Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Is blending genres well received by readers? You can very clearly blend elements of genres. Lots of people have done it. The real question is, will it produce a work with crossover appeal? That is, will it appeal to fans of both genres? A good example to look at here is Joss Whedon's Firefly. It is a very clear blending of elements from wester... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Why would my "Hero" start his Quest to save the world? I'm afraid that you have gone about this a bit backwards. The basic structure of a story can be described in many ways, but one of the best and most well-founded is that of the hero's journey, as described by Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer's Journey. The story begins in the hero's normal w... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Variations of the same story? There is an old piece of advice in writing circles that says "slay your darlings". When a story has been worked and reworked many times, you will have created a number of great scenes, great characters, great plot lines, great emotional arcs, great endings. (At least they will seem great to you, they... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How does External Conflict set up the Climax? There are many ways of describing story structure, most of which are essentially pointing to the same thing. One of the simpler ones is that proposed by James Scott Bell which is a small elaboration on the basic three act structure. I think it may be a useful way to look at this question. In Bell's ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are character flaws and what makes a good one? The word "character" is used in two different senses. There is "character" in the sense of "characteristics" -- the way that a person does things that is different from how others do things. If someone whistles while they work, that is a characteristic. The second meaning is moral character. A moral... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Physical description of characters A character does not have to be described at all to feel real. In many stories we are told little of their appearance beyond whether they are male or female, and occasionally not even that. Where physical appearance is described it can really go no further than to place the character in a general cl... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to turn the world "alive"? Worlds and their histories are abstractions. People don't live in worlds and they don't live in history. They live in a particular neighborhood at a particular time. Their horizons are small. Only their local bubble is known by direct experience. The wider world is known largely through stories, whic... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can there be multiple translated versions in the same language of a public domain book? Can you think of other cases where there are multiple translation of the same book into the same language? If you search Amazon for classics in one language, do you find multiple translations into other languages? (Try the Divine Comedy or Beowulf or the Iliad -- or the Bible.) What do you find? (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to make the reader feel like the protagonist is not a single character, but the group/squad? Short answer: you can't. Stories are about emotions and they are about choices. Groups don't have emotions and they don't make choices. Only individuals do. Stories about groups of friends are, of course, very common. But in such stories, each person in the group has their individual story arc. Thos... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I ensure what I am writing captures what I'm feeling as I write it? The job of the writer is not to convey emotion (or only in a secondary sense that I will come back to in a minute). The writer's job is to create emotion. A story is fundamentally an experience. You don't push emotions onto the reader during the experience, rather you design the experience to create... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What is the Purpose of an Inner Conflict? Inner conflict is the whole enchilada. All good stories lead up to a moment of crisis in which the protagonist must make a choice. That choice must be personally difficult. It must come at personal cost. Deciding to buy the Chevy rather than the Ford is a choice, but not one that comes at a personal ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What I kind of project can I do for a writer's group to show that I have mastered character development? > I have begun writing a story about two city-states in the year 2307 in an arms race to create a time machine. The essence of your difficulty is right there in your opening sentence. Stories are not about city states. Stories are always always always about a man/woman/boy/girl/small furry animal wh... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What is the difference between Literature and entertainment literature Books are classified for various reasons. The word literature is used in more than one classifications scheme. For the purpose of selling books, "literary fiction" is a genre like any other. Genre is sometimes thought of in terms of subject matter, but it would really make more sense to think of it ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Grammar for describing novel plots? Story structure is essentially a sequence of incidents. It is important and contrary to what is said in some of the comments, literature has it just as much as light entertainment. But while all conventional stories have story structure, those incidents must happen to someone in some place and some ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I break away from imitating published works? There is a fundamental difference between the desire to imitate and the desire to create. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the desire to imitate. Indeed, it is the foundation of our social order. Imitation is how we learn to get along with each other. It is why originals tend to be outcasts. We... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Act 3 totally broken...keep writing? Stop writing and put it in a drawer. Go write something else for a while. There is no point in continuing when you know, as you clearly do, that this story is off the rails. It is not going to yield either usable prose or usable insight. At the same time it is clear that you have not yet had the po... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is stating the feeling in the action that describes it a sign of bad writing? In real life, we experience emotions ourselves and we observe them in others. Thus some emotions are observed but not felt and that is fine. As far as felt emotions are concerned, we feel emotions in response to events. We do not feel an emotion because we are told to feel it. Felt emotion, therefor... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to keep it interesting before the inciting incident? Inciting incident is a term for one of the bones of a story, the thing that give it shape. But while a story needs shape, shape alone is not enough. The basic story shapes are well enough known and not particularly complicated. Anyone who does a little elementary research should be able to write a st... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is it possible for an aggressive character to become sensitive? You are writing a story, not a psychology textbook. Stories appeal to our hopes and to our sense that the world is (or our wish that it should be) a fundamentally orderly place, by which I mean a place with a fundamental moral order. Virtue is rewarded. Vice is punished. Love conquers all. Whether y... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is it bad idea to directly state the message/moral of a story? Fundamentally, a story is a an experience. Strictly speaking, an experience does not have a meaning. Different people may reach different conclusions based on the experience they have had, just as they may with real life experiences. The novelist should be content to create an experience that is true... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Nintendo Based Copyright IANAL, but this is one of those questions where you can start out by asking, are other people doing this. If not, there is a good chance that the answer is that you can't do it either. This is essentially what is called a tie-in. Your book would be tied into the world of the games. People who play t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to write hidden details There is no background in prose. The reader receives every word and they receive them one at a time. Thus there is no place to hide anything. Where you can be more subtle is in the connections between things. If you mention a rose, it is a foreground rose for the moment the reader is reading a word,... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is it a bad idea to write and edit chapter by chapter? A story is an experience, but it is an experience in which all the threads of that experience point at something, like the pattern the iron filings assume around the head of a magnet. If you have a very strong sense of how the magnetic fields of your story align, then I think you are in a position t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to casually reveal the relationship of two recently introduced characters? The answer to this is crushing simple. You tell us that they are brother and sister. > "Pass the butter," Pamela said. > > "Get it yourself," her brother replied. Don't try to slip information into dialog that naturally and properly belongs in narration. It will always sound forced and unnatural a... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can I make the final realisation less depressing? A good story creates an experience. The reader draws their own conclusions and has their own emotional reactions to the experience it provided. Some will therefore find your ending more of a downer than others. What we want from stories is not necessarily uplift. It can be understanding. It can be a... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to work in a piece of information that no MC knows, when writing in 3PLtd? I really wish we could get rid of the current terminology for describing point of view. First person and third person are not points of view. They are simply grammatical persons. Point of view is the angle or viewpoint from which a scene is described. It would be much more helpful if we used terms l... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Using reference books for free handbook There is no copyright on ideas. You can retell the ideas from other books freely, as long as you are actually creating new words to describe those ideas from scratch. If you are taking chunks of text from other books and editing them for clarity, on the other hand, you would need permission, and you... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to interpret editor feedback? I was in just this position as few years ago. Extensive comments from an editor at a top house, mostly critical. I did a rewrite and got a "better, but not quite" back. No invitation to try again, so that was that. I was having more success on the non-fiction front so I put the fiction in a drawer an... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What exactly is a copywriter? "Copy" is one of the elements of an ad, along with the visuals, the headline, etc. The copywriter is the person who writes the copy. The word has largely given way to the equally generic "content" these days. But the implication of copywriter is that the writer is not necessarily the prime creative ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What makes a personified force of nature? In this context, I would take it to mean someone who cannot be reasoned with. When dealing with a mountain or a rainstorm, you can't reason with them or reach a deal or a compromise with them. When you are dealing with a normal human being, on the other hand, you can reason with them or make a deal w... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Point of view question Here is the thing about point of view. People always position themselves to get the best view of something they are interested in. If they can stay in one place and see everything they want to see, they stay where they are. If they have to move to see everything they want to see, they move. This is t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Presenting documentation for a large software product That approach is fine for a landing page. But what you have to bear in mind is that people don't use landing pages. This is true across all categories of information. There has been a steady decline in reader's use of landing page across all categories of information. Gerry McGovern charts the declin... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Length of Children's Books Because bedtime stories are about getting children to fall asleep and no parent wants to be reading until 3am. Publishers impose word restrictions for two basic reasons. 1. A new author represents are risk. Bigger books cost more to produce, so the risk is higher. Restricting word count reduces the... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How much development does a subplot need? A subplot is a plot. As such, it has the same shape, the same components, the same effect as a regular plot. The reason you have a subplot is to provide thematic counterpoint of elaboration to the main plot. You need to to be sufficiently worked out to provide the desired elaboration or counterpoint... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: A subplot becoming another novel Subplots are generally thematically related to the main plot. They provide thematic elaboration or counterpoint to the theme of the main plot. If your subplots are doing that for you main plot, then they are enriching the reader's experience and they should stay. If they are just more business, then ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Flashback or Framing, does either work "I want to hook the reader by displaying the danger and darkness of my world" This is a very common idea about how to engage the reader, but it has a fundamental flaw: Darkness and danger are not interesting unless they happen to someone we care about. Look at most successful novels and you will se... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Writing a book that appeals to both genders It has become fashionable in recent years to base the appeal of a novel on personal identification with the protagonist. That is, enjoyment of the novel is supposed to consist in a personal aspiration to be the protagonist or in a close personal identification with the protagonist (recognizing onesel... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Get an agent for prescriptive non-fiction before or after completing a manuscript? The normal process for a non-fiction book is to sell it first, then write it. The reason is that non-fiction books sell based largely on the author's qualifications, the soundness of the idea, and the size of the author's platform (their existing audience). It also allows the publisher to shape the b... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to write from the male point of view? There is one key fear that all young men share, and most older men, if we are honest: The fear of appearing weak. Men have an instinctive need to project strength, and will find any way they can to do it, even when it is against their best interests. They will do it through their behavior, they will ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Stories with Philosophical Conversations? I would suggest that there is a very simple rule of thumb here: if it is revelatory of character, it is a story. If it is revelatory of ideas, it is a philosophical essay in disguise. We debate philosophy. It is part of what makes humans human, and it is therefore a fit matter for story. But the iss... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Powers with unknown limits vs ones full of rules, limits and reasons? In addition to Lauren's excellent points, I would refer you to this question: "The flux capacitor--it's what makes time travel possible." When to keep world-building explanations short. Whether you explain magic or not, set limits on it or not, depends on if it matters or not. In some stories it matt... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Help! I have no 'cheese-meter'! I think cheese, as you call it, is simply one aspect of work that is not morally serious. What do I mean by morally serious? In the literary sense, I mean that a work that is morally serious is one in which the author works to ensure that they are presenting an accurate portrait of human life as it a... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Writing psychopathic characters (I) There is a kind of brainstorming process that some writers seem to go through when trying to come up with something to write about. It goes something like this. Can I take two apparently incompatible features, assign them to the same character, and see what happens. And after trying to make this wor... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I avoid rambling in first person narratives? The simple answer to this is that this stuff works when it is revelatory, when it shows the reader something they care about, when it draws them in. That is not about quantity, it is about aptness. Is the hatred of a green sweater or the need to fix the lock on the front door revelatory? Not in thems... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Multiple tasks and a step by step tutorial Reality is often more complex than our document structures can easily capture. Most of the solutions to this issue simply make the text structures more complex without making the meaning any more clear. Practical clarity should rule over scrupulous correctness. There is no real risk of confusion of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Caption title for screenshots I would tend to match the case of the interface, but here is a way to think it through: Labels on interface elements are often brief instructions rather than actual names. The capitalization of those instructions will frequently be unconventional because the people who wrote and implemented them wer... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What Kind of Story can Achieve Cult Status? I think your revised question reveals a confusion of two different things. There are works with strong and enduring followings, and there are works that inspire roleplaying. There may be some intersection between these two categories, but they are by no means the same thing. The roleplaying phenomen... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is it more effective to lead with a physical conflict rather than an emotional one? The heart of a story is neither physical conflict nor emotional conflict, it is moral conflict. That is to say, it is about the character being made to face a choice about values. Does pride and prejudice win out over love? Does Spiderman save MJ or the busload of children? Emotional conflict result... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Classical Style vs. Modern Innovation Centuries don't have styles; writers have styles. True, there are certain broad features of the way things are written which change over time, but they are very much secondary to the styles of individual authors. And diction and vocabulary are only a small part of what constitutes an author's style. ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I keep the gender of my main character purposely ambiguous? One of the things that seems like a good idea to many beginning writers is trying to deceive the reader in some way or another. There is one problem with this idea: readers don't like it. And why should they? The reader's enjoyment of a story depends on their ability to enter into the world of the s... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |