Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »

Activity for Mark Baker‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Answer A: What can I do if I hate my own protagonist?
You don't build a character around a psychological profile. The primary driver of character is desire. Do you know what this character wants? Do you know why they want that thing enough to overcome their shyness to strive for it? No one comes out of their shell except under the compulsion of desire. ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to deal with multiple climaxes (multiple protagonists)?
A good book should form a thematic and, ultimately, moral whole. Multiple characters may reach their moment of crisis, but there will generally be one central climax that plays the major notes of the theme and multiple supporting climaxes that work in harmony or counterpoint to support the major note...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Is it okay to have my family edit my book?
Your family may be biased, and they may be too kind, but the deeper problem is that they will be interested in your story because you wrote it and they are interested in you. Thus they are in no position to judge whether or not it will be of interest to anybody else. You need the opinion of a reader ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How can I break up a lengthy explanation?
If the explanation is interesting, the reader will not notice that is is long. If it is not interesting, breaking it up will not make it interesting. So forget about whether it is too long and focus on whether or not it is interesting. The reader may be interested in explanation for one of three rea...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to transmit feelings in a technical book writing?
Just don't. Unless you are writing one of those nutty Dummies books, don't put emotion of humor in a technical book. The reason is not that technical subjects aren't funny or that technical people don't have a sense of humor, it is that audience selection is different for technical books than for ot...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Two protagonists where one is dark - a mistake?
Evil is cool. Virtue is dorky. The pure hero really only exists in hagiographies and tracts -- works that hold up somebody's idea of political or moral virtue for admiration. Works of these kind exist to draw lines between good and evil, not to examine the human condition. And consider the basic sh...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How much heed should we pay to writing advice
You should follow the advice that makes you go, "Oh, of course, why didn't I see that before." If you don't have that kind of clarity, then you have not understood the advice properly and will not be able to implement it correctly. Thus if someone tells you to remove all your adjectives, and you go...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: What are effective methods for getting reviews for a non-fiction business book?
There is probably nothing you can do that will get publications like the Economist to review a self published book. Major outlets like this are bombarded with more book review requests than they could ever possibly publish. One of the virtues of going with a traditional publisher is that major publis...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Pros and Cons: A blog to get feedback
Publishing a blog make a lot of sense for a non-fiction work. Almost all of my last non-fiction book appeared on my blog first and this had three big benefits: - I got me lots of feedback on the quality and interest of the ideas. - I got lots of criticism and discovered lots of errors and omission...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: The use of short, concise sentences to suggest a withdrawn character
I think it is unwise to rely on style changes to delineate a character. First, it is far from certain that the reader will notice the difference, or interpret it in the way you intend. Don't rely on subtle effects to get across key points of your story. It is hard to do well and probably will go over...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Plotting My Story~
One way to think of plotting is in terms of desire and accidents. The point of a story is (usually) to bring one or more characters to the point where they must face a defining moral choice. What drives them towards that point is desire. What boxes them into a situation where they have to make that c...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Multiple POV's: Am I in over my head?
Don't spice up the goal, spice up the antagonist. Pinky and the Brain had the same goal every week: to take over the world! It mattered not a whit. It was just an excuse for mousy mayhem. Taking over the world is just a McGuffin, the thing everyone wants that provides the impetus for the plot. It do...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Avoiding "kill it off for DRAMA" trope whilst doing it
The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution. But I think you need to stop thinking in terms of tropes, or at least stop reading TV Tropes. TV does not get by on storytelling. Most TV storyli...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to make "Joffrey like" characters for a "kick that son of a bitch " moment
Betrayal elicits stronger negative emotions than mere villany. The traitor, the false friend, we hate more than we hate an honest enemy. The betrayer adds the wounding our our pride to their other sins. We want to hurt them particularly, and personally, for having made fools of us. That and harming ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to move from writing scenes to a short plot?
The mainspring of story is desire. What drives your hero on from one scene to the next? What shapes their actions in a consistent way? It is their desire, they thing they are driven to attain. The desire can be anything that reasonably drives someone to action: love, lust, greed, revenge, the desire ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: I wrote a novel, now what?
I can't speak to the Italian market specifically, but generally speaking the fiction market is totally saturated with manuscripts, most of them completely hopeless. This saturation means that it is very hard to get over the first hurdle of getting a publisher or agent to even pick up and read your ma...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to write from a cat's perspective?
Remember that all stories are told from a human perspective. Cats don't have grammar and they don't have stories. A cat's eye story, therefore, is an act of projection of the human into the cat. It is a human experience of a uniquely human ability: the ability to project themselves imaginatively into...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Tips for making writing move fluidly
The paragraph is the most indistinctly defined unit in all of writing theory. In the 19th century it was common for paragraph to run on of a page or two. Today, they often run only a few lines. For instance, the paragraph break I just made does not really indicate a shift of thought or action or the...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Does a work need to be sexually stimulating to be classified as erotica/erotic literature?
From a marketing point of view, books are classified according to the type of pleasure they give. Stories can give different kinds of pleasures. Some readers are more open to a variety of pleasures, and some want a steady diet of a particular kind of pleasure. Genre sections of bookstores exist mostl...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How do I stay confident?
Only everyone ever, to the point where it is a classic cliche of the writer: the writer sitting in front of a typewriter beside a large wastepaper basket overflowing with bits of crumpled paper, and tossing yet another ball of paper over their shoulder. (By the way, after earning my living as a write...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: When using mythology in your writing, can you change certain small aspects of some myths to fit into your story?
You can turn Zeus into a flower pot if you want to. It's your book. The myths are public domain and the vast majority of the population has no idea of the details of any of the myths.
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to make good anti-heroes?
I don't think I would count Han Solo as an antihero. He may take a little longer to cross the threshold, he may resist the call to adventure a little longer, but in the end he becomes a traditional hero, even to the point of getting a medal in that absurd final scene. To me, at least, the anti-hero ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Weaving VERY IMPORTANT OPINIONS into a story without murdering it
Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for leading people to form the same opinion themselves by leading them through the experiences that would le...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: From a writing standpoint, what is the value of Deus Ex Machina?
It really comes down to merit. The heart of every story is moral, it is about the character making a choice about values, and the reader has a basic desire to see virtue rewarded and vice punished. If your Deus Ex Machina prevents your hero from having to make the great sacrifice that proves their mo...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to introduce a nameless, mysterious character in limited third person?
I don't think you have a point of view problem, I think you have a storytelling problem. You are trying to introduce a character without introducing them, identify them without identifying them. You are doing this because you are planning a surprise for the reader. Fine, you can certainly surprise t...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Literary agent terms
I doubt many of these terms have very precise definitions, and I am probably not the best authority on their meaning, but here is what I would take these terms to mean: Serious fiction: Not genre (bearing in mind that genre is defined no only by subject matter but by treatment and intent -- Cormac M...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Using Present Tense to describe a Fact on a story that uses Past Tense
Stories do not have tenses. Individual verbs have tenses. Even an individual sentence can contain verbs in different tenses. > Tom is saying that Jane promised that she will marry him in September. Stories may be told in the narrative present, meaning that the narration is framed as if it were taki...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Story content and audience
Well if your style is immature, only two things will fix that, reading with attention, and writing. Do not neglect the reading with attention part. Francine Prose has a good book called Reading Like a Writer. It will help you learn to read with attention, to understand how the writers you read are ac...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: If the first book didn't sell well due to going the self-publishing route, is writing the sequel worth it from a business perspective toward agents?
Well, more to the point, no agent is going to want to read a sequel to a book they don't represent because no publisher is going to want to publish a sequel to a book that they did not publish. The value to agents and publishers is seldom in the first book, it is in the body of work. If they want the...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Reasons for confusion over tenses in a story
The tense is not wrong. Guessing as to why you are being told it is wrong: English grammar is a system of explanation, not a set of rules, and it is incredibly complicated, and even as complicated as it is, still does not adequately describe all forms of common English usage. In this system of expla...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Should I be concerned with my fiction writing containing accidental prophecies of real world events?
Stories "ripped from the headlines" are always good sellers -- the interest in their subject matter is being actively aroused by current events. Writing a novel is a long business, so to be able to bring out a "ripped from the headlines" novel at the opportune moment is often a matter of serendipity ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How do I write a good haiku poem?
I think you have to start by making a fundamental distinction between good and conformant. Obeying a set of rules makes something conformant but it does not make make it good. A Lada is conformant to the characteristics of a sedan, but it is not a good car. This is not to say that there is no relati...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to stop projecting yourself into your writing?
There is always a temptation to be didactic. At least, that is always a temptation for me. Having got your character into some sticky situation, there is a temptation to treat them as you would a child, to advise them on the sensible course of action that will get them out of the sticky situation wit...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Why are 'Episodic' books so uncommon
The reasons may be economic. I'm speculating here, but the golden age of the short story was the golden age of the magazine. If a magazine wanted to publish fiction (and most of them did back before TV took over) it necessarily had to fit within the available space. That meant either short stories or...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: a compiler or an editor?
You are the author of the work. Authorship means you wrangled the words. It does not mean you originated the ideas. If you composed the words, selected the quotes, and put it all in order, you are the author of the work. Since you are not advancing an argument of your own, the work is one of reportin...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How much work do you have to do after getting your novel published?
If you mean how much work you will have to do between when a contract is offered and when the book is published, the answer is that it will vary depending on how good the MS is and how well it fits the publisher's needs. But it will probably be quite a lot and it will probably be the hardest work you...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Wrote myself into a paradox and now demotivated - how to resolve?
It is hard to say without reading (and we don't do that here) but the times I have fallen into this paradox, and the many times I have seen others fall into it, I believe the real problem is that the story lacks a main spring. The main spring, the thing that drive a story, can, I think, be reasonably...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How do I promote a self-published book?
The fact that you have never seen an ad for a book should tell you something. Advertising doesn't sell books. If advertizing sold books, you would see lots of advertisements for books, because publishers would do what works. (As the comments indicate, publishers do certain amounts of targeted adverti...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Do popular books use simpler language?
Apparently not, according to this study (https://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-reading-level-analysis-will-change-the-way-you-write/) which found popular authors spred all acorss the reading ease scale from Ernest Hemmingway at a grade 5 level to Michael Cricton at a grade 9 lev...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Am I being too descriptive?
If people are telling you that your writing is very descriptive, I would take them at their word. I have been in many critique groups with many very nice people and they do not say that about every piece they read. A good story is a composite of many elements. There is no one recipe for a story any ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: When writing a novel where do you start?
At the heart of every novel (or almost every novel, at least) is someone who wants something and some form of opposition, internal or external, that stands in the way of their getting it. The novel is their quest to attain what they desire and how they either overcome or are overcome by the things th...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: What makes a piece "lyrical"?
The word lyrical does not mean "like a song lyric". If anything the derivation probably goes the other way. Lyrical means expressing the writer's emotions in a beautiful or imaginative way. Thus you can have poetry that is lyrical and poetry that is not lyrical. You can have prose that is lyrical but...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Point of view, narrative voice, and when to name a character in narration
Just because a scene is written from a character's point of view does not mean it is written based only on information available to the character. The first responsibility of the narrative it to make events clear to the reader, so it should generally be written in terms of what is known to the reader...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Not enough real world experience to write convincing situations?
There is no substitute for experience, but when a story feels forced or inaccurate the root of the problem is almost always motivation. Authors can and do divert wildly from how actual places look and how actual institutions work all the time. Real forensic labs are not staffed by the gorgeous peopl...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Is consonance good or bad in fiction?
One of the worst things that happens in advice given to writers is that individual criticisms get inflated, either by the speaker or the hearer, into iron-clad universal rules. Thus, a perfectly reasonable "show this, rather than telling it" becomes a universal "show don't tell"; "remove this adverb"...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Citing an author's primary sources
There are multiple citation standards. If your teacher or your school has a particular citation style they prefer or require you should consult the guides for that style. In not, one approach you can use to make your sources clear is to use the formula, "as cited by". That is: "Instructions to Christ...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Explain character dynamics without giving away too much backstory?
Character dynamics come through story. There really isn't another way. You can simply tell the story in brief form to establish the dynamic, or you can dramatize it in full, but in the end, character dynamics come through story. There really isn't another way. Now, you can certainly observe behavior...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How to write and promote my film blog more effectively?
Blog audiences (and for that matter audiences for most content) are primarily built word of mouth (or perhaps today I should say tweet of thumb). Yes, you have to seed the process by making the existence of your blog known to as many people as you can, but after that, it is all about the retweets and...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: How can we find a mentor for publishing our book?
There are certainly people who will perform a substantive edit on a manuscript and give you an evaluation of it. They generally advertise themselves as editors or literary consultants. However, finishing a non-fiction book before you look for a publisher is generally not the right approach. Publishe...
(more)
over 7 years ago
Answer A: Are lit consultancies just out for money or can I trust them?
There is an obvious moral hazard in the literary consultancy business, but it is hardly alone in that. There is a moral hazard in the financial planning business, for instance (advisors profit from the trades you make through them, and may be incented to sell certain products). But that does not mea...
(more)
over 7 years ago