Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Is it needed to add breaks in a depressive story? I think you should make a very clear distinction between tragedy and futility. Classically literature has recognized both tragedy and comedy as essentially heroic forms. In a tragedy, the hero strives for a goal only to be overcome by opposing forces, or by their own fatal flaw, but still they strive... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Are 'how-to write fiction' books full of it? Writing is definitely a craft, and as a craft it definitely has technique, and technique can be described and taught. Writing is also all surface. There is nothing hidden underneath. All the techniques that an author uses are there on display, and so you can figure them out for yourself by reading w... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Does spending time on Self-Publishing take away from improving my writing skills? Publishers are in the book marketing business. Their job is to figure out which books will sell and how to sell them. There are three reasons why a publisher may reject a book: - It is not good enough to sell - There is not a big enough market to sell it to - They don't have the knowledge/channel t... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to use narcissism productively in writing? I really doubt that you can. Literature rests fundamentally on the sympathetic observation of human life. Whether you are writing literature or pulp, your success depends on creating convincing characters and without the power of sympathetic observation, I don't see how you achieve that. Writing is ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How can I keep my dialogue nuanced and informal without breaking the illusion that the story is a translation (from a fictional language)? In addition to what Chris Sunami said, I would point out that a scene is a lens, not a window. A great scene works by focusing your attention on just one thing. You can have many different things going on in a story, but in each scene you want the focus to be on just one thing. All you have is words,... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How To Develop A Character For A Character-Driven Story? I've never been entirely sure what the distinction between plot driven and character driven is supposed to mean. Story is the intersection of character and event. Character without events is psychology. Events without character is history. None of the definitions of the concept I have read are reall... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to keep the protagonist from being the only interesting person in the world? Every character had an arc. This does not mean that every character has their own subplot in your novel. But it means that they are driven in the same way that your hero is driven: they want something and they are exploring just how far they are willing to go to get it. You may not follow their arc, ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What's the Silicon Valley of English language fiction writing? London and New York are indisputable the places where English language publishing takes place. Traditionally, therefore, they were the places you needed to be to get the attention of a publisher. But while personal relationships still help, it would seem that there are far more avenues now than being... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I improve "beige" text? Don't focus on vocabulary. It is very hard to change your vocabulary and the only real and natural way to do it is by extensive reading. Any attempt to artificially liven up your prose with exotic vocabulary is only going to sound forced. Rather, focus on what you write about. The real texture of wr... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How can I accurately represent young adult dialogue? Dialogue is not realistic. Human being speak very tediously and brokenly. What makes dialogue authentic is not the vocabulary or diction but the motivation. What does this person say, based on who they are, what they want, what they are trying to conceal, and what they want people to think of them. ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I figure out what "challenges/issues" my character could encounter/go through? The basic shape of any character's story arc is that they want something and there are forces that make it difficult for them to get it. They try the least expensive thing they can to achieve their desire, and are rebuffed. They then try the next least expensive thing and are rebuffed again. This rep... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is it bad not to explain things? The audience that actually cares about worldbuilding is pretty small. Most people who read LOTR, for example, don't care a fig about the whole legendarium. They only care about the story. Most stories with magic in them are very indefinite about how the magic works and what the limits of a character... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Metaphors and other "tricks" in scientific papers There are two aspects to writing style: there is what does the best job of explaining a concept, and there are the shibboleths that determine if a certain group is going to accept the document. Unfortunately, when submitting a document for publication, you have to consider both how stylistic decision... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to write a good fight/action scene? Setup. Setup. Setup. You can't force the pace in prose. Prose is always asynchronous with action because it takes more words to describe some things and actions than others, and because you can't control the pace as which the reader reads. The way you create an effect is fiction is by building up the... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Ways of describing new characters? The reader is going to form an image of a character or a scene by putting together bits from their own experience. They do this based on the clues you give them, but they use those clues to select from their own repository of images. The key, therefore, is to give them the clues that matter, that wil... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Using more than one enneagram types when developing a character for a novel? Most stories are not psychological studies, and even those that are are not necessarily accurate. Indeed, many story characters undergo far more trauma than most ordinary people could ever psychologically endure. (What characters in you average police drama would not be invalided out with PTSD after ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What's the best way to describe what an option does in a program? There is actually not a lot of point in describing what an option does, per se. What you should really focus on in both technical communication and interface design is what do you enable to user to do. The goal is to enable the user to react correctly. So the first question is, given you user base, ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: "The flux capacitor--it's what makes time travel possible." When to keep world-building explanations short I think there are two basic reasons for describing anything in fiction. One is to give sensual pleasure in its own right. There are all sorts of sensual pleasures that prose might convey, from the erotic to the gastronomic to the social. Tom Clancy's loving descriptions of really big machines with r... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to introduce alien flora/fauna without turning the fiction into a biology book? Everything is boring unless it has a function in the story. It it is irrelevant, it is boring. There is nothing you can do with language to make irrelevant stuff not be boring. Conversely, if something is relevant to the story, then it is interesting. Describing it beautifully may be icing on the cak... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to show a brief hesitation around a word My answer is a variation on my answer to the question you linked to: In prose, you cannot act out dialogue. Prose is recieved by the reader asynchronously. Things that take minutes can sometimes be read in seconds. Things that occur instantly or at the same time may take minutes to describe. Dialogue... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why/when should character conflict happen and how do I write it? Conflict in a story arises from desire. The basic structure of any story is that the protagonist has a desire and there are forces or people who oppose their attaining that desire. The story proceeds as they attempt to fulfil that desire and face increasing obstacles leading to a moment of truth in w... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Mixing dissonance and alliteration? Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of consecutive words. It is not limited to consonants, and there is nothing in the definition that speaks to its purpose or effect. So, there is no conflict between the terms. You can be both alliterative and dissonant if you... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to make a choice more sadistic? Few realistic choices are that hard in themselves. What makes them hard is history. Does Spiderman save Mary Jane or a bus load of schoolkids? Easy, save the school kids. The needs of the many, etc. But wait, Spiderman is in love with MJ. Yeah, but still, 30 kids on that bus... But wait, Peter P... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How can I write well-structured ideas without overusing connectors such as "moreover" and "in addition to" "moreover" and "in addition to" are the kind of connectors that occur to us when we think of another idea as we are writing. It often happens that as you are writing one idea in support of a point, another one pops into your head, and then another one. In the urgency to get them down before they fly ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should an author have one website or two? I have four. I now profoundly wish I only had one. The idea of a "site" is now becoming moribund anyway. The essence of a "site" is a home page, but the importance of the home page is diminishing every year simply because, across the board, home pages get less and less traffic each year. People navi... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Romance without cliche? That's a bit of a tough assignment, because there is no precise definition of a cliche. But you may find the advice of George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" useful. It's not about writing romance, obviously, but it is about avoiding cliche. Lazy writers, Orwell contends, writ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Language specific rhetorical devices and their influence on non-English native writers English does not have an allergy to adverbs. Bad writing teachers sometimes tell their students not to use adverbs, perhaps because they are not skilled enough to teach them to use them well. Different cultures go through different stylistic periods. These are cultural phenomena more than linguistic... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What do you call someone who is neither/both an antagonist and a protagonist? In classical theory, this character is known as the trickster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster They are the chaotic character. They create problem for the protagonist because they cannot be relied on, but nor are the necessarily an enemy. (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is it bad storytelling to have things happen by complete chance? Life is full of chance occurrences. In many ways, though, our appetite for story is based on our appetite for a more logical, predictable world than we actually live in. We want stories to have the logic that the real world does not. But chance can be made logical simply by foreshadowing. If a picni... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I gain sufficient emotional distance from my work to edit it? How can you tell whether "yes, this is good" or "okay, this needs work"? These are objective artistic judgments. Emotional distance from the work is certainly part of what you need to make them about your own work, but you also need artistic detachment. What I see very consistently is that the bette... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What are the main steps to prepare and promote my fiction novel? If you want to maximize the success of your book, seek professional publication. Being successful with self publishing is like being successful playing the lottery. Even those who win small prizes now and then pay out more than they take in, and the real jackpots are incredibly rare. But is you actu... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Need recommendation re: online resume format The sad truth is that today, resumes are read by machines. Machines don't care about aesthetics. In fact, machines can be confused by the characters you insert to achieve aesthetic effect. If humans do read your resume, chances are that the submission system will have mangled the text so that your at... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should i have four points of view for my novel? Point of view is nothing more than it says it is. The place where the story is viewed from. In movie terms, it is the position of the camera. To have a single POV is equivalent to shooting an entire movie from a single camera angle. It is a constraining thing to do. Generally it is easier to show di... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should capitalization be used for emphasis for a character's tone? Neither of the above. You can't act a scene in prose. Nor can you describe your way into a reaction. What you have to do to get the reader to have a reaction to events it to set them up properly so that they have the reaction you are looking for when the plain words are delivered. If you want "Do yo... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: A long backstory right at the beginning Every story has a bootstrapping problem. You have to establish characters, a world (fantasy or not), a problem or desire, and the obstacles to that problem or desire, and the story cannot really get going until all of that is done. Starting with action is not particularly effective in itself because ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I know who's my protagonist? EARLY in writing process (maybe complicated, maybe not) To answer your question, I have to talk about the difference between a plot and a story. A plot is a sequence of events that happen. A story is an arc of rising tension leading to a resolution. (These terms are sometimes defined differently, and even exactly the opposite, but that is what I am using ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is it allowed to write a review on every chapter of a book? Generally speaking, quotation for purposes of criticism is an allowed use under copyright law. That does not necessarily mean all quotation in a review is permitted usage, though. You should make sure it is genuinely done for the sake of critique. But IANAL and there are plenty of better resources on... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Thriller sub-genre This is the sort of question you can best answer with a stroll down to your local bookstore. But consider: thrills come from danger. You need to be strapped in to ride the roller coaster. A book let's you take a thrill ride with the safety harness off. The roller coaster is probably the preferred sou... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How many books should writers read? Quite honestly, if you do not read widely and voraciously, you have no business trying to be a writer. To do otherwise would be like a chef who only ate once a week and only at McDonald's. It would be like a actor who hardly went to the theater or a ball player who never went to a ball game. And I d... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Writing a character that does not share your ethnic background? Nothing. Everything. In the end, fiction is not about what you have researched, it is about what you have lived. Of course, writers of historicals or space operas have not actually lived in those environments, but thematically and in terms of their characters, they are a reflection of lived experienc... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Creating a story in which the hero(es) lose Well, consider the term cookie cutter. Now imagine that you love cookies and you want to go into the cookie business. Which do you think would be the best strategy: 1. Bring out a totally original line of rhubarb and pickle cookies. 2. Bring out a line of exceptionally well made chocolate chip cook... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How many rewrites should a writer expect for a novel? There is not one answer, as others have said. But I would suggest the following: 1. How many rewrites it takes to make a competent writer is a very different question from how many rewrites it takes for a competent writer to write a new book. Writing is a difficult craft and you should expect to hav... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How credible is wikipedia? I think most of the answers here are missing something important. It is not about credibility (Wikipedia is as credible as most sources, which is to say that it contains a certain number of errors and omissions, just like everything else). It is about traceability. What matters when you cite a source... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How much detail when writing technical documentation? The acid test is this: Will the reader behave differently if they know this? If not, leave it out. The aim of user documentation is to enable the user to act correctly. Any detail that does not contribute to correct action slows the reader down and may reduce their confidence. (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What if my story seems too similar to a particular movie? There are no original plots left. There are no myths that have not been mined and exploited a hundred times over. And coming up with a new mythos is nigh impossible because the elements of myth are elemental -- they speak very deeply to basic human hopes and fears and so even the ancient myths we hav... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How much detail is too much? To answer this question you have to consider the purpose of detail. The purpose of detail is to refine the picture in the reader's head. Readers pull images from their own stock of experiences to build a picture of what they are reading. Each detail you add refines the selection of images they make. ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What are the steps/plot-points of the Sequel Story? Let me approach this another way. The idea of a maturation plot occurs in more than one of the various schemas for classifying plots by type. Those schemas divide plots into multiple types, but there are different numbers of types in each. Heros's journey, on the other hand is not part of a classifi... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What are the steps/plot-points of the Sequel Story? I would challenge your assertion that the journey is a metaphor for maturation. In today's highly (one might almost say pathologically) individualistic society we do tend to think that the story is all about me: the hero is heroic for the hero's own sake. But the classic hero's journey is not about t... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What is subtext? The term "subtext" seems to be used for a least four things each of which is distinct, and only two of which I will suggest are on topic for this site. 1. It is used as a catchall for literary devices such as symbolism, metaphor, etc. This, I would suggest, is just a mistake. Literary devices are a ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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What is subtext? In this question about creating subtext, Where in the writing process do you work in subtext?, the question of what the word subtext means was raised. This question is to address this issue. Of course, as all good writers know, there are not enough words to go round for all the things we want to say... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |