Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Why are clichés discouraged in fiction writing? You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is not a cliche. Writers stick to familiar ground because that is where they find the stories that people w... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Questioning Plagiarism Rules Algorithms cannot detect plagiarism. They can detect a similarity between two text which might or might not be a sign of plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing someone else's work off as your own. You can write a text that is similar to another text (actually this happens all the time) and not be plagiari... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: To make my art or to work for the readers? (For a profits-intended work) I think this is a false dichotomy. Art is a form of communication. It fails if it does not communicate. We hear a lot of talk about "expressing yourself" but that is hollow unless you are expressing yourself to someone. We are social animals. We strive to make ourselves understood to others. Good art... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Do people keep reading because of what's ahead or what's behind? Consider the mania around spoilers. Why do we demand that people discussing books and TV shows online warn us if their posts are going to contain any information about how the story ends. Here's the thing about spoilers: if the point of reading a book was to find out what happened, spoilers would be... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to tactfully inform readers of differences in the book world to the real world? The simple answer is that you don't. You don't tell the reader anything that is not needed to support the plot of theme of the story. There are a lot of people who enjoy world building as a hobby and when they have built a world they want to write a novel set in it as a way of taking people on a gui... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What makes a good death scene? As is the case with any scene intended to evoke strong emotion from the reader, 90% of the effect is achieved via the setup. If the reader is going to scream "please don't", it will not be because of how the death scene itself is written. It will be because of how they have come to feel about the cha... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Plot and characters conflict too much Plot is the servant of character. One of the most common mistakes of beginning writers seems to be to start by inventing a plot -- essentially an imaginary history -- and then peopling it with characters to make it go. But stories are about characters. More specifically, they are about character arc.... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to slow down the pace of the story? You never want to slow down the pace of a story. Pace is everything. But pace is not about rushing to the exits. A pace is a comfortable speed at which to see all the scenery and experience everything that the journey has to offer. If the pace feels too rushed, this is not about the speed per se, it ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is the strategy described here an effective one, to distinguish character voice? Be careful not to fall into writer as actor syndrome, imagining the movie of your book and how the actors might act the parts. You are writing a novel, not a prose description of a movie. While you can certainly create a visceral experience of sight and sound (and smell, and tastes, and touch) in a ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: In fiction writing, how can one make the passage of time seem shorter? Stories are asynchronous. There is no particular connection between story time and calendar time. The length of a story is determined by the complexity of its action and the depth of its detail, not by the elapsed time between its inciting incident and its denouement. You will sometimes have to make... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What would you call non human "people"? We tend to have more and simpler words for things we talk about regularly than for things we talk about seldom, so there probably isn't an exact equivalent to "human" for ants, at least, not one the average reader would recognize. So I think you have to ask what effect you are trying to produce for ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can I write a realistic motorcycle crash? The human perceptual system runs on anticipation. We understand things that play out in predictable and foreseen ways. We are disoriented by things that happen suddenly, violently, and out of the blue. We come away from those incidents with a jumble of poorly integrated memories of light and noise bu... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can I make a setting which shows something? Stories create experiences. Stories that are heavy on setting create an experience of that setting. People sometimes simply receive an experience for what it is. We are experience junkies. Stories are one of the ways that we satisfy our need for experiences. They help keep us sane. People often draw... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a name for layers of subtext? Your subtext2 is what is generally called foreshadowing. That is, it hints at something important that is yet to be revealed: the clouds on the horizon that hint at rain. It is not really a form of subtext. Subtext is a very loose term (and, frankly, I think we would be better off without it) but it ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I write sexual tension between two characters? Tension (of any sort) lies in what doesn't happen. To create tension you create the expectation that something is about to happen, but then don't let it happen. This keeps the reader waiting for it to happen, and that is tension: waiting for something to happen that you expect, hope for, or dread. T... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make a statement formulated like an exclamation, but even-toned? On the old typewriters, there was no `!` key. To create an exclamation mark you had to type a single quote, backspace, and type a period. That was a good system. Exclamation marks should be hard to type. There is a good argument to be made for breaking them off your keyboard altogether. There is a l... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to know the reason for rejection? Publications don't explain why they reject things because: a. It takes time. b. If they do, people will argue with them and call them names. c. If they do, people will try to fix the piece and send it back, creating even more work for them. But there are really just three reasons why a publicatio... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is a neutral/impartial story "boring"? For the sort of poor soul who can only enjoy themselves if they are rooting for one side in a fight, then I suppose that a story that does not take sides will be boring. But that is not and never has been the function and appeal of art. Art is about seeing the world as it is, but more acutely, with ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to avoid repetitive sentences? (Describing actions, he/she) First and foremost, I would suggest that you resist the urge to describe everything that happens in a scene. In a movie, all the actions of a scene like that are acted out and are visible on screen, though it might take several viewings before you actually saw everything that every actor was doing. B... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Do modern readers believe the first person narrator can't die? I suspect that most reader expect the narrator is not going to die. But you should not look on the device of the involved narrator as requiring the maintenance of strict logic about when the story was written down. Using an involved narrator is a literary device. It is not intended to imply that the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to avoid being too wordy It is the lure of the fine phrase. We all want to create fine phrases, phrases that are a thing of beauty in their own right. But the lure of the fine phrase can often lead us into the verbose and the excessively ornate. There is nothing wrong with fine phrases. We should pull off a fine phrase when... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to avoid constantly starting paragraphs with "The character did this" "The character did that"? This seems to be an increasingly common problem and my belief is that it results from the writer consciously or unconsciously seeing the movie in his head and trying to transfer it to the page. Thus they give what are essentially stage directions at every verse end. To break this habit, you have to ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How does one write fluff? I think the heart of your difficulty is that you are equating light hearted with not serious ("fluff"). Your intuition that it is easier to write dark than light is correct, at least in the sense that going dark is an easy way to seem serious while covering up the fact that you don't actually have an... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it dull to have a world where all characters cannot speak properly? The great privilege of the novelist is that you can choose what sources of interest you create in your novel. Novels today tend to be dialogue heavy, partly in response to "Show don't Tell" and partly because the writer and the reader probably watch more TV than they read novels. But that does not me... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Does misspelling words for the sake of bad English improve the immersion or distract the reader? Dialect writing can be extremely difficult to read. The preferred technique today seem to be to do just a very small hint of it. The best way to portray the background and intelligence of a person is through the words they choose and the ideas they express. People from different areas use different ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it wrong to use the same word multiple times within a few sentences? You can use the right word repeatedly in the course of several sentences as long as it is the right word in each case. There was a writing school fashion a while back for using as much vocabulary as possible, but this is generally regarded as bad technique today. (In some ways it gets confused with a... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: To what extent do I have to explain certain reasons or choices to my audience? In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner tells each part of the novel in the voice of a different character. In No Country for Old Men Cormac McCarthy switches back and forth between first and third person narration. In Bleak House, Dickens switches back and forth between a rather haughty and detached nar... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Will a publisher create a custom font? I question whether a publisher is going to produce a book using a custom font. The complications of making sure such a book was formatted correctly on all possible digital devices don't seem worth the risk and expense. If they are willing to include them at all, I expect they will do so using a graph... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Effective hero journeys that don't kill the villain? You don't always need someone to die. Remember that the Hero's Journey is a universal archetype. It does not just apply to quest stories where the hero literally goes on a journey. It is (it is proposed as) the archetype of all stories. Thus it is proposed as the archetype of Pride and Prejudice just... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What's gained from NaNoWriMo? People are motivated by competition. We can do more, often much more, when we have others to compare ourselves against. In the Tour de France, riders ride in teams. Each lead rider has a team of ten or so teammates to set the pace for them. In any competition, athletes do better when competing agains... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How many pages should cover the Ordinary World of the Protagonist? This is the third question today that I am going to answer with essentially the same point, but stories are fundamentally about a choice of values. To establish the grounds for a story, you must first establish the values that will be at stake. In a loss of home and family story (like LOTR) you have... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should my opening include a religious initiation ritual? A drama is fundamentally about values and about a choice between values that reveals who the protagonist is in their heart of hearts. The first question that a story has to answer, therefore, is one of values. Who is the protagonist, what does he have now that he cherishes, and what does he desire th... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I start writing a good plot line? What you have done so far is to create a history. A history is fine, but it is not a story. A story is a drama and dramas have a specific shape. You can think of a drama as being built around a choice, specifically a choice between competing values. A conventional hero is on a journey of discovery. W... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How is an antithesis used in creative or formal writing? The first principle of highlighting anything in any work of art is contrast. If you want a white dot to stand out, you put it on a black wall. If you want a high note to stand out, contrast it with a low one. If you want a character to appear more saintly, compare their conduct to that of a sinner. ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Can't write, can plan At the heart of all art is vision. The artist is an artist because the see something and find a way to express what they have seen so that others can share in the experience. No work of art can succeed without vision. If you have not seen, you cannot show. It may or may not be necessary or helpful f... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to be mindful of the reader when handling disturbing/distressing subjects? You should always be mindful of why a reader is reading your book. People are reading for a reason. In the case of fiction, they are reading for pleasure. People may take pleasure in reading about serious and difficult subjects. One of the functions of fiction is to provide vicarious experiences that... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Are more or less details better for details that do not play a role in the story but describe where part of the story takes place? The reader needs to be able to see the scene in their mind's eye. This does not mean that every reader needs to see it the same way. In fact, it is a virtual certainty that each reader will see it slightly differently, or even radically differently. We build our pictures of scenes from the stock of i... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: When my story has a powerful phrase but that loses its power when I read it again in the next day, should I keep it or remove it? Delete it ruthlessly. As writers, we are often addicted to the clever phrase (or the phrase that seems clever at the time). But we succeed or fail not as crafters of phrases but at tellers of stories. The storyteller in you has to keep the writer in you on a short leash or your story is going to get ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Could I get a publisher outside of my home country to publish my work? Yes you can. In fact, people do so all the time. I am Canadian. I have published one book with a European publisher, one with an American publisher, and have another coming out from an American publisher later this year. I have also contributed to two other books from American publishers and had a nu... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a YouTube for writers? Basically a way to share manuscripts on social media What distinguishes YouTube is not the number of contributors, though that is huge, and essential to its success, but the number of viewers, which is extraordinarily large. What makes a content platform is always its appeal to consumers. For any content platform, the primary appeal to producers is tha... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Why are words like In stressed sometimes and not others? While words with multiple syllables do have an internal stress patterns, stress is more a matter of the role a word plays in a sentence. Often a writer who is sensitive to this will recast a sentence just to make the stress fall on one word rather than another, or two have stress fall on two related ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: "Group think" and least common denominator in writing groups? This is absolutely a problem with critique groups. On of the fundamental facts for 90% of critique groups is that your critique partners are not your natural readership. Most of the critiques I give start with "This is not the kind of thing I read, but..." We would all like to think that if a piece ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it possible to read your own words too much? (and begin to hate them as a result) I think this is what separates the pros from the amateurs and the unpublished from the published. Writing is hard. Getting it right can take a huge amount of work and many writers report being royally sick of a book by the time they have finished it, or even by the time they have finished the first d... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Usefulness of writing conferences and realistic expectations of obtaining an agent Going to writing conferences will increase you chances that a literary agent will read your manuscript, compared to the chances if you simply submit over the transom. It will not make it a more publishable manuscript. Why do agents go to conferences (a significant cost in time, if nothing else)? Bec... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Flash-forward as Prologue and then Flashbacks too complicated? This is a very common technique among aspiring writers. It feels like playing tricks with the narrative line solves all kinds of writing and story problems for you. But this is largely an illusion. You rarely find these kinds of tricks in successful published works. Sometimes, certainly, but not ofte... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Rewriting a scifi story to fit with actual science, should I do it as I go? Fix it now vs fix it later is a perennial question in writing. Often the answers given are absolutist one way or the other, or come down to "whatever works for you". But I would suggest a different approach, one which divides changes into structural and cosmetic. If you were building a house and you... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What are the risks and benefits of using humour in business/commercial writing? There are two reasons for a reader to read something, because they are interested in the subject matter and because they like how it is written. The risk of using humor in business or technical writing is that it can turn people off even if they are interested in the subject matter. The opportunity... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Classic fantasy races lazy or boring? I think it is important to remember where these creatures came from. They are all religious in origin, and as such represent fundamental religious themes that have a corresponding resonance in the human heart (whether we actually believe the religious ideas or not, those ideas still resonate because ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Do some people lack the ability to generate ideas or content for writing? The term writing is kind of like the word walking, except that writing gets used as a collective term in a way that walking does not. Lots of people walk as a major part of their jobs: letter carriers, police, floor salespeople, soldiers, etc. We don't refer to them collectively as "walkers". We rese... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: When does use of offensive language in a book go from a character trait or to convey emotion to bad use of English skills The purpose of fiction is to give pleasure to the reader. The use of profanity, like anything else, works when it gives pleasure to the reader. Of course, certain profanities will displease certain readers, so you will certainly lose some potential readers if you use profanity. The question is, are ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |