Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Is First person perspective more intimate than Third person perspective? First person narratives are not inherently more intimate. You can achieve intimacy or distance in any narrative mode. But in some ways first person can actually diminish intimacy. But first we have to ask what we mean by intimacy. It could mean any of the following: - Knowing more about the charact... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Where's the middle ground between genre conventions and originality? Stories are inhabited by archetypes. That does not seem to be a choice. It seems to be what the human psyche craves. One has to ask, after all, why we like stories at all. We can suggest some practical purposes that stories serve, but for the most part they are simply entertainments, and it is very ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you tell a character's backstory without explicitly telling it? This is another version of this question: Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal? In other words, it is a how do I tell something given that I have chosen a narrative point of view that is not suitable to telling it. The answer is, you don't. In the default na... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal? A story has to be interesting all the way through. There are many cases of authors withholding information that could be given earlier in order to create a big reveal later. But it has to be done in a way that does not make a big chunk of the story leading up to the reveal boring or frustrating. The... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: A question on the ambiguity of the Alternate History genre Everything in a story has to matter. If you write alternate history, the alternate has to matter to the story. If you put in a detail that is obviously and deliberately contrary to history (as opposed to an accidental anachronism, which you will find in many books if you look hard enough) then it is ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Intentionally writing a Deus Ex Machina? If you could remove that plot point and the story would remain the same, then it is not a deux ex machina. It is only deus ex machina if the entire resolution of the plot depends on an intervention of some force entirely outside of everything that has happened in the story before. In other words, it ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you make the reader root for the protagonist when the primary antagonist is more relatable and more likable? Be careful not to confuse the concept of protagonist with the concept of good guy or even hero. Protagonist simply means the main character of the story. Similarly, antagonist does not mean bad guy or villain, it simply means the person opposed to the protagonist. There is nothing at all to say that... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it a good idea to make the protagonist unlikable while making the supporting characters more likable? It is not and never has been about making the protagonist likable. It has always been about making them recognizable. If you want a great example of an unlikable protagonist, try Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Pinky is in no way likable and in no way moral. He is, however, recognizably human. When p... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How unadvisable is it to flip the protagonist into a villain? The good character who turns bad is a classic feature of literature. It is the essence of the literary form we call tragedy. Thus Macbeth opens with high praise for the virtuous Macbeth: SOLDIER. Doubtful it stood; As two spent swimmers that do cling together And choke their art. The merciless... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it a deus ex machina if the alternative is illogical? I think you have to look at DXM this way: the resolution of the hero's arc has to be merited. The hero can merit their solution by achieving it by their own actions. But they can also merit it by deserving the help that has been provided to them. A classic case is Androcles and the Lion. Androcles i... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I get my readers through the early, "hardship" part of my fiction? "The purpose of the book is to convince..." That is likely the source of your problem right there. If a book is didactic or polemical in nature, it is generally only of interest to those who support that message and only of interest to them while it is actually preaching that message. A book can cer... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What type of character should I write about first in a potential series of books? Start by writing about a character into whom you have the most insight, about whom you have the most to say. Art is about vision. It is about seeing what others do not see and transforming it into words so that they can see it. This is not as highfalutin as it may sound. A character becomes compelli... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Does my protagonist *have* to succeed? No, your protagonist does not have to succeed. Your protagonist has to arrive at some difficult choice and make a choice that the reader finds emotionally or morally satisfying. That does not mean that they have to win the fight with the antagonist, either immediately or in the future. Sometimes the ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Resources to find editors of magazines and newspapers? You don't find them. They are hiding from people like you. And from people like me. You might as well announce that you have decided you want to play professional baseball and want to get the names of scouts for the Yankees. It does not work that way. You have to start at the bottom and work your way... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Would George Orwell get hired in today's expert climate? There is now and always has been a front door and a back door to every profession that is not government regulated. The front door is generally to go to school, get the appropriate qualifications, send in your resume, and hope for the best. The back door is to know someone, to have a friend who know... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it discouraged to format a list of items vertically? It depends on the context. In technical writing, using the list format is generally preferred. In a novel, you would always keep the list inline. In popular non-fiction you will find both styles used. There are some markup language that will allow you to enter a list as a substructure within a parag... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: No Contractions This rule is because it is easier to impose simple rules than to inculcate good taste. In real life, try to develop good taste by reading excellent examples with attention. In class, do what you are told so you can get good marks, graduate, get a good job, and be able to afford to buy good books whic... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Structure for software documentation: long vs short pages I wrote a whole book on this subject. It is called Every Page is Page One: Topic Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web. In it I look at the research on how people use technical information and how the web changes how we use information generally and come up with seven principles for t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What is the spectrum of 'disasters' in 'scene-sequel?" Well, not specific to the scene-sequel model (for which I would harbour deep suspicion) but in literary terms I would say as disaster is an irreparable loss. A loss you can recover from, from which you can be made whole, is not a disaster, it is an inconvenience. A disaster forces a permanent change ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Stories with multiple possible interpretations: do you plan for it? No matter how hard you try to make sure that there is only one possible interpretation of your story, people will interpret it in different ways according to their experience, ideology, and circumstances. You don't need to plan for multiple interpretations; you are going to get them whether you like ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Character, plot, and setting conflicts My pet theory on this is that all story conflict is moral. That is, it is a conflict between values. If a big pile of rocks falls on the road and our hero picks them up one by one and moves them out of the way, that is landscaping, not story. If a big pile of rocks falls on the road and our hero st... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Sorkin: "Dialog is music" - In what way(s)? I don't pretend to be able to interpret Sorkin on this, but I would make this point: When we write, we have punctuation to break sentences into meaningful phrases. In speech, unless you are Victor Borge, you do not. And in writing, if the reader does not get the meaning of the sentence the first time... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to write a 'fish out of water' character? Well, the best way to introduce a reader to a world is to describe it to them. It worked for Tolkien. It worked for Rowling. It can work for you. The best way to make a fish out of water character convincing is to have a very good reason why they are out of water, and either show them working as har... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I manage screen shots and other graphics for maintenance? For the book I am currently writing, which is not written in docbook directly but is written in a markup that will be translated to DocBook for publishing, I use an XML file to capture metadata for each illustration. assemble.svg assemble.svg 4.25in... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Can your narrator talk to the reader of the novel? Of course the narrator can talk to the reader. That is their job. It is what narrator means. I suspect what you are really asking is, can the narrator comment on the action? Again, the answer is that of course they can. This was pretty much the way every novelist wrote until very recently, and the w... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Character crisis for a Science Hero? Science and faith are not opposites. They are different modes of knowing. They are other modes of knowing as well, such as logic, mathematics, ethics, and the historical method. Each of them addresses a different subject matter and we use each of them according to type of evidence available to us and... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Words we may believe are neutral yet have restricted connotations I'm not sure that the issue with enormity is that it has emotional baggage. The issue is that it has restricted usage -- it is only use in certain constructions such as "enormity of the crime". This is not a matter of emotional baggage so much as simply an accident of the development of standard usag... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you write a Stack Exchange answer? That is an interesting question and and interesting observation. Is the Stack Exchange answer a distinct genre? Or perhaps more broadly is the QA site answer a distinct genre. If it is, I think it is an example of a more pervasive genre that was created by the Web, which we might call persistent conv... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a dialog tag for when someone is saying something in awe? How many ways are there to say "Oooooooo!" Only one that I can think of. Therefore the only dialog tag you need is "said". The only reason to use a dialogue tag other than "said" is if the intonation of the dialogue is not clear either from the words themselves or from the context in which they are ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to quote something somebody was told by someone else? (Third-party, hearsay) The classic case of this is Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is almost entirely in the dialogue of the narrator from the frame story. > "It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-pint champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz had... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Describing body language? One of the things you discover pretty quickly as a writer is that there are all kinds of things that we do not have words for. Worse, even if there were words of them, most people would not recognize what they meant. (How many people know what it means to say that someone stands with arms akimbo?) T... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How To Settle On An Ending? You really should not have much choice of endings. Of course, you have all kinds of choices in the specific details of the ending. But in a larger sense the function of the ending of a story is to prove through action that the protagonist has made the choice that they are shown to have made at the cl... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Coincidence of Similarity in Writing Finding something truly unique on the Web is pretty rare. What you find far more often are a hundred different ways of saying the same thing. Even on Stack Exchange, which goes to considerable pains to detect and eliminate duplicate questions, multiple instances of essentially the same question aboun... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Converting/rewriting present tense narratives to past tense gracefully. Not a question about verb conjugation One of the great misconceptions is that a story can be written in the past tense or the present tense. This is not the case. Individual sentences and sometimes phrases are written in particular tenses. Any substantial passage of prose is likely to contain multiple tenses. Stories are written in the ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I introduce languages that will be spoken in the long term? Does it actually matter to the story that the language they are speaking changes? Most of the time in international stories, the difference is language is not germane to the plot in any way and is simply ignored. A well-told story focuses the reader's attention on the elements that matter to the sto... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I understand characters whose worldview is alien to my own? The only way you can really pull this off convincingly is through humility. If you are to approach a person you disagree with with sympathy, you have to start with the notion that they are neither irrational, malevolent, or crazy, but rather a sincere and rational human being who has reached differen... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to make the murder's identity less obvious, or make the obviousness not matter? This is an "I have chosen the wrong point of view for the story I want to tell. How do I make it work anyway?" question. We get them a lot. The answer is, change the point of view so that the story does work. Choose the right tools for the job. If someone asks you, "I am entering a hundred yard das... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What is the difference between limited third-person narrative and free indirect discourse? Limited third-person narrative and free indirect discourse are analytical categories invented by academics to classify the techniques of writers because classification is what academics do (regardless of whether such classification produces anything useful). Academics are often bitter rivals so it i... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay to include world-building facts by "telling" instead of "showing"? You have to understand what show vs tell means in the context of prose. In a movie, you can show something by pointing the camera at it. In prose, all you have is words and all you can do with words is tell things. Showing in a prose context therefore means telling us one thing which leads us to see... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How should I document a product release with an inherently flawed design? This is essentially a business problem, which is not to say it is off topic, because technical writers exist to solve business problems. But it is not a problem the writer should try to solve on their own. You have to get guidance from the product manager. However, there is a very good chance that t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it better to use "firstnamelastname.com" for a portfolio site, or something unique? First of all, if your firstnamelastname.com domain is available, claim it now. Even if you don't decide to use it immediately, it is a valuable asset that you might not be able to claim later. I would say that firstnamelastname.com is much more effective when people have heard of your first and last... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to get my book taken seriously as a teenager? If you write a serious book, people will take it seriously. If you write a book that people take seriously at age 13, people will consider you a phenom. But it almost never happens, and the reason is that a book is a highly complex piece of art that depends both on an in-depth grasp of storytelling ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I spot an unintentional promise in my story? What a fascinating question. I suspect that the answer is that you can't with perfect certainty. There will probably always be readers who will pick up your book hoping for one thing, thinking in the early going that they are going to get it, and then being disappointed in the end when they don't. In... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Submitting things I post on my blog for publication Legally there is no issue. It is your work. You own the copyright. You can licensed anyone you like to make copies no matter how many copies have already been made (subject, of course, to any rights you have already sold). The issue is going to be what individual publications are willing to accept. ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Should software product release notes be in marketing voice or technical voice? (software documentation) I think that there is a very strong case to be made that this distinction between marketing voice and tech comm voice should be avoided entirely. There are two main reasons for this: 1. In ancient times, when tech comm and marketing were delivered on paper, each came to the customer at a different t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you mix dialogue with actions of a character? There is always the temptation these days for a writer to try to act out a scene as they imagine it playing on a movie screen. But this does not work in prose. It is impossible in prose to have two things happen at once. The reader can only read one word at a time and a rapid back and forth between d... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I include a powerful theme in my story without making it blatantly obvious? Just as a technical matter, a theme is not a message. Love is a theme. Love sucks is a message. When you say you want to get across a message in your writing, what you are saying is that you want to change people's minds about some issue: either change what they think about the issue or change how i... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Our team needs to automate many routine tasks. Can we use a single tool or do we need to use multiple ones? To automate any data manipulation task you need two things: - Access to the metadata or pattern in the source data that you want to act on. - The ability to change the metadata or data of the source in such a way that you don't corrupt the file or make it unreadable. The reason that so many syste... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it redundant to repeat a subject when it's been implied in a college essay? Redundancy in prose is often useful because people forget things and because the real world relationships implied by the grammatical relationships is not always clear. One often finds that overzealous editing for brevity can do a hatchet job on clarity. Technically the meaning may have been preserve... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Should important events that happen a long time before the rest of the story be in a prologue or in chapter 1? You are not writing a history, you are writing a novel. In a history, the temporal sequences of events is generally the mainspring of the narrative. In a novel, the story arc of the protagonist is the mainspring of the narrative. Events should therefore be narrated in the order that they impact the s... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |