Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
A: How can I explain my world if the character is technologically not yet capable of understanding it? If you are using POV characters to explore a world, you are not doing storytelling, you are doing world building. That is a perfectly legitimate hobby, but it is not literature and the normal concerns of literary writing, such as suspension of disbelief, or, for that matter, point of view, don't appl... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What raises the stakes and suspicion in a plot? Stakes, in a plot, as not what the character wants, but what they will have to give up to get what they want. Love is a desire. But gaining the one you love may require giving up your pride or your prejudice. Is you character willing to do that? Those are the stakes. So, Lassie wants to rescue Timmy... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Referencing Screen shots in technical/knowledge base articles? There are three basic reasons for using figure references in a document, rather than just putting the figures inline in the text next to the point where they are referenced: - You are referencing a figure from more than one place in your document. Using figure references lets you insert a reference ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Why are the paragraphs of a document often indented and not vertically separated? A factor that has not been mentioned yet is the difference between material that is meant to be read vs. material that is written to be scanned. Narrative works such as novels and histories are written to be read. Thus they are formatted to facilitate the easy movement of the eye through the text. Pu... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Considering the audience for technical publications There is no real way to tell if you are doing enough, of doing the right things, just from a brief description of your product and your users. The questions you really have to come to grips with are: - When your user look for information on how to do something with your product, are they finding it?... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can I give a novel a particular atmosphere? Suppose you are hosting visitors to your city and you want to control the impression they get. If you want to give them the impression that your city is safe, you take them down certain streets at a certain time of day. If you want to give them the impression that your city is dangerous, you take the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What is the balance between 'stating a problem clearly' and Hemingway's literary iceberg? This is an interesting question. The answer, I believe, lies in remembering that people read for pleasure. And when it comes to our pleasures, we value predictability very highly. This is not to say that surprise has no role in pleasure, but it is a very confined one. When we read a mystery, we want ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How Often To Proof Read Book I'm Self-Publishing First, let's be clear on terms. Proofreading is going through a manuscript looking for mechanical errors: missing punctuation, misspelled words, grammatical errors, etc. If you are rewriting sections, that is editing, not proofreading. Proofreading is generally the last step in the preparation of a ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Are tables of contents mandatory in novels? Starting around the 1920's dust jackets started to get decorative and became a place where you could market the book. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust\jacket#Oldest\dust\jackets) That function has now migrated to the back page of the paperback. There is no place to put marketing material on the co... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Has self-publishing killed the in-person critique group? 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 couple of years back, it seems very difficult to find anything remotely equivalent. One group I joined fizz... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: I wrote a book, but changed my mind on the ending Yes, this is going to be a death march. But the thing that is going to kill you is not this rewrite, but the next one and the one after that as your story gradually become more and more disorganized through the process of revision if you fall into the trap of trying to get there by rearranging scenes... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Little did he know The phrase is being used here to refer to what is commonly called either Sophoclean irony or Dramatic irony, a literary device in which the reader knows something that the character does not -- something which is going to have a material effect on the character's future. This device is extremely usef... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What's a good writing software for Android phones/tablets? It is perhaps worth pointing out that in the 6.5 years since the question was originally asked, Microsoft had made Word available on Android. Whatever you think of Word as a writing app, there is an obvious appeal to cross platform software with files in a shared space. Ditto for OneNote for the note... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Common mistakes made by first time fantasy novelists? As far as I can tell from the MSS I have read in critique groups and from the kind of questions asked here, the biggest mistake of aspiring fantasy writers it to focus too much attention on worldbuilding, followed by too much attention on word choices, with very little attention being paid to story, ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What makes writing emotional? Writing isn't emotional; stories are emotional. Paint isn't emotional; pictures are emotional. Notes aren't emotional; music is emotional. While some words are certainly more emotionally changed than others, even the trigger power of certain words depends on their context in a story. Emotion in a st... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: First Person vs. Third Person: Advantages and Disadvantages? First person vs third person narration does not really change what can be narrated. In both cases, the narrator is the narrator and it is their role to tell the story. You can tell a character's thoughts in third person or in first person, including the thoughts of characters other than the narrator,... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to structure a sentence containing long code examples? Do the simplest thing that works, which in this case is example 3. The rules of sentence structure don't really cover these kinds of things. That is a defect of the rules of sentence structure, not of the examples themselves. Remember that the first rule is clarity. Grammar rules and style guides ex... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: In searchable documentation, what function does a glossary serve? In terms of providing definitions for general terms, I would say that glossaries are pointless in online documentation. User can easily search for any term they do not understand. If there are terms that refer to concepts that you describe in your documentation, I would say that it is far more valua... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What is a subplot based on: conflict or tension? I think you have to start with understanding the role of a subplot. Artistically, I think it is fair to say that a subplot exists to provide a counterpoint to the theme of the main plot. If a short story is a singer accompanying themselves on a guitar, a novel is an choral symphony with complex harmo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Not sure if my idea for a conclusion is introducing a new argument Rhetorically speaking, your conclusion should not be a mere summing up of arguments already presented. Rather, it should build a rising tide of emotion and conviction to carry your reader irresistibly to act as you would have them act. The whole point of communication is to change the reader's behavi... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make my story structure less repetitive? The first issue I see here is not that the writing is repetitive but that the details are banal. That is, they are bits of everyday life that happen to everyone. They are repetitive or everyday life without telling us anything specific or vivid about your character of your story. Yes, sometimes your... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What should I do if halfway through a story, I am not anymore convinced with the plot and the storyline ? It sounds like you are starting with an incomplete story idea and discovering, half way through writing, that your idea is incomplete. For some writers, it would seem, it is quite normal to start with an incomplete idea and for them to discover the rest of the idea as the story develops. (The tale g... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to cite annotation in an annotated copy of Shakespeare's Othello An annotated edition of a work is essentially a book within a book. The inner book is the original text and the outer book is the volume of annotations. Cite the book you are citing, inner if you are citing the original text, outer if you are citing the annotations. Details are here: http://penandthe... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Where to put counter-examples within a 5-paragraph essay? I think you need to remember that the five paragraph essay is not a normal literary form, it is an artificial training exercise (of dubious merit, if you ask me, but that is beside the point). Training exercises are designed to isolate certain aspects of an activity in order to focus on them in pract... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it better the use the present or the past tense for a novel written in the first person You are almost certainly going to use both, since it is almost impossible to say very much without making reference to actions past, present, and future. But I think what you are really asking is, should you write in the narrative present or the narrative past. The narrative present means that you a... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What can I do if I hate my own protagonist? You don't build a character around a psychological profile. The primary driver of character is desire. Do you know what this character wants? Do you know why they want that thing enough to overcome their shyness to strive for it? No one comes out of their shell except under the compulsion of desire. ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to deal with multiple climaxes (multiple protagonists)? A good book should form a thematic and, ultimately, moral whole. Multiple characters may reach their moment of crisis, but there will generally be one central climax that plays the major notes of the theme and multiple supporting climaxes that work in harmony or counterpoint to support the major note... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay to have my family edit my book? Your family may be biased, and they may be too kind, but the deeper problem is that they will be interested in your story because you wrote it and they are interested in you. Thus they are in no position to judge whether or not it will be of interest to anybody else. You need the opinion of a reader ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can I break up a lengthy explanation? If the explanation is interesting, the reader will not notice that is is long. If it is not interesting, breaking it up will not make it interesting. So forget about whether it is too long and focus on whether or not it is interesting. The reader may be interested in explanation for one of three rea... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to transmit feelings in a technical book writing? Just don't. Unless you are writing one of those nutty Dummies books, don't put emotion of humor in a technical book. The reason is not that technical subjects aren't funny or that technical people don't have a sense of humor, it is that audience selection is different for technical books than for ot... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Two protagonists where one is dark - a mistake? Evil is cool. Virtue is dorky. The pure hero really only exists in hagiographies and tracts -- works that hold up somebody's idea of political or moral virtue for admiration. Works of these kind exist to draw lines between good and evil, not to examine the human condition. And consider the basic sh... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How much heed should we pay to writing advice You should follow the advice that makes you go, "Oh, of course, why didn't I see that before." If you don't have that kind of clarity, then you have not understood the advice properly and will not be able to implement it correctly. Thus if someone tells you to remove all your adjectives, and you go... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What are effective methods for getting reviews for a non-fiction business book? There is probably nothing you can do that will get publications like the Economist to review a self published book. Major outlets like this are bombarded with more book review requests than they could ever possibly publish. One of the virtues of going with a traditional publisher is that major publis... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Pros and Cons: A blog to get feedback Publishing a blog make a lot of sense for a non-fiction work. Almost all of my last non-fiction book appeared on my blog first and this had three big benefits: - I got me lots of feedback on the quality and interest of the ideas. - I got lots of criticism and discovered lots of errors and omission... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: The use of short, concise sentences to suggest a withdrawn character I think it is unwise to rely on style changes to delineate a character. First, it is far from certain that the reader will notice the difference, or interpret it in the way you intend. Don't rely on subtle effects to get across key points of your story. It is hard to do well and probably will go over... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Plotting My Story~ One way to think of plotting is in terms of desire and accidents. The point of a story is (usually) to bring one or more characters to the point where they must face a defining moral choice. What drives them towards that point is desire. What boxes them into a situation where they have to make that c... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Multiple POV's: Am I in over my head? Don't spice up the goal, spice up the antagonist. Pinky and the Brain had the same goal every week: to take over the world! It mattered not a whit. It was just an excuse for mousy mayhem. Taking over the world is just a McGuffin, the thing everyone wants that provides the impetus for the plot. It do... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Avoiding "kill it off for DRAMA" trope whilst doing it The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution. But I think you need to stop thinking in terms of tropes, or at least stop reading TV Tropes. TV does not get by on storytelling. Most TV storyli... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make "Joffrey like" characters for a "kick that son of a bitch " moment Betrayal elicits stronger negative emotions than mere villany. The traitor, the false friend, we hate more than we hate an honest enemy. The betrayer adds the wounding our our pride to their other sins. We want to hurt them particularly, and personally, for having made fools of us. That and harming ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to move from writing scenes to a short plot? The mainspring of story is desire. What drives your hero on from one scene to the next? What shapes their actions in a consistent way? It is their desire, they thing they are driven to attain. The desire can be anything that reasonably drives someone to action: love, lust, greed, revenge, the desire ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: I wrote a novel, now what? I can't speak to the Italian market specifically, but generally speaking the fiction market is totally saturated with manuscripts, most of them completely hopeless. This saturation means that it is very hard to get over the first hurdle of getting a publisher or agent to even pick up and read your ma... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to write from a cat's perspective? Remember that all stories are told from a human perspective. Cats don't have grammar and they don't have stories. A cat's eye story, therefore, is an act of projection of the human into the cat. It is a human experience of a uniquely human ability: the ability to project themselves imaginatively into... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Tips for making writing move fluidly The paragraph is the most indistinctly defined unit in all of writing theory. In the 19th century it was common for paragraph to run on of a page or two. Today, they often run only a few lines. For instance, the paragraph break I just made does not really indicate a shift of thought or action or the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Does a work need to be sexually stimulating to be classified as erotica/erotic literature? 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, and some want a steady diet of a particular kind of pleasure. Genre sections of bookstores exist mostl... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I stay confident? Only everyone ever, to the point where it is a classic cliche of the writer: the writer sitting in front of a typewriter beside a large wastepaper basket overflowing with bits of crumpled paper, and tossing yet another ball of paper over their shoulder. (By the way, after earning my living as a write... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: When using mythology in your writing, can you change certain small aspects of some myths to fit into your story? You can turn Zeus into a flower pot if you want to. It's your book. The myths are public domain and the vast majority of the population has no idea of the details of any of the myths. (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make good anti-heroes? 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 hero, even to the point of getting a medal in that absurd final scene. To me, at least, the anti-hero ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Weaving VERY IMPORTANT OPINIONS into a story without murdering it Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for leading people to form the same opinion themselves by leading them through the experiences that would le... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: From a writing standpoint, what is the value of Deus Ex Machina? 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. If your Deus Ex Machina prevents your hero from having to make the great sacrifice that proves their mo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to introduce a nameless, mysterious character in limited third person? I don't think you have a point of view problem, I think you have a storytelling problem. You are trying to introduce a character without introducing them, identify them without identifying them. You are doing this because you are planning a surprise for the reader. Fine, you can certainly surprise t... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |