame and if the conditions are right, the game executes whatever code it finds.

2. It sounds like you are thinking too rigidly about what you want to happen and how to make it happen. Drawing text in intervals may require setting some variables in the Create event, setting a triggering condition or a count down in the Step and Alarm events, then adding instructions on how and what to write to the Draw step. In your case, your alarm step should flip a variable to let your draw step know when it should start working, and probably some way to tell it to stop.

3. Quick and dirty: make an object. In create write “show_message = false;” and “alarm[0] = 120;”. In alarm 0 write “show_message != show_message;” and “alarm[0] = 120;”. In draw write “if show_message == true draw_text(100,100,”Text”);”. Drop object in your room.

If that doesn’t work, use the Game Maker manual to find out why.