Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How do you force a turning point in a narrative that is supposed to be precisely about the lack of such devices? I hate to try to divine motive, but are you sure this is a story question? It sounds more like you are trying to make an argument than tell a story, more like you are trying to find a way to convince that reader that their lives are not governed by fate than that you are trying to find a convince the... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I gain experience in editing? I believe that many if not all of the small literary magazines are edited by volunteers. How those volunteers are selected I am not so sure, but I would begin by scouring their websites looking for any call for volunteers. Failing that, write to them and ask. Now I would imagine that they will have ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Unofficial Fan Fictions - How can I Secure Them? You are worrying about the wrong thing. No one wants to steal your stuff. Unpublished fiction on the web is of zero commercial value. There are far more people writing it than there are reading it. The only people who should worry about being plagiarized are successful authors who are, first, making... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Habitual use of -ing follows -ed -- is this wrong? I don't see anything wrong with the construction per se. It's just how English works for a structure that is action followed by consequence. It is far more important that your prose should seem natural than that it should be varied in structure. That said, the passage you present as an example strik... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Using "show not tell" while characters are planning for something that happens Philipp provides a good answer, but I think there is more to say. First, "show don't tell" has kind of become the touchstone of all advice about storytelling but it is good to remember that it originated as a piece of advice for novelists moving to writing screenplays. What is told in a novel must b... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why not God as our subject? Because God does not have a story arc. If story is the conflict between desire and what stands in the way of the fulfilment of that desire, God cannot have a story arc because nothing can frustrate the desires of God. There are, of course, stories about gods. But those gods are really supermen. They... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What do Readers Expect from a Fantasy Novel It is not difficult to think of fantasy novels that don't have big battles (Voyage of the Dawn Treader). The battles, the strange creatures, etc, are set dressing. Sci Fi and Fantasy are often lumped together, and often appeal to the same readers, because they essentially do the same thing. They exam... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is there any risk of being published in the wrong genre? Genre is a marketing tool. Publishers are marketers of books. That is why you seek out a publisher rather than publishing yourself -- because you want the services of someone who knows how to market books. So if a publisher says your book is in a particular genre, chances are they are right. (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is starting a story with dialogue bad? As you say, there are many stories that work that start with dialogue. Far too much advice about writing is much too mechanical in nature. Dialogue is just a mechanism for telling a story. Rules about which mechanism to use are silly, and usually easy to prove false with counter-examples. What a sto... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Can a scene be written to be disorienting and not be too confusing to readers? A disoriented character does not have a perspective. A perspective is what you have when the world makes sense to you. When you are disoriented, you don't have a perspective. You have a whirl of sensations the refuse to resolve into a perspective. I seem to remember that it was Dr. Johnson who said ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How useful are stock characters in fiction? I think we need to make a distinction between a stereotype and an archetype here. The two are often confused, as illustrated by Wikipedia's unhelpful definition of a stock character: > A stock character is a stereotypical person whom audiences readily recognize from frequent recurrences in a particu... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: The Subplot: What to do when it is only loosely tied to the main plot? The various parts of a novel may be tied together in different ways. They may be connected by the threads of plot. But equally they may be thematically related to each other, or provide thematic counterpoint to each other. The wholeness and integrity of a novel depends on the wholeness and integrity... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why does the villain always win right before the hero defeats him? > Is there any other reason to use this device in a narrative, beyond "to build tension"? Yes. In Story Robert McKee describes the structure of a story as a series of attempts at a goal met by increasingly dire setbacks until the protagonist is forced to the limits of human experience and must make ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: In character development for a screenplay, is it enough to present only a person's most salient characteristics? Characters are defined by what they want and what they are willing to do to get it. The specific details you give about them are there to justify what they want and what they are willing to do to get it. Joe wants X because he was raised by wolves in a trailer park in the 70s. Mary is willing to do Y... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What is Literary Fiction? I think it is a mistake to try to define literary fiction in terms of themes, language, or the primacy of plot vs character. I would suggest that it can be better understood in terms of the pleasure it gives. Stories can give different kinds of pleasure. Some provide vicarious adventure (you want to... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Can you make multiple prologues in one book? This strikes me as a semantic quibble. You can have a section in which the stories of various main characters are told before some larger action commences. Lots of novels have multiple parts, often with gaps in time between them. Calling the entire first part, with its multiple chapters, a prolog, ho... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How much detail should I go into for a character taking advantage of physics expertise? I think it depends on what the main problem is in the novel. If the main problem is technical in nature, the reader needs to have some sense of what it technically possible. If the main problem is psychological or moral, however, what matters is the decision to use or not use the power in question. ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Writing a novel largely composed of question-answer sessions Sounds like you want to write a philosophical novel. Two examples that I can think of are Walker Percey's Lost in the Cosmos and Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both of the above are interesting reads, but interesting as philosophical texts, and as approaches to doing philo... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Can a first person protagonist be the writer's alter ego? It depends entirely on whether your voice is an interesting one. We all tend to believe our own voices are more interesting than they really are. Despite all the talk about expressing oneself, what readers really want is something interesting to them, and there is perhaps a better chance that you wil... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: AmE text for a British literary agent (and viceversa) The best approach is to query the agent first and ask them what their preference is. It is unlikely that they all have the same policy. Asking them first shows them that you are aware of the issue and willing to adjust if required. That shows professionalism, which counts for a lot with agents. (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Finding the 'voice' of a character Every human being strives to establish a place in the world, to be seen and accepted in a certain way. Their voice, the way they react to each situation, is developed in an attempt to establish and maintain that place. Their way of speaking, their vocabulary, their boldness or timidity, is shaped by ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: should I use predictable plot elements? Surprise is the cheapest of literary devices. People often reread their favorite books and re-watch their favorite movies. They would not do so if their enjoyment of them depended on surprise. With effective storytelling our hearts can still be in our mouths for a character at a critical juncture no ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to move back to main section after finishing a sub-section There really is no convention for indicating the end of things in text. You are asking for a way to move up the hierarchy of the document without a title to indicate the change. There really isn't a reliable way to indicate that to a reader. Titles indicate the beginning of things not the end of thin... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Hang on - where's the main conflict? As others have said, the main conflict is what the main character wants and can't get. But I think the point that needs making here is about what plot is. I think it is all to easy to get into the habit of thinking of plot as a kind of history. You can meticulously develop an imaginary history and w... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Does something need to happen in every single chapter? Does something need to happen in every chapter? Yes. Something needs to happen in every paragraph. Something needs to happen in every sentence. The story must advance. A story needs more to advance than physical action by the characters, however. It is the telling that needs to advance. Actions ar... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Do people still read blogs? My blog is still being read, and at about the same level it always was. But as blogs have become a popular form of content marketing, it is inevitable that fewer and fewer of them are being read. Ineffective marketers pump out boat loads of drivel which people do not read. Since producing something ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to structure the text when describing the steps of a procedure which has simultaneous processes? I think you need to join them into a single step, or else there is a risk that the user will do the first step without paying attention to the indicator arm, and may thus hold the input vane open too long. And I presume that there is a third step here, which is to close the input vane when the indic... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should I start writing even if I'm not sure how the story will end? You don't have to know how it ends, but you do have to know how it begins. It begins with some pain, some longing, some need, some disturbance in the equanimity of life that forces some deep deviation from the ordinary course of affairs. You don't have to know how the deviation will end, or even wha... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How often do writers develop characters before plot, and why? Story arises out of a challenge to character. The same event may challenge some characters and not others. A given character will be challenged by some events and not others. So, to create a story, you need a character and an event that challenges that character. Which comes first? In some cases, I... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How many characters can I introduce in the first chapter before the reader gets overwhelmed? At risk of sounding glib, I would say "as many as will fit". But I think that probably is the answer. A chapter should have a shape to it. It should accomplish something. It should have focus. As many characters as fit within that shape and contribute to that goal should be fine. Sometimes that will ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Starting a sentence with the name of a program or command-line tool: capitalization? The GNU site itself treats the name of the Make utility as an uppercased word: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ There does seem to be a convention to frequently use `make` (the command) where Make (the name) would seem more appropriate. The GNU Make manual seems to do this almost exclusively (http... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: The order of says in the present tense I don't believe that one is preferred over the other or that you have to be consistent. However, I do believe that they signal something slightly different, at least in certain locales. In the England I grew up in, "says Max" signals that Max's interjection is unexpected or cheeky. It might be used ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Technical Writing Software I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG tools like FrameMaker and XML vocabularies like DocBook and DITA require complex and somewhat cumbersome edi... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Are there legitimate uses for using bold for emphasis within a sentence? Bold is one way to emphasize something in a sentence. Recasting the sentence to put the emphasis where you want it is another method. Is one preferable to another? I'm not sure. The point of any writing is to communicate your point clearly and if using bold does that, why not? Conventional practice,... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: When is a screenshot really useful in training documentation? It all comes down to the familiarity of the audience with the interface. The words of a procedure describe parts of the interface. Will the audience immediately recognize which parts of the interface those words refer to? If yes, then screenshots are unnecessary and will simply slow the reader down. ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How can the antagonist mislead the readers? Don't mislead the reader. It is a cheap trick that will leave the reader unsatisfied and disinclined to trust you as an author. This does not mean you cannot have surprise, but the surprise should be produced by the logical progress of the story, not by artificially withholding information. Ask your... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Description: How to apply an adjective to a list of nouns without seeming redundant? Simply choose another adjective: > I drove past the empty stables and the deserted servant's quarters, and after another quarter mile I entered a very large circular driveway. Or break up the sentence so that you can group them together. > Both the stables and the servant's quaters were empty as I... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do sci-fi stories hold up if their premise or details become discredited? Tolkien wrote a wonderful essay called "On Fairy Stories" in which he essentially rejected the notion of suspension of disbelief as an explanation of what is going on when a reader reads any kind of fantasy (and science fiction is a branch of fantasy). Tolkien argued that a story is an act of sub-cre... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to write a "strong" passage? What makes a passage strong is almost always its context. We walk by the wonders of nature unseeing everyday. Only at certain times and in certain moods or circumstances do we pause to notice them or be moved by them. Squirrels accidentally plant forests by hiding nuts and forgetting where they put ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to write a religious experience? It is easy to imagine that moments of religious experience are great strum and drang affairs, but they are more often moments of quietness. Not the storm but the calm after the storm. Consider 1 Kings 19:11-13: > 11So He said, "Go forth and stand on the mountain before the LORD." And behold, the LOR... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should a main character be like the reader, or better than him? I'm not sure where we got the notion that readers have to identify with the main character. We are one of the most narcissistic societies of recent memory but we are still interested in people other than ourselves. We do still read about characters who are interesting even though (or even because) th... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: YA novel with old protagonist? There are plenty of examples of novels about adults written for young people in the canon. Look at Rosemary Sutcliffe for example. But this involves a different view of how a reader identifies with a work. Traditionally, most works were written for the reader looking outward. They were windows. For ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How do I know whether to revise or submit elsewhere? You can certainly look at it from the market perspective. What one editor rejects another may accept. What 100 editors reject, the 101st editor may accept. But you can also look at it from the perspective of your own ability to make it better. The passage of time allows us to see work in a new light... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How can I make believable motivations for antagonists? Two dogs. One bone. The dogs are antagonists. Which is the good dog? Which is the bad dog? One dog may have the objective right to the bone, but that does not change how each dog sees things. Each lives in a world in which that bone is their bone. Your antagonist lives in a world in which the bon... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Efficiency or correctness in communication? John Carroll did extensive research on an aspect of this in the 80s. His finding are recorded in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel" and lead to the development of a practice called "minimalism" in technical communication. What Carroll observed was that people do not read manuals linearly. They pref... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How can you write less to say more? The key question to ask in deciding if something is in or out in technical communication is this: What would the user do differently if they knew this? If the answer it that they would not do anything different, then leave it out. Once you have determined if the user would do something different if... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Can technical writing suck less The number one thing that you have to realize about technical writing is that people do not read it for its own sake. They read it because they are trying to do something and they need more information. The writing does not need to engage or entertain because the reader is already engaged with the ta... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: What to avoid when foreshadowing a death? Think about the purpose and effect of foreshadowing. If you are walking home and you see a column of smoke rising over your neighbourhood, you will probably rush forward with a lump in your throat fearing that you house is on fire. But when you turn the corner and see your house in flames, you will p... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Story Structure All these analytical schemas are interesting, but I don't think you can rely on them for building a story. It is like dissecting a body. An autopsy may tell you what killed them, but it won't bring them back to life. I think they can be great tools to figure out why a story is not working. But I don... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Trying to avoid being cliché Readers are not hooked by outlandish openings. Readers are hooked by character, story, and setting. You can introduce a character, story, or setting in an outlandish way. (See Steinbeck's introduction to Monterey in Cannery Row for an example.) But it will hook or not hook depending on its effectiven... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |