Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How to make a character's personality trully distinguishable/memorable? In a nutshell, the answer is, humanity. A more human character is more memorable. The great authors are those who seem to have the greatest insight into what it means to be human. I don't think that comes from anything one could reasonably describe as technique, it is more a matter of careful observa... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Recaps: Yes, No, and How To? I can only speak to personal taste, but in the interest of generalization, I will try to justify my personal taste in this. I think serials should consist of stand alone novels that can be read independently. This is for four reasons. 1. Many of the serials I have read -- Sharpe, Aubrey/Maturin, Hor... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: When it comes to creating cadence, should I depend on my ear or are there principles I can follow? Prose cadence has mostly to do with making the emphasis in a sentence fall on the most important words: > But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Do I have any control over the grammar of my novel? 1. English grammar is anything but black and white. Everything is debatable, even the definition of "word". 2. Punctuation is not grammar. This is a punctuation question, not a grammar question. 3. Your publisher probably has a preferred style guide that they want their authors to use. 4. Everythi... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Will Publishers Accept Alternate Planetology? Publishers will accept anything that they think people will buy. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How does copyright generally work? Copyright is what it says it is, the right to make copies of a written work. Copyright covers a finished form of expression -- book, movie, etc. It does not cover an idea. There is no protection for ideas. Copyright is automatic. As soon as you write down an original work, you own the copyright on t... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a hack to bring out your "true" voice? It should sound very far away from your internal voice. Your internal voice is the voice you use to talk to yourself and it has all kinds of advantages that your public voice cannot share, since you know yourself better, and have a complete stock of shared experiences with yourself, that no member of... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Text formatting Any decent text editor will have a function to unwrap lines. For example, you can download Notepad++ and install the TextFX plugin. Then highlight the text and choose TextFX \> TextFX Edit \> Unwrap text. (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What are ways to make the protagonist's relationships with other people seem realistic? This is a pretty broad question and therefore this is a pretty broad answer. It all comes down to what is called the "telling detail". The word "telling" emphasises two things here. First it means "important", a detail that matters. Second it means a detail that gives information. A warrior walks in... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What rights are needed to sell books on your website? IANAL, but when it comes to rights, it is generally the the right to make copies that is protected. If you own an existing copy of a book you can sell it just like you can sell a chair or a piano. However, the Supap Kirtsaeng case makes things a little more interesting. Publishers often sell books m... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: 'Filling' up a school setting without making a bunch of new characters? If a character knows the people in a crowded scene, they think of them by name, which indicates to the reader that they are in familiar surroundings. If they don't know the people in a scene, then they will tend to notice some prominent feature or action they are performing. If you don't name the in... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Do new writers stand a chance at a career without ambitions to write series? I think you are looking in the wrong part of the bookstore. Certainly that is not true in general fiction (by far the largest part of the fiction marketplace). There are plenty of best selling authors who do not write series. John Grisham is a good example, or Michael Crichton. It also depends on ho... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a method to estimating the length of a work before writing it? I suspect not. Certainly I have never found any proportionality between a line of an outline and so many lines of finished text. A concept or event that you sum up in one line could take ten lines or a thousand lines to fully describe in exposition. Sometimes what seems like one chapter in an outline... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Making a blog for my book? The best place to get critiques is in a critique group or a writing class. In these settings you will get feedback from other writers, or from a writing teacher. These are people who are (to one extent or another) studying and practicing the craft of writing. They care about why things work and don't... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do I know what language is period-appropriate? Let's start with two basic observations: - All dialogue is artifice. People in Jane Austen's day did not speak like characters in a Jane Austen novel. Dialogue is not speech. Genuine transcribed speech is painful to read, almost inarticulate at times. Speech is a multimedia phenomenon. Dialogue has ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: When can You Pause the Story and Speak Directly to the Reader? I think your premise is a little flawed here. The convention of the novel since its inception is that the narrative is addressed by the narrator to the reader, and that the narrator is free to relate events or to comment on them as they see fit. There is no fourth wall in the novel; there are no wall... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Using ellipses in a novel Editors care if you have a good story to tell and can tell is reasonably well. No manuscript was ever or will ever be rejected on the basis of spaces around an ellipsis. Four spelling errors on the first page, maybe. Spacing around an ellipsis, never. All that will get taken care of in copyediting an... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Why is getting a job in journalism so difficult without a degree? I very much doubt that there was any such thing as a degree in journalism in George Orwell's time. There has been a huge proliferation of degrees over the last half century or so, responding, I guess, to the demand of the upwardly mobile middle class to send all their children to university. Since th... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How to find and keep readers and commenters for a diary like blog about mental health issues? Most of the marketing for content is by word of mouth. You build an audience by writing good content that people want to read. Slowly, the natural audience for that content will find it and will spread the word, slowly building an audience for you. You will notice that advertizing of books is rare, ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How can a book get a Kirkus Star, yet have no sales? A good review means the reviewer liked it. It does not mean anybody else did. Something can be intensely liked by a small group of people and ignored by everyone else. It can be a very fine example of a kind of literature that appeals to very few people. The my-childhood-was-wacky-because-my-parents-... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Satirical writing: how much can you say about famous athletes? This is essentially a question of libel. Is what you say about these athletes libelous or not. The laws governing libel different from one country to another, so it is impossible to give a definitive answer as to whether what you propose is libelous or not. Also, libel is not in the general concept, ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Can my character's name match someone in real life? How many Harry Potters do you think there are in the phone book? Or James Kirks? Literature would be full of some truly strange and wonderful names if no character could have a name borne by any real person. (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What makes a poem a poem? Well, it's a very old question, and one that is not likely to get a definitive answer. It is perhaps worth making a distinction between poetry and verse. Verse is a literary form that is characterized by the use of rhythm to achieve literary effects, the most foundational of which is simply to make i... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: When do I successfully kill off an important secondary main character... in a series of five books? If you can't adequately develop sympathy for a character over the course of an entire book, then there is little hope of your readers ever reaching the end of that book. Of course you should be able to get your readers attached to Cancer by the end of book one, indeed, but you need to get them attac... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How to interleave a story with context and introspection? In principle it works. Great magazine writers do it all the time. The thing is, at every turn of a story, you have to make the reader care. Detail for the sake of detail is just a distraction. If you include a detail it has to be what we call in the trade a "telling detail" it has to point to somethi... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Switching between past tense and historical present tense It is perfectly acceptable to switch tenses generally, using each as it is appropriate to the thought being expressed. One thing to note in regard to tenses is that the choice of tense has nothing directly to do with past, present, and future time. Rather, they have to do with events relative to the... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What's the effect of placing "of course" at the beginning or at the end of the sentence? Virtually none. Both the beginning and the end of a sentence are prominent positions to emphasize something. English allows for many variations of word order with the same semantics. The only effect of one choice over another in many cases is a change in emphasis, in where the reader's attention is d... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Term for writing mostly in first-person, but switching to third-person for things the POV doesn't yet know? It is called a frame. A frame is a literary device in which one narrative is contained within another, the outer frame being used to in some way set the scene for the other. A frame has nothing to do with person or POV directly, but it is not unlikely that the frame and the narrative it frames may be... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Writing about a subject on which you have no expertise? Most fiction that includes technical details get them wrong. Fiction does not sell based on the accuracy of its technical details, but on the strength of its story. Indeed, many stories absolutely depend on getting the technical details wrong, or, at very least, ignoring obvious technical solutions, ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How long is a single-title romance novel supposed to be? Publishing is a risky business. Publishers lose money on a lot of the titles they publish and new authors are a much greater risk than established ones. The longer a book, the more it costs to produce, and therefore the greater the loss if it does not sell. Therefore publishers look for books from fi... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Online resources searchable for example sentences from literature Well, the obvious answer is Project Gutenberg. All the material is there and searchable. The question would be how to confine your search to just the works that fit your definition of classic English literature. What I think you are really looking for is a concordance of English literature, and Goog... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Better Ways of Showing Fear Two thoughts: 1. As an author, your job is not so much to show that your character is afraid, but to make the reader afraid for them. The physical expressions of fear are far more often played for comic effect. (Think about how they are used in the movies. Almost any time you see a character's face ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do you describe your characters? Well, it is impossible to tell from what you have told us which of these problems you have, but there is a fairly easy test you can do to find out. Write character descriptions of real people you know. If you are happy with those descriptions than your ability to write descriptions is fine and the pr... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Is it better to leave out the "filters/filler" in situations like this one? This is all about where you want to direct the reader's attention. As a writer, you have almost total control over where the reader's attention is focused in a scene. If you write: > A rabbit sticker sealed the manila envelope. Graceful handwritten words read: To Kiyoshi. Then the reader's attenti... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Time frame of a traditional publisher, submitting to publishers, and need for an agent The number of publishers that will even accept unsolicited fiction manuscripts is very small, so unless you are submitting to some very specific niche market, it is hardly worth talking about. Most major publishers will only accept work that is submitted by agents, so basically you need an agent to ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Where should I pitch a book of short stories in English accompanied by French translations? To answer any "where should I pitch" question, you should ask yourself the following questions: - Who would want to read this? What is its market niche, and how big is it?. - What are the other notable works that people in this niche read? - Which publishers serve that niche? Publishers build t... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a template for how to write a movie summarization? By their very nature, such templates tend to be specific to individual publications. For example, the general shape of a recipe is universal and well known, but the details like whether to include a picture or a wine match, or substitutes for key ingredients, or a list of nutritional values, are spec... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Resource for rejected novel manuscripts Yes, it is called Amazon Digital Services. It is where authors publish manuscripts that have been rejected by publishers, or which they have rejected themselves by not bothering to submit. Writing is a craft and publishing is a commercial enterprise. Like other enterprises that depend on appealing t... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do I cover many years with little activity without it feeling rushed? You are writing a story, not a history. Were the characters of your story real people (which they are not) many things would happen to them in their day to day lives that are not in any way relevant to the story. Your story is not going to tell us how many times they went to the bathroom or brushed t... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What writing process should I use to produce the kind of writing I want? I'm going to dissent from the spin straw into gold argument that others have made. It's not that I don't see merit in it, its just that I think prose rhythm is a heard thing, by which I mean that some people hear it in what they read and some do not, and that some writers hear is in their heads as th... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Can I avoid free writing? There is story development and there is narration. You need to compose a story before you can narrate it. Some people are naturals at story development. For them the story flows so naturally that they can focus on narration from the moment they start writing. Some people struggle with story developm... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do you write an evil character without making him "sexy" or "cool"? Cowardice. Villains who are bold and brave like Darth Vader have a cool factor because of their boldness and bravery. However evil their deeds, they display characteristics that we admire and would wish to possess. But the cowardly villain, the obsequious sneak like Uriah Heap or Wormtongue has not s... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: In a formal syntax notation, how should I indicate many optional elements? The problem here is that you are conflating two separate things: the syntax for parameters in a function expression and the list of available parameters. The syntax itself is straightforward enough: CREATE PARSER [schema.]function [WITH [parameter='value' [, parameter='value']+] ]; ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How can you show that a character is feeling amazing? You use the full narrative pallet that the novel form makes available to you. Different emotions manifest themselves in different ways. Some are very overt, some and entirely hidden from external view. Don't worry about doctrinaire interpretation of show vs tell; Use whatever techniques are useful in... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How can I write a fictional mythology diary? One of the most common forms of dating in the pre-Christian era was by regnal dating. That is, events were recorded as occurring in such and such a year in the reign of king X. (For that matter, Christian era dating is actually regnal dating based on the reign of Christ as king.) The use of regnal da... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What kind of effect can the name of a place or character have on a reader? I'm not sure that the phrase "Curley's wife" was intended to express possession. Be careful not to view things through a contemporary political lens. (Actually, two points here: don't let contemporary politics color your interpretation, and don't assume that literature was intended to be read in the ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: "Am I mixing my tenses?" She asked, scratching her head Stop worrying about this stuff. English tenses are enormously complicated, but they are tools of analysis, not composition. If you are a native English speaker you will have learned how tenses are used in English by osmosis. Trying to follow the explicit rules that have be developed to explain how te... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Worth writing, if end is obvious The ending is obvious in most books. In a romance, will the heroine get the guy? Obviously yes. In a detective novel, will the detective get the bad guy? Obviously yes. Wanting to know how it ends is not actually about wanting to know the facts of the ending, or no one would ever reread a book. It i... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What is considered "childish" in fictional writing? The emotional lives of children, adolescents, and adults are very different. This sometimes lead adults to dismiss the emotions of children and adolescents as trivial or inconsequential, which is unfair. If anything, the emotions of children and adolescents are more deeply felt than those of adults. ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: When writing a novel, is it wise to switch from first-person to third-person? What is the most effective way to do this? Perhaps the most famous example of switching from an involved to external narrator is Dickens Bleak House. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy is a more recent (and shorter) example. It is worth noting that in both these cases, there is far more than a change of narrator going on. The whole ton... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |