Mark Baker‭

It's not the end of the world if this is not possible, but I would like to reclaim my content. The problem is, I no longer have an SE account of any kind. I asked them to delete my main account bec...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by ArtOfCode‭

Exposition is a problem for movies, because movies, generally, do not have a narrator. The audience sits and watches events unfold. But if the story needs the viewer to be aware of events that woul...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

I've never subscribed to this notion that you should just start writing. Sure, depending on your level of skill and experience, some number of things about your first draft will probably be bad. A ...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

I think that the answer, broadly, is that structure is necessary but not sufficient. You need both structure and vision. Yes, you can have works that don't follow conventional structures, or don'...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

What do you want a blog for? If you just want to share your day to day life with the world, that's what Facebook and Instagram are for now. People who blog these days are either selling something o...

posted 3y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Mark Baker‭

This place is not exactly lively yet. That is not a surprise. But one quickly loses interest in visiting just to find nothing new day after day. Pretty soon you don't come back at all. What would...

3 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 5y ago by ArtOfCode‭

The model on SE was moderation, not curation. Nothing was ever removed. Duplicates, were marked, but never resolved. The only way any kind of curation occurred at all was through voting, and voting...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

People skip details that they don't care about at the moment. If people are not interested in the details, it won't matter if you put them in a lump or spread the out. They still won't be intereste...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

In my book, Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process, I make a distinction between three domains of markup, the subject, document, and presentation domain. CSS is a presentation domain language. HT...

posted 3y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Canina‭

Grammar is to writing as driving a nail is to architecture. Yes, you need the nails to be driven in straight, but it is not what architecture is about. A good writer is, first of all, a good obser...

posted 3y ago by Mark Baker‭

I belonged to an excellent critique group for many years. More than one member of that group went on to commercial publication of the works that they refined in that group. But since we moved a cou...

4 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Amadeus‭

None of the things you list are character flaws. They are forms of disability. A person can suffer multiple physical and psychological disabilities and still be of stirling character. A character f...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

The question you should be asking is not how big a change this is in the world, but how big a setback it this for the protagonist and how does it impact his/her moral arc. The basic structure of st...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭

What you want in a beta reader is someone who you trust to tell you the truth in the spirit of helping you improve, without attempting either to stroke or destroy your ego. You can't trust friend...

posted 5y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Mark Baker‭

I wrote a blog post a little while back about what it means for a reader to identify with a protagonist: https://gmbaker.net/avatar-friend-and-shrink-three-modes-of-reader-intimacy/ I identified t...

posted 3y ago by Mark Baker‭