Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Transfer from first person to third person Third person is not just a grammatical category, it is the whole angle of attack on the subject matter. Most particularly, the third person brings the protagonist into the frame (assuming, of course, that your narrator is your protagonist, which is usually the case when people start off in first pers... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to develop a more vivid and descriptive writing style The problem with description is that description is the wrong word for it. The right word is evocation. You are looking to evoke a response in the reader which brings a sense of place flooding into their minds. You can't build it for them; you don't have the materials. You have to pull it out out of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How Can I Reliably Find Well Written Novels? Probably the best filter of all is age. Any book that is still around 50 years after is was written is probably around because it is well written. Recent books get liked for all sorts of reasons other than being well written. They express a popular political or social prejudice. They ride on the coat... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do publishers handle bilingual novels? When you sell a novel to a publisher, you sell them specific right to publish in certain languages and certain countries. Whatever rights you don't sell, you retain and can sell to someone else. Usually publishers want to buy all rights, and usually writers want to sell only limited rights, since the... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: First Person when the PoV is not the Protagonist? I believe you are incorrect. If anything, writing in the first person distances you from the character. First, consider the characters from fiction that you feel like you know well. Harry Potter? Oliver Twist? Frodo Baggins? All described in third person. Second, consider the actual effect of first... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Showing a Brief Hesitation If you have so many pauses that you feel the need to vary how you describe them, chances are that the reason it feels repetitive is that you are reaching for the same device too many times, not that you are always describing it the same way. The reason could be that you have fallen into the trap of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How best to handle revealing a main character's name midway through a long story in close-third person? In fiction (which takes place in a universe much neater than our own), a change of name almost always indicates a change of status. Thus when Strider becomes Aragorn his status changes from vagabond to king. How a character responds to the change of name, therefore, is a signal of how they respond to... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Footnotes when using in-text citation style The fallacy here is the idea that there are general rules at all. There are no general rules about what is allowed in an academic paper, or any other kind of writing. There are specific style guides -- some public, some specific to a particular institution or publication -- and their rules cover the ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Capitalization after interrupted dialogue It has nothing to do with who spoke or who interrupted. It only has to do with what is a sentence. Speech tags are part of the same sentence as the dialog the report. Separate actions occurring after the speech are separate sentences. Only the last of your examples is a speech tag, though an awkward ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can you use third person limited in a story that begins before the MC is born? Third person omniscient and third person limited are analytical categories. They are terms you use if you want to dissect the use of POV in a piece. Don't take them for rules about what you have to do, and don't think you have to even be able to describe what you end up doing in those terms. The fact... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can we use MadCap Flare with semantic markup? I'm pretty sure that the answer at the technical level is no. But this is really a question that needs to be addressed another level up. The thing about structured writing is that it factors out certain aspects of the final publication, which then have to be factored back in by algorithms when it co... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I stop my writing sounding like a bad imitation of whatever author I've just been reading? To write fluently, you have to have a ready of flow of language at your command, and that will come from all you have heard and read. If you binge read one author, their language will invariable be what is flowing in your head for a while. The key to developing your own tone is not isolation from in... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Citing a footnote Generally speaking, citations refer to the physical page on which the cited content appears. They do not narrow it down to a logical part of the document that appears on that page. Cite the page on which the citation in question occurs. I have never heard of any style guide that does anything other t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do you write 2 or more characters saying almost the same thing in unison You don't. That is a TV thing. The page is not the screen. How you tell a story in each medium is an artifice. You are never reproducing all the elements of real conversation, all the halts and tics and repetitions, and all the banalities of everyday speech would be catastrophically boring on the pa... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are some ways of adding deeper meanings to writing? Oh Dear, no. That is not how it works. You should always make your work as clear to the reader as you possibly can. If your use a symbol or a metaphor, it should be to make your meaning clearer, not more obscure. Yes, I know that in school your English teacher told you that there were deeper meaning... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to create feeling with setting If we start with the premise that character and feeling are supposed to be at the heart of a story, it follows that the description of setting is not separate, but it related to character and feeling. Man people have a profound love of place that deeply affects their character and motivations. Descr... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Script-style conversations in a book You certainly can. You can do anything that works. Melville does something very like this at one point in Moby Dick, so there is good precedent for it. The thing is, why are you doing it? Why break convention? Any time you break convention, you call attention to what you are doing. When you follow c... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to present common foreign words in fiction? Well, whatever you do, don't convolute the the sentences around those words. Voices don't greet. People greet. `"Konnichiwa!" greeted a voice.` is grating and unnatural. There are at least four things you can do that will not sound artificial and grating: 1. Just use the word. People can deduce the... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to excite readers Excite is the wrong thing to focus on. The real key to successful storytelling is to engage the reader. There are no car chases or gun fights in Pride and Prejudice. It is a story of a courtship, decorously told. And yet is is probably the single most durable and popular novel ever written. There is... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I prevent a structure-breaking character from being seen as a fourth-wall-breaking joke? This sounds like you are describing a literary device known as Deus Ex Machina (The God in the Machine). It is a device use to get an author out of a plot hole for which there is no satisfactory resolution. The term originates from the Greek theatre in which plays would sometimes be resolved by a god... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Ethics of incorporating a supplier's technical documentation into one's own documentation? This is not an ethical question. It is a legal question. Ethics deals with professional conduct over and above what is required by law. Copyright is a matter of law, not ethics. In this particular case, however, it is also a matter of contracts. You should be negotiating a licence to use their conte... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Writing a fiction in first and third person. is that acceptable? Anything is acceptable if you make it work. For an example of a book that makes this work (brilliantly) see Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. But any change in narrative style calls attention to itself and therefore has to be handled with care and skill. It may be more acceptable to the read... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: My book doesn't seem to fall into a clear genre Genres are literary ghettos. They are places where people with particular and highly specific tastes (cosy mysteries, sword and sorcery, horse stories) can be assure that they get what they paid for and just what they paid for. Not all fiction belongs in these ghettos. Much of it serves an audience w... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: using double negatives and sentence structure English is not a programming language and negatives are not minus signs. They do not automatically cancel each other out. Double negatives are idioms and, depending on context, the second negative may cancel, weaken, or strengthen the first. `not infrequently` is a case where the second negative wea... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Restrictions On Producing A Playscript Copyright law covers the creation of derivative works. This is important to authors. For instance, if someone wants to make a movie of a novel, they have to pay the author for a license to create a derivative work. So, you need permission from the copyright holder to create a play based on a book. A... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: As a writer, should I be upset because I couldn't think of an idea? Fiction is based on observation, not invention. The same stories are told over and over again because the same stories are lived over and over again. If new writers repeat the stories of old writers it is not because they copied them from the old writers, but because both the old writer and the new o... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Typo correction when citing an external source The usual convention is to quote the source as is but add "(sic)" after the incorrect word to indicate that the error is in the source and is not a transcription error. > christians (sic) (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Best Practices for Getting a Sense of Character I think it is important to remember that fiction is not primarily a matter or invention but of observation. You are not creating new stories or new characters, you are discovering story and character in nature and sharing them through storytelling. If you discover character in nature, then your read... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Publishing images of paintings Unless the copyright protection period has expired, those works are copyright and if you use them without permission, you could be sued. Copyrights are property and are part of the estate of a deceased person. The copyright holders are the heirs. Any publisher you approach is going to insist on your ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Appropriate use of outdated vocabulary and terms? If you are after verity, you have far more to worry about than vocabulary. In the nineteenth century the whole style of writing was different. Paragraphs and sentences were much longer than we typically use today and the overall tone was far more formal. Language usage was far more of a marker of cla... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to write a character misinterpreting Four Candles as Fork Handles The fork handles sketch was one of the most brilliant things The Two Ronnies ever did. And it depends for its success not simply on homophones, but on the manipulation of point of view. You can't write down a homophone (by definition, they are things that sound alike but are not written alike). But y... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is NaNoWriMo necessarily a good thing? Not necessarily, no. In fact, probably not. NaNoWriMo puts an emphasis on words, and on getting words down on paper. But words are merely a vehicle. What we call "writing" is actually about storytelling, not grammar and vocabulary. The relationship between words and story seems to be different for di... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Starting In The Middle And Flashing Back Tension within a story does not depend on what the reader knows or does not know. It depends on how much peril the character feels and how much we sympathize with their feelings. Consider the movie Apollo 13. We know exactly what happens because it is based on a real incident. Yet we feel tremendous... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Avoiding -ly Words Saying that you should use adverbs sparingly is silly. You should use adverbs, and every other part of speech, appropriately. If adverbs are less frequently appropriate that other parts of speech, then they will occur less frequently in good prose as a consequence. But this will not happen because of... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I write a story within a story? The best answer to questions of this kind is to read brilliant examples of the technique from great writers. In this case the preeminent example is probably Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the book on which Apocalypse Now was based). Technically, the method here is storytelling (outloud to a group... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are "good" writing habits? There is a huge market for simple rules like this. There is a huge appetite for rules and formulas to make writing simple and easy. Whenever there is a huge market for anything, someone steps forward to supply that market, regardless of whether there is any merit to the product they are selling. The... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Describing a Character Traveling: Too much narrative? For an example of just this being done brilliantly, read Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. A journey is a rite of passage, a gate between worlds. Handled correctly is it a fantastic way to open a novel. Note that Harper Lee makes it very clear that the journey with which the books opens is a significan... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Description of "Unimportant" Details The purpose of fiction is to give pleasure. The question, therefore, is not whether a detail is important but whether it gives pleasure. Different types and levels of detail will give different kinds of pleasure in different kinds of works. The details of military technology in Tom Clancey, the detai... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: I'm using the same formula for stakes over and over - is this a problem? What strikes me about your examples is that the goals are quite abstract. This may be the peril of taking such an analytical approach to developing a story (there are, of course, perils in every approach). Stories are very concrete things. Some very particular person wants some very particular things... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Could I have a writing phobia? Honestly, if you have not yet the read the writer who makes you say, oh no, I will never ever be able to be that good, you are not ready to start writing. Despair has to be the starting point, because only despair at imitation will break you out of the beginner's habit of pastiche and hesitation and ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can I respond to praise without appearing egotistical? If someone asks you a writing question, don't answer with reference to your own work. Answer with reference to the works of the greatest writers you have read. This allows you to address the question while tacitly acknowledging that there are better examples out there than your own work. It also show... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Does it matter which literary agents one contacts first? I would advise attending a writer's conference in your genre and booking some pitch sessions with agents. This lets you try out your pitch verbally and does not preclude you approaching the same agent by mail later. And if the agent ask you to submit a sample, then you are a requested submission, rat... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Does a reader care about how realistic a book is? Some people will only read books if they are gritty and realistic. Some people will only read books if they are about horses. Some people will only read books if they are about dragons. No book is written for the whole world. Every book is written for a specific audience or audiences with specific ta... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Why do Popular Fantasy Novels of Today Feature Teenagers? I think Lauren's suggested reformulation may be a better way to express the phenomena. YA is a very popular genre today, and much of YA seems to be in the fantasy/sci fi realm. So there is a lot of sci fi/fantasy with adolescent characters out there. I can see two factors that help explain this. Fir... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Am I copying an idea too closely? We are in the business of storytelling, and it is the telling, not the story, that sets us apart. Storytellers tell the same basic stories over and over and over again. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Friends go on quest for McGuffin. Friends have setbacks. Friends get McGuffin. T... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: In narrative essays, should I make all the paragraphs narrative? So if you were asked to build a wooden house, would you take that to mean that you could not use glass for the windows of fiberglass for the shingles or nails to fasten all the pieces together? We say a house is a wooden house because it is structurally wooden, not because it contains nothing but wo... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I contrast the thought processes of different characters in one scene? The thing about writing is that everything has to be accomplished with a single stream of words. A narrative can only ever be doing one thing at a time, in stark contrast to movies, where many things can be going on on screen simultaneously. On the screen you can create an 18th century ballroom or a ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Advice on writing horror? That's a pretty broad question, but they key thing about horror, or any other strong emotion, it that it is all in the build up. What creates the tension in a horror movie, for instance, is not the thing that goes boo, but the quiet period where we keep waiting and waiting and waiting for the thing t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How does one evaluate his own writing ability? You evaluate yourself as a professional writer by submitting writing to respected publications and seeing if they offer you money for it. The beauty of writing is that there is no other criteria, no other qualification you need to possess, no licence you need to obtain. If it is good enough, it will ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can I write a character whom I have no knowledge of? No one is a rival. Lots of people have a rival. The distinction is crucial. Your protagonist's rival does not think of himself as a rival, and neither should you. He thinks of himself as having a rival. That is how you should write him. This is not to say that there are not characters in fiction tha... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |