Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Still struggling with character desire, positive vs. negative, hooking readers Root for the guy is not really the magic elixir you are after. As I have said before, the heart of every story is a choice. It is not enough to make your character want something. The pursuit of that desire, whether the desire itself is considered positive or negative, is not enough. It must lead the... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to derive a storyline from a beginning? If you don't have a middle and an end, you don't have a beginning. I don't mean that you have to work out all the details of the middle and the end before you begin, because you can work those out as you go if that is how you work. What I mean is that the beginning sets up the middle and the end so i... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can a "rip-off" still be good? Ah, the myth of originality. (Hi @LaurenIpsum! Waves.) No one in the publishing industry wants originality. Not publishers. Not readers. The only people in the orbit of publishing that claim to value originality are snarky internet trolls and bad tempered newspaper columnists. And these people, of c... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it better to repeat steps listed elsewhere in a manual, or to refer the reader to where the steps are listed elsewhere in the manual? I think there is one thing to be said on this that is not covered by Does DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Apply to Documentation? and that is this: It is not uncommon that there are common operations that must be performed as part of many different tasks. For instance, you might have to log on to the ad... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Writing dialogue Dialogue is an action like any other action in a novel. The amount of dialogue in any given novel should be a function of how much of the action of the novel -- the working out of the story shape of the novel -- involves people talking to each other. In some novels the working out of the story arc r... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a word or a sets of words that describe a persons beautiful dead face? First let me say that the notion that a dead face cannot be beautiful is nonsense. Some may never has seen a dead face they found beautiful, but many have, and I see no reason not to believe them. But whether a dead face is objectively beautiful (supposing you are willing to grant the traditional we... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What are the things that only Stories can do? I disagree with Amadeus on the matter of becoming the protagonist. I don't think that is what literature does or why readers turn to literature. I think there is always a narrative distance. We are always hearing a story told, and that is a different thing from doing something yourself. If I read abo... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is inner monologue a bad way to show character traits? Not necessarily, but the propensity to indulge in internal monologue is itself a character trait. Fundamentally, the way we assess the character of someone in fiction is the same a how we assess their character in life: by their actions. Sometimes it makes sense to shortcut the process of establishin... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What strategies are there to document data lineage and keep it updated with a minimum amount of maintenance? I worked on a project that sounds similar to yours in which the ability to identify every process that touched every piece of data was vital in order to minimize the amount of code validation that had to be redone whenever any other piece of code changed. To show the flow of data through processes, ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to communicate character desire? I doubt the issue is whether the desires are stated explicitly or implied by actions. I suspect the issue has more to do with story shape. If we use the hero's journey model, and novel opens in the normal world, where we establish what the character loves and who they are. Then comes the call to acti... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What constitutes a 'hook?' I hate the word hook (in this context, it is useful for talking about fishing). It implies some kind of violent capture (fishing again). Who wants to be hooked? Fish? Drug addicts? The problem with the word it that implies a kind of sudden and intrusive attachment. That leads writers to suppose that... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay to use "fell" in one sentence, and "fall" in the next sentence? Yes, absolutely. Repetition is a well known rhetorical and dramatic technique. Unfortunately, you will get English teachers that will tell you that you must always vary your words. I have seen people in critique groups who hardly ever contribute anything other than to criticise repetition of words, ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I learn subtlety? Well, to start with, what you are describing is not subtlety. Subtlety is paying attention to the small but significant details of something -- making a subtle point or a subtle distinction. What you are talking about is indirection: suggesting one thing by saying another. It is closely related to t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable to use synonyms to achieve rhythm? As someone who worries a lot about rhythm in my own writing, I would say that rhythm is more often achieved by changing word order than by by changing words. Prose rhythm does not depend on exact scansion anyway, so choosing a word with a different stress pattern doesn't do that much for you. Prose r... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I show dust/ ashes being blown away by the wind in a story? This is where the show don't tell doctrine becomes particularly pernicious. It is all telling. All you have is words. All words can do is tell. To apply show don't tell to prose, you have to show A by telling B. So, if you want to show that Joe is nervous you replace telling us he is nervous: > Joe... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I write an action scene? First, make sure that you are not subconsciously trying to write a movie fight scene. Movie fight scenes are all about movement and noise (and generally far too long and tedious for anyone older than 10). Good fight scenes in the movies are actually more dialogue than action. (Consider the sword figh... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How much does style contribute to the overall value of a novel? "Everybody can invent a story" -- No. In his classic book Story, Robert McKee reports just the opposite: There are a great many people who can write beautiful prose. There are very few who can tell a captivating story. My years of critique groups and writing classes bear this out. Most of the manusc... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Does DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Apply to Documentation? No. Don't repeat yourself is a good content management rule, which is what it is in programming as well. If you have two instances of the same thing it becomes harder to manage them. If it were not for the management issues it raises, there would be no point to the DRY doctrine. But the same pieces ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Where would I specify which user is required to run an administration command? People do not read the documentation through. They dip into a specific spot in pursuit of one instruction on how to accomplish their task of the moment. As far as the reader is concerned, therefore, Every Page is Page One. There is no rest of the manual. There is only this page. It is all I am looki... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Alternatives better to the binary "0b..." format? People will type things the way you write them in the documentation. People are looking for concrete instructions on what to do, not philosophical discussion of the working of the system. So, enter them in the documentation the way people should enter them in the product. (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Terminology question - "if-else" or "if/else"? In this case I think what you want is if...else. The slash tends to be used to suggest alternatives: yes/no answer. But you are talking about a case where both are present. The hyphen is used to make a phrase into a word you can talk about. Instances have an is-a relationship to their class. But if... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Formatting of Text in Technical Writing (Procedure Writing) This is all about recognition. The user may recognize the component being mentioned by name (verbal) or by sight (visual). Recognition by name is sufficient in most cases. If you are going for recognition by name, the the reason for bolding the text in the manual is to offset the name from the rest ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Can "numbers" be good doc performance metrics? Is there a way to meaningfully interpret the quantitative user data we gather? It is extremely difficult to measure the performance of a technical document because it is hard to gather the data and hard to interpret the data when you have it. Let's start with the aim of technical communication. The aim is to make the user of a product productive by enabling them to use the pro... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Traits of Bad Writers - Analysing Popular Authors The novel is one of the most complex pieces of art that humans create, and the enjoyment of novels can be based on many different characteristics. Without trying to be exhaustive, we could distinguish these five elements in a novel that may satisfy readers to different degrees: - Prose: the ability ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Bridging the gap between colloquial usage and technical meaning of terms People choose words to make distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions they are trying to make are fine-grained and sometimes they are not. In many cases, the people making the coarse-grained distinctions are not even aware that the fine-grained distinctions exist. People tend to choose the most famili... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can we make reviewing HTML documentation easier? On one project I worked on, we did reviews via a work- in-progress server, which was an HTML version of the current state of the docs. We created a modified build script for this server which included the following: - A status indicator for each topic (ready to review, draft, final, etc.) - An ID fo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Why do many manuals and technical documents seem to prefer passive voice? Well, there is no good practical reason for it. In other words, there are no studies showing that passive voice is more effective in communicating technical information. That leaves us with social reasons, which are necessarily a little more speculative and anecdotal. There is history to suggest that... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Limitations of automatic documentation Doxygen, etc. do not really generate documentation automatically. They restructure and format information that was written by hand, either in the form of code (which is a form of structured data) or comments written into the code. They format and publish the information automatically. They don't gene... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How much humour is effective in technical documentation? The typical user of technical communication is in a hurry and in a bad mood. They were working along trying to get a job done so they could go home and have supper with the kids then something broke or refused to work the way they thought it should, or a part would not go on properly, or a bug appear... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do you explain the details of something technical to a non-technical audience? While there are strategies such as the use of analogy and simplified language that can help somewhat, the real issue is that a non-technical audience is non-technical (for a given domain) because they are not interested in the details of that domain. We are all technical in some domain or another, a... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to simplify a sentence so that a younger audience can understand it? You can't. 13 year old boys don't care about pocket squares. Period. End of story. There is a vast overemphasis in the writing community on how things are written. The emphasis should be on what things are written. Most communication project do not fail because of how things are said but because of ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What does "juvenile tone" mean? The overwhelming concern of the child is to be noticed by adults. It is a constant stream of "look at me, daddy", "look at me, mommy", "look at me, grandpa". Kids act out in school, in public, at the dinner table because they want to be noticed. Even being scolded is, apparently, preferable, for the ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: The Good, the Bad, and the Semicolon Bollocks. (That's a technical term.) The semicolon is the correct punctuation for a particular kind of sentence structure. So on the face of it, if you want to outlaw something, it should be that sentence structure, not the punctuation that is necessary to it. But this is one of those rules like kil... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Moving between a narrator's memories of the past and the "literary present" "Use the present tenses when discussing events in literary works" I don't know where you got this from, but it is not true. The default for stories is to tell them in the past tense, or to be more precise, in the narrative past -- relating them as if the events occurred in the past. This is fundamen... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to properly format a post update on a company blog? There is no universal convention for this, and thus no "proper" way to do it. But I would question is editing an existing blog post is the right way to do this at all. A blog is a "web log". That is, it is sequential in time. One post follows another. The primary organization of the material is simpl... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to edit story structure While no one can say for sure, my guess is that you are probably suffering from what seems to be a recurring problem for people posting here: confusing plot with imaginary history. Story never starts with plot. It always starts with character, and it always starts with a character who wants somethin... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Are there any postulates of literature? Well, within any discussion of literature -- any answer given on this SE for example -- there tend to be lots of ideas postulated. That is, simply, that they are taken as accepted truths by the writer, and usually by the readers as well. They are postulates in context -- simply the things we think we... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should I write a novel if I haven't read many? In all the author biographies I have read, two things seem to be constant. They are all voracious wide-ranging readers, and they all (or almost all) started writing in some form at a very early age. It follows that they cannot have been widely read at the time they started writing. Wide extensive rea... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should I, and how should I develop a "filler character"? At the core of every character is a desire. They want something. They are where they are, they do what they do, because they believe that it is leading them to what they desire. They also have a set of values and beliefs that shape how they are willing to behave in order to achieve their desire -- th... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I write someone reading a document? I don't think I seen a closeup on a document in any movie made since the 40s. It simply isn't done that way. The way it is done if for the character to be handed the document, open it, and immediately cut to a scene in which two characters are arguing about it. Look at any legal drama made in the las... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a difference between slogans and brand statements? I don't think you should expect to find a term like "brand statement" defined too rigorously. I think you will find different companies using different mechanisms to control their message and calling those mechanisms by different means. I would take the meaning of "brand statement" to be a generic f... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to prevent ebook piracy from stealing your livelihood? It appears to be just the cost of doing business. Pretty much everything I am going to say here comes from https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/ but I will sumarize. First, in the days of paper, authors only got paid for a fraction of the people who read their book. Many readers... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I make a book or series of books that take place in three different centuries make sense and flow appropriately? You need to make a very clear distinction between imaginary history and story. It seems to be quite common for aspiring writers to construct elaborate imaginary histories and then struggle to write them down because they are not actually stories. We can't tell from your question if what you have are... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What is Third Person Dramatic? First and foremost, it an an analytic category. This means it is a category that is used to do literary analysis of existing texts to group different texts according to common features. There are apparently people who find this a diverting exercise. They are not writers. This particular category mea... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What tense do I use when talking about a character that has died? You use the past tense to report past things and the present tense to report present tense. Death turns a number of present facts about a person into past facts. "John is Chair of the Board" becomes "John was Chair of the Board," but only because John is no longer Chair of the Board. It same would b... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Q about verb tenses for technical writing In these cases it is generally preferable to use the imperative mood: > System developers must transport their systems to the facility in Boulder, CO. The declarative mood (in which the question of tense comes into play) deal with statements of fact. But it does not signal that such a fact is creat... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do you handle it when a controversial philosophy is an essential part of your story? A useful way to think about this is to recognize that all stories are experiences, not propositions. A philosophy is a proposition, so it is not the matter of stories. But living with the consequences of a proposition is an experience. You can write a story about living with the consequences of beli... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Writer's Block? Or something else? There is no such condition as writer's block. However there are several reasons you may be unable to write. - You may not have anything of consequence to say. Since the young tend to imagine that everything that pops into their heads is of consequence and needs to be expressed, and discover, as the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What is the origin of the Hero's Journey? That first story is long lost in the mists of time. Indeed, it could reasonably argued that it is the first and universal story. In a very real sense, this is the story written in the human heart, and the art of the storyteller is not creating this story but discovering and serving the need that exis... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How does one gauge the strength of any particular adverb? Think of a sentence like a Venn diagram. Each word you add to the sentence is like a circle added to the Venn diagram. Each circle added to the diagram should reduce the area that is common to all the circles. If the circle you add does not have any area in common with the other circles or does not r... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |