Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: I feel like most of my characters are the same, what can I do? I'd venture to guess that you are caught in the worldbuilding trap. Worldbuilding is a perfectly fine hobby. You can make up characters and people and kingdoms and creatures. You can draw maps. You can imaging histories. This is all a perfectly fine way to keep yourself occupied on long rainy days. B... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Secondary characters in character-study fiction That is what secondary characters are for. If you conceive of a story as the arc of a principal character, then every event and every secondary character exists to define that arc, to push the character along that arc, and to demonstrate the change that occurs in the character (if any) as they traver... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Do I need to start off my book by describing the character's "normal world"? Start with a wind blowing through the normal world As others have stated, you need to start in the normal world because we need to understand who the main character is, how they live, what they love, what they are capable of, etc. in order to understand what is at stake as the story unfolds. At the... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: When writing non-linear, do I have to note time changes? How a time change is indicated in the finished film is up to the director. You just need to indicate to the director that the time has changed, not specify how this is shown. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Correct way of Citing References in a writing a Non-Fiction book? Different publishers will have different preferences about this. An academic press is likely to prefer a more academic style. A popular press will prefer a more popular style. Ultimately, this decision is going to be up to the publisher. If you know who the publisher is, ask them which style they pre... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is there a writing style I can use to show "the result that appeared is contrary to the expectation"? Writing is all about conditioning the reader's expectations. All the big effects in writing come from an appropriate setup. If you want to show a result contrary to the narrator's expectations, you make sure that the reader is aware of the narrator's expectations before the event occurs. This is the ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to ensure that neurotic or annoying characters don't get tiring in the long run A character has to have an arc and be seen to move along that arc. You can't show the reader the same thing they have seen before, you have to show them development -- which may mean development of the character, but more often means development of the situation in which the character finds themselve... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to switch pov characters mid-scene without jarring the reader? This is definitely a high wire act. I had to do it for one scene a novel where I had two lovers who were both misunderstanding the other's motives and actions. The only way to make full sense of what happens in the scene was to be in both heads. Whether I was successful in pulling this off remains to... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to write characters doing illogical things in a believable way? Foreshadowing. Basically, anything you do, any coincidence, and personality quirk, that you introduce in order to move the plot in the direction you want it to go will appear as transparent manipulation to the reader if there is no precedent for it in the story. On the other hand, almost any coincide... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What should come first—characters or plot? Yes, there is an objectively better place to start, and that is with character. This is not to say that it is the only place to start. As long as you put all the bits together in the end, it doesn't matter how you got there. However, you stand to save yourself a lot of bother if you start with charac... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to deal appropriately with an inappropriate sexual relationship Well, I think you need to start by reading Lolita -- not because it will give you a clear answer to your question, because Lolita is hugely controversial to this day -- but because it will give you an example of a great artist treading the same treacherous ground you are proposing to tread. And you w... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Should you only use colons and full stops in dialogues? You should punctuate dialogue exactly the way you would punctuate the same sentence if it were not in dialogue (excepting the typographic rules around the placement of quotation marks). A sentence is a sentence. A sentence fragment is a sentence fragment. Two independent clauses joined together are ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Very simple markup language for writing fiction Just because markup preferences are personal, I will mention the markup system I developed for writing my last non-fiction book. It is called SAM (Semantic Authoring Markdown). It is a general purpose language, like XML, but with lightweight syntax, like Markdown. This means that while it has standar... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Writing a love interest for my hero As it stands now, your question seems to boil down to: how can I write a story that no one will criticize? The answer to that is, don't publish it. If you publish it, with any degree of success, someone will criticize it. The more successful you are, the more people will criticize it and the more vic... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How much should I pay the copyright holder for the right to translate a book and sell copies? I think the issue of translation is largely beside the point here. What you are seeking is the right to publish the book in a new form for a new market, presumably one that the current publisher does not serve. So, for instance, if you wanted to publish this Ukrainian book in Spanish, you would be lo... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Where's the balance between realism and story? Is there a breaking point where people say, "that makes no sense"? Certainly there is, but I don't think it is anything you can quantify. In fact, it is demonstrable that that point is different for different readers, some condemning works for making no sense while others ignore the contradictions qu... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Doubt about the double action of the concept of plot in fiction writing You may be interpreting McKee too narrowly. "Design in time," for instance, does not have to imply a strict sequence. But I would suggest that you look at the word "plot" in much the same way as you would look at it in the real world. A plot in the real world is a conspiracy to make something happen... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Switching languages within dialogue Placing foreign languages phrases in italics is a well established convention that extends outside the bounds of fiction. It is always vastly preferable to stick with established conventions since people are much more apt to recognize them than anything you invent for yourself. Still, I would recomme... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Leaving wiggling room for your characters while avoiding contradictions In the end, the story you are creating will either be convincing or not. But being logically coherent has little to do with making a story convincing. (The fact that there is an entire YouTube subculture dedicated to finding plot holes in blockbuster movies should convince you that a plot hole is not... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Getting an editor after the second draft At this point you need one of two things, either time or someone you trust to tell you the truth. The problem with most beta readers is that they are friends or acquaintances and they don't want to upset you or jeopardize your relationship. I recently did a beta read for a friend and basically told ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do we create our own symbolisms? The short answer is that you can't. Symbolism is really a property of a culture, not an individual work. Symbols are a kind of second order language, and you can no more make up symbols out of whole cloth than you can make up language -- at least, not if you hope to be understood by a broad audience.... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is there a "right" way to interpret a novel? If so, how do we make sure our novel is interpreted correctly? This notion that a novel has a meaning that we can ferret out and interpret has been a staple of English teachers for decades. Essentially it is an attempt to turn a novel (or any other work of art) into a simple proposition. As far as I can tell, they do this because otherwise they can't figure out ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do I start off in web comics? Every writer should understand the Hero's Journey. Not everyone agrees on whether it describes the archetype of all stories or just a particular genre of stories, but either way it provides a lot of the language that is used to talk about story structure. It is hard to talk about storytelling without... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is there a better way to introduce acronyms through a dialogue? In this particular case, don't, because the term NASA is more well known than its expansion. Sometimes acronyms evolve into words, such as scuba and radar. Once they become words, use them as words. As a matter of usage, NASA is no longer an acronym but a word (like FBI or CIA). Use it as such. As a ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How exactly can a writer write a horror story without making it so scary to the point where it's actually hard to read or watch? I think you need to make a distinction between horror, which runs largely on anticipation (like every other genre) and splatter porn (which relies on the perverse titillation that some people feel when regarding scenes of gore, torture, etc.). If you are writing splatter porn, you probably can't go ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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What makes an ending "happy"? In this answer, Amadeus makes the case for happy endings based on their far greater popularity compared to unhappy endings. This leads me to wonder, what exactly makes an ending "happy"? Before I go further, though, let me say that talking about a "satisfactory" ending doesn't address this question... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is there any difference between these two sentences? (Adverbs) Well to start with, "Adverbs are the devil" is not a rule. It is not even correct. Adverbs are a perfectly peaceable law abiding part of speech like any other. That many people use adverbs poorly is a valid observation (thought not a rule). A reasonable rule would be, if you want to write well, lear... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: 'This one' as a pronoun There is a distinct use of "this one" in English which is a matter of usage rather than grammar. It is used by one person to refer to another person (often, though not always, an inferior), who has done something stupid. Thus: > We were driving along in the rain and this one decided to hit the sunro... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Doubt about the concept of "true (or complex) character" A character is not a human being. A character is a construct created entirely by the author for the purpose of telling a story. This works because stories are much neater simpler things than real human life. They exist in part to allow us to escape our humdrum human lives, and in part to help us unde... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do we know if a dialogue sounds unnatural without asking for feedback? Characters seem natural when they pursue their goals in a way that is consistent with their values. (Their actual values, not necessarily the values they give lip service to for the sake of social acceptance.) Characters seem natural when they act this way because that is how human beings act. The p... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to eliminate standoff between "Lengthy" vs "Concision"? Every propositional document (that is, one that is not telling a story) consists of three parts: the conclusion, the argument, and the evidence. The native or intuitive way that most people write such a document is to mix in bits of evidence as they develop the argument and then sprinkle bits of conc... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What is one way to write about feeling someone's sadness? There are multiple ways to approach a character's emotions, each of which may be appropriate in context. First, you can simply name the emotion. This is appropriate when their emotion is incidental to the main focus of the scene. It is also appropriate in cases where the character is giving no outwa... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Should I contact agents/publishers to see if they would be interested in my book before finishing it? If your book is fiction, it must be finished before an agent or editor will consider it. They are not going to invest any time or effort in an unfinished project by an unknown and unproven writer. After all, many novels never do get satisfactorily finished, and they already have a superabundance of f... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What is a more techy Technical Writer job title that isn't cutesy or confusing? The conventional term is "programmer writer" or, sometimes, "programming writer". It is generally used to describe someone whose training and focus is programming rather than technical writing, but who is currently performing a technical communication function specifically aimed at documenting things... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How can I highlight changes in HTML output from Flare, based on branch diff? Even if you could find a way to format dif output in HTML, that in itself would not give you the dif navigation tools that you get from a dif tool (next change, last change, etc.). One way to very quickly get a navigable WYSIWYG dif of two HTML documents (old and new) would be to open them both in Wo... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: For HTML documentation sets, are there meaningful guidelines for topic length? I spent so much time trying wrestling with just this problem that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web. (https://xmlpress.net/publications/eppo/). The answer I came up with after much research and experimentation is that it is... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Third Person POV: What level of telling is acceptable for character motivation? Please understand that "third person limited" and its ilk are categories of analysis applied to works after the fact by those who find it entertaining to categorize everything. They are not rules that you are obliged to follow. You are not obliged to pick one box and stick to it. Also note that the ... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: How can I make an in-universe random event feel like it was really random instead of just RNJesus' will? What Chris said, but with the concomitant point that solutions must be merited. They don't have to be probable. Little in most stories is truly probable. Stories basically run on coincidences. Their logic is moral. Misfortune is often merited by a moral flaw, but is can also exist to create some mo... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Overcoming "Possibility Paralysis"? In any life, there are moments when you can turn one way or another. With fictional characters, largely untrammeled by the cares of real people about where they are going to sleep or what they are going to eat or when they will run out of money, there are more and bigger moments at which they can tur... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Should I be able to 'feel' my outline? No, you should not expect to feel your outline. An outline, by its nature, strips away all the particular details that create an emotional response. Our emotional responses are naturally regulated, tamped down, if you will, to make life bearable. If we reacted equally to every emotional stimulus, par... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Character motivations facing death? At the core of every story, there is a moral choice. That is, a choice between values. Circumstances force the protagonist to the point where that choice must be faced and made and lived with. Such choices can obviously end well or badly, and can involve triumph or sacrifice or defeat for the main ch... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Is my story too similar to an existing published work? A story is like a person. Many people lead similar lives and yet each person we meet is unique. Every fireman we meet is a different fireman. Every nurse is a different nurse. Every teacher is a different teacher. Every cop is a different cop. Even when they fall into stereotypical behaviors -- even... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Will it be disappointing for the reader to not know who the main character is until the end? Yes, it will be disappointing, but that disappointment will not likely occur at the end, but much earlier when the reader begins to get the sense that the character they are following has no arc. Once they realize that, they will stop reading and never reach the end. A story is not a history. A hist... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Is it true that "Any story can be great in the hands of the right storyteller"? By and large, yes. thought it does depend on what you mean by story. Every story is unique. It is a particular set of words that tell a particular tale about particular characters, and it is the total immersive experience of the reading that make it great, not some particular twist of plot or eccentr... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Academic Writing: Paraphrasing few words when quoting If something is a quotation, you put it in quotation marks. If you are replacing part of a quotation with a paraphrase, you put the paraphrase in square brackets. "[Faith] can be active and effective only when man, through the exercise of his Reason, has already acquired knowledge of God, belief in... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Difference between DITA and S1000D Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use them. In other words, both systems, as well as several other similar systems, use similar terms to descr... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Can ‘Stupid’ Characters Make Plot Narratives Memorable? Remember that all stories are moral. They deal with moral conflict, both within the individual and between individuals. Questions of what it is most effective to do to address a given problem as the matter of essays, not fiction. If fiction deals with them at all, it is to address the related moral i... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Topic-based authoring vs. Modular authoring This is a complex question -- complex enough that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web from XML Press (https://xmlpress.net/publications/eppo/). At the heart of the confusion is ambiguity about what the word "topic" means. For ... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Is it considered lazy writing to have a dry prelude at the start of a book? Not too lazy. Your work habits really have nothing to do with it. The question is, can you make it interesting? Providing context is difficult because it is a chicken and egg problem. No one cares about the context until they know what is a stake, and no one can tell what is really at stake until th... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: How does a writer go about consulting experts? Pick up the phone and call them and say, "Hello, my name is X. I am a writer and I am researching a piece on Y for Z. I will credit you, of course." This pushes the I'm-gonna-get-my-name-in-the-paper button. After food and sex, getting your name in the paper is the third most potent human drive. At 1... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |