Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How do I make "foreshadowing" more relevant in the early going? You can do almost anything if you make it a story. Want to foreshadow something that will happen in chapter 5. That's fine, as long as you do it in the context of a story in chapter 1. A novel is a long story made up of many smaller stories. Each turn, each event, each incident, is a story in its own... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How much can the supporting sentences deviate from the topic sentence before introducing a second paragraph becomes a better option? The paragraph is a very ill-defined unit of composition, and the rules of paragraph writing that they teach in schools (which is a kind of mini-essay format) has not a lot to do with how actual working writers write today. For certain, the paragraph has been getting shorter. In the 19th century you ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How acceptable is "alternate history" in writing (nowadays)? You were right about your own taste. You may have been right about the taste of many other people as well. But as a general principle, you were wrong. Fiction is fiction. Fiction is all the stuff that didn't happen but should have. There is no part of life, experience, or history that is not ripe fo... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I convey an absolute truth from the author to the reader without a mentor character? If you want to say something to the reader, just say it. You are writing a novel, not a movie. You are narrating the whole thing and everything in it is said by you to the reader. In LOTR, Tolkien outright tells us all sorts of things. There are other things that we learn only when they are spoken b... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to plan a short story for a given word count? A story is how long it is. The short story is a spare medium to begin with. You can't make a decently written story of X words X-500 words without taking something away from the story itself. I think a perennial short story writer develops a sense of what constitutes a 2500 word story. It is a 2500 ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Do you have to write in the tone of ordinary speech? You should never write in the tone of ordinary speech. Ordinary speech is unreadable. It is repetitive, broken, trivial, and largely mindless. Dialogue is not speech. Dialogue should be crisp, relevant, coherent, readable, and should move the story along. As such, dialogue is always to a greater or ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Does the degree of immersion in the character alter the extremity of plot points used? The most powerful magnifier of emotion is anticipation. Dread multiplies horror. All horror films play on this basic emotional truth. If you want to produce the most profound emotional impact on the reader, you must build their anticipation. Full immersion is not necessarily the best way to do this.... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Why is young adult romance now being written primarily in the first person? I doubt it is specific to romance. It seems to be everywhere. I keep finding books that have no reason to be in first person (and in some cases every reason not to be) which are in first person nonetheless. In part it may just be a fad. It's a bit like the way people wore blue jeans when I was growi... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Describing something that doesn't exist It looks like a fish bowl had a baby with a bike helmet. Images, not adjectives, are what you need to describe something that does not look like anything conventional. You won't get close to the details -- words are not good at imparting physical details, they are good at recalling images that the re... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Do I have to show my characters making up after an argument, or can it be implied when we see them on good terms again? It depends. In these matters, it always depends. It it advances or enriches the story, leave it in; if not, leave it out. There is no general rule that says such and such a thing always advances the story or such and such a thing never advances the story. It is always about the role it plays in the c... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Tools for organising anthologies In a month or two I will have a book out on how to do things like this (Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process, from XML Press). The big question is, what are you going to use to do the selections based on the metadata and publish to the various output formats? Are you willing/able to write any co... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Slow buildup vs sudden introduction It all depends on the moral structure of the story. At the heart of every story is a choice about values. (With great power comes great responsibility, etc.) The more conventional structure would be to build up to by focussing on the choice that the hero has to make in order to fully realize their p... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What is the most fundamental advice when it comes to writing? If you want to be a writer -- that is, someone who writes for a living -- as opposed specifically to being a novelist, then the money is in business writing: technical writing, science writing, marketing writing, medical writing, etc, etc. These are all reliable and lucrative careers that allow you ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: No time to deal with emotional trauma Two thoughts. 1. Literature is not about the character's emotions. It is about the reader's emotions. In real life, every single TV cop and mystery series detective would be invalided out with PTSD by the traumas they endure. Most fictional heros are far more emotionally resilient that real people (... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Alternative for the Hero's journey (since it is about Ego) It strikes me looking at this that what the difference between true self and false self here can be summed up as contentment vs discontent. I would like to think that contentment was the true self and discontent a false self, but I think that is bollocks. Man is born to trouble and the sparks fly up... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Describe illustrated characters? I think there is a huge difference between an illustrated novel and a graphic novel. An illustrated novel is a novel that can stand on its own but to which the publisher of a particular edition has chosen to add pictures. There are various editions of Lord of the Rings, for instance, both illustrated... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Referencing a blog post in text? When it comes to citations, there is no universally correct method. There are various style guides that specify different ways of doing citations. Publications often specify that the articles or books that they publish must use a certain citation format. Certain academic disciplines may adopt a parti... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to manage getting depressed by what my main character goes through? I'm not sure that you do get through this. A story is an experience. To write the story, you have to live the experience, emotionally at least. When a story does not ring true, I think that is usually because the writer chickened out of really putting themselves through the emotions, of fully immersi... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Should I describe a person or a room first? Setting is character. Where you meet someone tells you something about them. It may tell you a lot or it may tell you a little. It may tell you the most significant thing you need to know about them or it may tell you trivial things about them. It is either the space they designed or the space they ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to improve a "dry" scientific review article? Dry is not a precise or technical term in writing. It is more of an I-don't-know-what-it-is-but-I-know-I-don't-like-it term. There are a lot of those in writing because in the end it is the total effect of the writing that matters and either the total effect is pleasing or it is not. However, most w... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What are the limits to description in story writing? How do I know if I have crossed them? The central issue here is not the extent of description, it is focus. Good prose allows the reader to focus on one thing at a time. When it is time to describe, it describes. When it is time to deal with action, it deals with the action. If a description of the setting is necessary to understand the ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How common *are* happy endings? An ending does not have to be happy; it has to be satisfactory. That is, it has to affirm something that the reader believes, or wants to believe, about the world. That can be something sad. It is often something sad. Sad stuff happens and we have to deal with it. It is often preferable for people to... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: A question about Past Participle vs Simple Past in a novel Lauren's analysis is excellent. But there is one thing to add. Language is not a machine. It does not work by machine rules. It works by context and suggestion. > Her father had given it to her... This sentence establishes the context of what follows it. The use of had here is essential because it ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you handle editors who materially change your writing after publication? Editors edit. Often for the better. Sometimes for the worse. When an editor edits something in a way that changes the original meaning it is a sign that, however clear the statement was to you, you did not get it across successfully to at least one person -- the editor. I'm going through the edit p... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Can I use LaTeX in a fictional code-weaving? ReStructuredText is a lightweight markup language with built in support for LaTeX math expressions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25793190/latex-in-rst-processed-with-pandoc (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Technical review process when using FrameMaker Long experience has taught many of us that when you send a busy person an email with more than one question, they only answer the first one and ignore the rest. Thus many of us have gotten into the habit of asking one question per email. You may be able to solve part of the problem by asking writers ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Why do readers enjoy reading about "bad" or evil characters? The virtuous transgressor is one of the oldest and most popular figures in literature. We find them everywhere from Robin Hood to Dirty Harry. How can a transgressor be virtuous? We all have basically the same attitude towards the law: it should constrain me as little as possible and other people as... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Can religions like Islam or Hinduism be represented respectfully in a fictionalized/fantastical Earth? The objection I think most people of faith have to their depiction in works of literature is not so much the author's lack of respect but the sheer ignorance of many writers about what people actually believe. I think this is true irrespective of genre. As a Catholic, I can tell you that the Catholi... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Larger structure - followup to Sense of Style by Steven Pinker It seems to me that what Pinker is describing at the sentence and paragraph level is substantially what most books on story are describing at the level of a document as a whole. Stories have a coherent shape and that shape has been mapped in various ways by different authors, but broadly the same sha... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: When should you convert a measurement in a local translation of a novel? It depends on whether you are using the local unit of measure for information or for atmosphere. If you use modern units in an historical setting (kilometers and grams in ancient Egypt, for instance, readers will know how large a quantity you are talking about, but it will sound completely out of pla... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Writing a Super Intelligent AI Surely it comes down to identifying what human quality your AI lacks. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Philip K Dick identifies that quality as empathy. He takes pains to illustrate the lack of empathy of his android characters. He does this by putting them in situations in which their lack of ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to break up dialog if some of the dialog is not in quotes? Despite the sources that ScottS cites, I believe this idea that you should use a new paragraph for a new person speaking is bogus. Paragraph rules are paragraph rules. You use a new paragraph for a new thought. A new person speaking is often a new thought, but not always. In particular, dialogue that... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Am I changing POVs if I'm describing what two or more characters are sensing (touch, smell, sound, etc.)? "Am I changing POVs if I'm describing what two or more characters are sensing". Not necessarily. If you are writing in what is awkwardly called "omniscient POV" then you can can tell what any number of characters are sensing without changing POV. Also, don't confuse POV with narrative first person. ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to describe 4 main characters at once without overloading the reader with information? By rewriting the book so that the four main characters are not introduced all at once. There is a good reason that most books introduce characters one at a time or two at a time (in the form of a conversation). Readers need time to integrate each character and form a distinct memory of them. This is... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you assess the value of an individual scene? The theory is bollocks. Here's why: the reader does not need any of it. A story is an entertainment. The reader needs food and water and oxygen and shelter and love. They don't need your novel. Readers read for pleasure. Any scene that gives pleasure is a good scene. However, a novel is a significa... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Should I write scared? You should write inspired. You should write in response to vision. Great work is work of great vision, work that sees what we ordinarily miss about human life. Tackling your vision may or may not be scary, but that is beside the point. If you have looked into the abyss, your vision may have terrified... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Putting code examples in BSC thesis Theoretical concepts are always difficult to understand without examples. Plus, the examples can provide evidence of the soundness of the concepts and generally increase the reader's confidence both in their understanding of the concepts and in the soundness of the concepts themselves. So yes, inclu... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: I feel like I'm plagiarizing my story? There are no new ideas. Everything has been done. Every plot device has been used a thousand times. Whatever you write it will use ideas that other writers have already used many times over. Plagiarism is representing someone else's work as your own. It is not using ideas that have been used before.... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Software to draw plot structure charts I think Dia, which is a general diagram editor, checks most or all of your boxes. http://dia-installer.de/ (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to get started as a freelancer? To make money as a freelance writer you have to have expertise in something other than writing. Anybody who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke. That can be expertise in addressing a particular audience for a particular purpose, such as an advertising copywriter or a PR disaster recovery specialist... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How should I respond to a supervisor/editor who thinks my technical writing is "too conversational?" There have been significant changes in technical communication style over the last 20 years, and particularly in the last five years as increasing volumes of evidence have shown that simple friendly language is both easier to understand and more respected by users. But it sounds like your supervisor... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I write LGBT characters without looking like I'm trying to be politically correct? Well, first, you cannot write about any politically charged issue without being read as taking sides. If you are ideologically aligned with one side, the other will throw rocks through your window. If you are not ideologically aligned with either side, both sides will throw rocks through your window.... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is Wikipedia Trustworthy? No information source is entirely trustworthy. But for purposes of citation, we need to distinguish three kinds of information: evidence, interpretation, and reporting. Evidence is the original data. Interpretation is what something thinks the original data, or a collection of data means. Reportin... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to get valuable feedback on the quality of my storytelling? I love critique groups. I have belonged to a number of them. I have good friends I met because of them. But if you are concerned about your storytelling, it is vital to realize what they can and can't do for you in regards to storytelling. To state it briefly, they can't help you with your story, but... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay if I wrote a story based on true historical events? Historical fiction based on real events is a huge part of the genre of historical fiction. In fact, the taste today seems to be for stories that are as close to historical events as possible, with authors often basing their stories on one particular character (famous or otherwise) and often including... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Are there agents or representatives who only specialize in book promotion and not distribution? You really can't separate credibility from reach. Credibility is reach. Credibility gets a message attention. Credibility gets a message passed on. A traditional publisher is not the only source of credibility today, but they are still a huge one. The credibility that a traditional publisher brings w... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to best pace information reveals to the reader I think it is a mistake to think of your story as a set of reveals. A story has a shape and the reader remains interested if they sense that the story is making progress. Tension is not created by mysteries but by anticipation. Consider a romance. We all know what the resolution will be. We all know ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Writing an "honest" Blurb? As has been noted before in relation to several questions on genre, a genre is a promise to the reader of a certain kind of literary pleasure. A blurb is essentially an expansion on that promise. It indicates a little more of the particular flavor of the work within its genre. Because a blurb is an ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: "Real people don't make good fictional characters". Really true? It very much depends on what you mean by "real people". You can, of course, make people from history into characters in fiction, as writers of historical novels do, and you can base characters on people you know, as Kerouac based Dean Moriarty on Neal Cassidy . In that sense you clearly can base char... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Pretty flowers with clunky Latin names The average western reader would not know the difference if you told them that your heroes rested in the shade of a rhubarb tree or tied their horse to a gigantic parsley. Even western works that talk about people walking through a grove of ash or poplar only evoke a vague sense of woodsiness in the... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |