Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: How do I introduce dark themes? > "this isn't what I thought I was reading"? This is the key phrase. The reader needs some idea of what kind of book this is. But this is where genre conventions come to your rescue. Each genre had a certain shape to its stories. Will a high fantasy turn dark in the middle? Of course it will. Wil... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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What questions was my new rep for. One thing I really miss from SE is the ability to see what answers of mine got upvoted since I last logged in (or in the last day). In other words, where did my rep increase come from. Because vanity. Is there a way to add this? (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to prove that my blog is just not average? Everything Monica said, and then this: There are, at very least, three components to this. 1. Are your ideas exceptional? Most people's aren't, of course, but some peoples are. No one can tell you how to have exceptional ideas, of course. 2. Is your expression of these ideas exceptional enough... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Rapid change in character I think you need to make a distinction between a change of character and a change of heart. Characters, inherently, don't have changes in character, because they are characters and character is all they have that makes them what they are. If their character changes, they are a different character. ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to hint at an antagonist's identity? By their fruits ye shall know them, but the works of their hands. What follows a character, despite the many masks they may wear, is their goals and their modus operandi. If the character acts the same way, exhibits the same values, and works for the same ends by the same means, we will recognize... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How can you redeem an awful character, who hits close to home? This question presumes are rather economic view of redemption. If the number of good deeds exceeds the number of bad deeds,the characters is redeemed. If their assets exceed the debts, they are redeemed. But that is not really the way redemption works. Redemption is a direction of the heart. A ch... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How do I know if my cast is diverse enough or too diverse? Birds of a feather flock together. This is a universal truth and one that you ignore in a story to your peril. A story which ignores this truth may check a bunch of ideological conformity check boxes (and that never hurts in the market, as long as you pick the right ideology), but it tends to leave s... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Scale: How to handle a personal story set in an epic war? One of the most important aspects of writing both fiction and non-fiction is managing the reader's attention. Parts of a scene are for atmosphere. They are meant to flesh out the setting so that it feels real and engages the sense in the moment. They are not meant to be remembered, only to color the ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How can I write a dark protagonist for whom there is no hope? Light vs darkness is not and never had been the only theme in novels. In fact, in the simplistic sense in which it is practiced today in things like post-Tolkien fantasy novels, it is a pretty new phenomena. Take most fairy tales, for instance, have more to do with the moral fortitude to resist t... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Have we ground to a halt? It seems like this place has ground to a stop. I have been trying to do what was suggested earlier of going back to old questions (as surfaced by the Lottery tab), but that seems to be all that is happening here lately. I rather suspect that all the people who used to answer questions back on SE ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is there any popular wisdom on the word "seem"? Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. I don't think that this has to do with the weakness of particular words. It may have to do with the car... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is the genre 'fantasy' still fantasy without magic? Magic and Wisdom share a common root, but have since diverged. The Wise Man became the Wizard. The natural philosopher similarly diverged to beget the scientist and the alchemist. Our notion of magic, in the modern sense, is a product of that divergence. The divergence occurred as we moved from a... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What makes an ending "happy"? Having thought much about this question since I proposed it, I am going to suggest a somewhat abstract answer: A happy ending is one in which perfection meets desire. That is, the ending which is the perfection, the rightful completion, of the story told, is also the one which the reader desired. ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Averting Always Chaotic Evil Why do baddies have to be bad? (Because that is the question you are really asking here.) Baddies have to be bad because baddies serve an important literary function. Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." And we are fond of it, particul... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What can I ask my readers to help me and how? You are trying to turn a critique into a movement. Is that possible? Sure. That's how all movements start. But critique is easy and it is everywhere. All the cranky old men who write to the newspapers decrying every new development and change in public policy are engaging in critique. Not one of ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Lost my ‘magic’ concerning characters For many of us, our first dive into writing consists of writing plot-driven stories peopled by one note characters, characters who are just types with a name assigned to them. That's fine. Writing is a complex skill and the way we learn complex skills is by practicing one aspect of them at a time. So... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Introducing evil characters before the evil deeds take place It depends on what you mean by evil. There are many characters in fiction which exist only as the personification of evil. They are not people, they are evilness in trousers and a mourning coat. You can't introduce Satan as anybody or anything other than Satan. They are the embodiment of evil and evi... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to organize ideas to start writing a novel? The thing you have to understand about writing a novel is, it's impossible. It can't be done by any method known to science. Sure, you can try writing an outline. It won't have any heart. Your characters will be flat as cardboard. You can try writing character biographies. Then you novel will be ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is it alright to add scenes that don’t move the plot forwards much but develop relationships/character? Every scene should produce a change in story values, which almost always means some change of state for the character. From the beginning of the scene to the end, the character should be more in love or less, more in danger or less, more tempted to sin, more moved to pity, more pained by rejection, m... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How could the disregard for both plot and dialogue tell the story? You can call the cat a minivan but you still can't drive it to Costco. A story is what a story is. If you create an object that has none of the characteristics of a story, it is not a story. You might consider it a literary work, given that it is a work made of words, but being a literary work do... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Do living authors still get paid royalties for their old work? Author royalties depend entirely on the author's contract with the publisher. If the contract says they get royalties, they get royalties. If the contract says they don't get royalties, they don't. The issue of copyright, which other answers mention, is beside the point. The author licenses or se... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Does a point of view need to be introduced when or right after the character is introduced? The point of view of a story is the point from which the reader experiences the story. What you do with point of view should be based on what the reader will want to experience at any given point in the story. I often see writers decide on a point of view long before they have figured out what th... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Transitional sections How does that travel change your characters? The iron law is that every scene should leave your characters in a different state from when they began, or, at very least, leave the reader with a different appreciation of their state from the one they had at the beginning of the scene. If the only c... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to write an introverted main character with accidental charisma The way you make a reader feel anything about a character is by how he acts. You can try telling the reader stuff about him that is contrary to how he acts, but it won't work. The reader will still judge him, will still feel interested in following him, or not, based on how he acts. So this makes... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What are good ways to improve as a writer other than writing courses? I think you need to distinguish four aspects of writing and focus on the ones that you most want to improve on. They are: The mechanics of writing: Sentence structure, punctuation, etc. For this books and/or classes on grammar and composition may be useful. The craft of writing: This has to ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is having elaborate metaphors ever a bad thing? Metaphors must be apt. They must make the reader's experience of the scene they are reading more vivid. The problem with many metaphors, particularly those created by inexperienced writers, and most particularly by those that think they are obliged to fill a certain quota of metaphors, is that they a... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to realistically describe pain? You can't. You can't describe pain. You can't describe what things taste like. You can't describe much at all about our physical sensations of the world. Language just does not seem to work like that. There are no adequate words for any of it. What you can do is evoke the memory of sensations tha... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Should a scene break always be put in place when there is change in location, times, and dates? A scene is a small dramatic arc within a story. Usually scenes take place in a single place and time, though that is not always the case. Usually it is clear that one scene has ended and another has begun, thought that is not always the case either. Where there is a possibility that it may not be cle... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is it cliché to have two best friends fall in love? Human beings are pretty simple creatures are heart. We are formed by evolution to pair up and reproduce. The forming of romantic bonds is therefore central to our lives and central to our stories. And there are only so many choices for the people we can form romantic bonds with: friends, acquaintance... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Doubt about a particular point of view on how to do character creation A character is a bundle of desires. (One could debate whether that is an adequate description of a human being, but characters are not complete human beings, they are artefacts of story.) When you create a character, you know what they desire, because that is what a character is. A simple character h... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Are worldbuilding questions on topic? It seems to me that there are two types of worldbuilding question. One is about the literary craft of creating the story world in which every story exists, even those that are ostensibly set in the real world. That would strike me as obviously on topic here. The other deals with the mechanics of f... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What's the difference between time-tested and formulaic? 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't do so in obvious ways, but their appeal tends to be limited. It is also true that there are some... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Alternatives to develop relationships without dialogue What Amadeus says about body language is true, but it can be hard to convey in prose. It is the kind of thing you can rely on actors to do well in film, if that is the medium (as the 90 second time limit suggests), though that really doesn't leave you much to write. In prose (and in film as well... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Introducing a new POV near the end of a story POV is all about letting the reader see the things they want to see. One changes POV so that the reader can see things from a different angle. We often do this in life. We move around a scene so that we can see it from different angles. But there is a time for changing points of view and a time f... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to integrate letters, in-universe book Snippets and the like into a story This is simply backstory, so the rules of backstory apply. Backstory should only be given when the reader wants to know the backstory. Backstory slows the forward momentum of the plot, so it should only be given when the lack of backstory would make further forward progress of the plot impossible. ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Choice of words on writing Travel writing is not about the destination or about the journey, it is about the company. It is the personality of the travel writer that make travel writing worth reading. Otherwise, you might just as well read a guide book. So your travel writing is not about taking your reader on a trip, it is ab... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Do people usually like the side characters more than the MC? The structure of most stories is that the main character is led to make some fundamental choice of values. Secondary characters exists to be the subject of those values (the love interest), the promoter of those values (the wizard), the supporters of the values (the companions), a temptation from tho... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Outlining the climax made me lose interest in writing the actual story This is a presumption, but my guess is that you have lost interest because there is no drama in your outline. The peril of outlining is that it causes you to focus on events. Events are not dramatic in themselves. There is no drama in a set of turn by turn directions, for instance. They will get you ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to start a story after the inciting incident? > In this story, the inciting incident, refusal of the call, and start of the quest are all backstory. Are you sure? You say they are heroes. They have set out on a secret mission. But is that a departure from their normal world? Or is that what these heros do for a living. Perhaps going on secret... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is quality of writing subjective, or objective? Any discussion of quality in art depends on your theory of what art is for. There seem to be two dominant theories of art today. Theory: art creates an experience ========================= In the case of literature, this means that reading the piece gives the reader an experience analogous in... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is there a formula for creating stakes? Raising the stakes is a gambling term. It refers to betting more and more on a game as time goes on, often in the hopes of redeeming past losses. It is not hard to understand why gamblers raise the stakes. What is hard is to understand is why they gamble. This seems to apply to fiction as well. W... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Difference between News Analysis and Opinion? It might be useful to compare this to what doctors do. Doctors first establish symptoms. These are the facts of the case. Notice that it is possible to miss or discount a symptom. The data being gathered is factual in nature, but that does not guarantee that it is complete or accurate. Even gathering... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Are competitions worth it in order to get published? A win in any contest in any field is valued in proportion to the quality of its entries. Winning a Pulitzer or an Nobel will do wonders for your career. Winning the Podunk County Fair Short Story Competition, not so much. However, publishing is a business. They publish work that can sell. It is n... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How can I have a character introduce themselves as humble without making them seem arrogant? Humble people don't know that they are humble. Anyone who burns to say that they are humble, isn't. See Uriah Heep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UriahHeep. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What genre would a fictional eyewitness account of a real historical event fall under? What you describe is mainstream historical fiction. There is significant piece of the historical fiction market that seems to value the historical accuracy not only of period details but of events themselves very highly. They want their historical fiction to be essentially a textbook, but with more s... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: The concept of "Exotic Culture" and the necessity of a new world A story is like a scientific experiment. You have to isolate the subject of study from outside influences in order to focus on its properties. Setting is the main tool that novelists use to achieve this isolation. For example, the country house mystery is a simple device from cutting off a group ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Dangers of being sympathetic to the killer We often use the word "sympathise" to mean agree with or approve of. But that is not what it means (or not what it should mean) when we are talking about the reader sympathizing with a character in fiction. In this context, sympathy means, to feel as they feel. The root of the word is from the Gr... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How much uncertainity will the 'general (Non-YA) fantasy reader' tolerate? Showing physical reactions to things works for immediate reactions. But stories are not built on immediate reactions. They are built on the long term desires and goals of the characters. It is hard to show those just by moving your character around the board like a chess piece. And immediate reac... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How can I make a character sound uneducated? Begin by noticing that educated is a relative term. Today we tend to think of it in terms of formal schooling. But many people with less formal schooling, may be educated in other things by other means, such as apprenticeship. Similarly, someone highly educated in physics may be completely ignorant o... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to write strategy and schemes beyond my real-life capabilities? All that has been said here about doing research, and about the advantage of the author's omnipotence, is valuable. But there is a more basic answer as well. Don't show how the sausage is made. Your hero is a tactical mastermind. Fine, have men drink a toast to his brilliance in the tavern after the ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |