Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: What are ways to "Show, don't tell" without simply listing bodily actions? The question is a good example of why show don't tell is bad advice. It results in all sorts of silly overblown and tedious writing. Give them evidence, let them infer is getting a little closer to the mark, but it still runs afoul of the basic writing rule which is to be a clear and direct as possi... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: 1st person story with no dialogue? Yes, of course it is. What you are describing is merely a story in which nobody speaks. Since it is perfectly possible to have a story in which a character is alone the entire time, why would it be a problem that there is no dialog? Dialog is just the recording of a particular action: speech. You mi... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Alternative to Strunk & White? I would not have thought S&W was long enough to be tedious, but it is certainly dry. A considerably more lively, and longer, and, I think, better book is Sir Ernest Gowers The Complete Plain Words. Livelier still, and much much shorter, is George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Using alternate quotation marks for 'scare quotes.' This is an example of direct quoted thought, which is a construct that only occurs in fiction. (Actually, direct quoted putative thought, but that is beside the point.) I do seem to recall seeing cases of single quotes being used to denote direct quoted thought, but I think what is right that the mo... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to write more clearly and with shorter sentences? The sentence that gets away from you is almost always the result of starting in the wrong place. Look at the first clause in your sentence. Everything that follows has to align with that clause, both semantically and syntactically. If it starts off in the wrong place, it is going to require and long ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to figure out if an agent is "on the straight" or "shady"? By far the best way to find an agent is to go to a writer's conference and pitch to as many of the agents in attendance as you can. This not only pretty much guarantees that the agents are legit (they have been vetted by the conference organizers) it also gets you to the top of their reading pile if ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Why are names in fantasy novels often "original"? Names are part of language. However, they are normally not translated. A Frenchman named Pierre is not referred to as Peter in English, he keeps the French version of his name. We presume that English is not the lingua franca of a fantasy world. Or rather, it would be a very specific kind of fantasy... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Why are writers so hung up on "show versus tell"? Show vs tell is an overblown and misunderstood idea imported into fiction writing from screenwriting. It was originally coined to train novelists to write for the screen. (You can see how novel-like the storytelling was in many early movies. The screen had to struggle to find its own storytelling sty... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Use of past tense in a book about the future The tense used in a story is relative to the temporal POV (point of view) of the narrator, not to the actual calendar date. The modern novel arises from traditional storytelling, meaning that the default temporal POV is that you are telling a story about things that happened before the story is told.... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a revision functionality in LibreOffice Writer? A program can only show you information that it records as part of its file format (metadata). If LibreOffice records the data on which date each line is written as part of the normal file format, then, in theory, it could show it to you. And if it didn't show it to you in the interface, you could op... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Any suggestions for a new writer? Let's say that you wanted to become a circus performer. You want your act to be juggling flaming batons blindfolded while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a tiger cage. You recognize that your first attempt to do any of these things, let alone do them all together, is going to suck. So what do ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Why aren't detective stories written in the protagonist's POV? No one can know the writer's reasons but themselves, but I would point out a couple of things: - If the detective is the star of of the show, you want them in frame. When you see a scene from a character's POV, you see what they see, you don't see them. - The natural way in which you get to know s... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What kinds of skill does writing require? I think that the hidden question here is, does writing require teachable skills. Of course writing requires skills. You have to be able to make marks on paper with a stick, etc. The real question seems to be, does it require skills you can't just pick up by living life. Do you have to specifically st... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can I get inspired to write a story, without any experience beforehand? If you don't have an idea for a story, you can retell an existing one. There are a few ways to do this. One is to take a song that tells a story (a lot of folk songs and ballads are small stories) and rewrite it as a short story. Obviously this will require you to flesh the story out with additional ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What rights can I claim for a book that compiles selected bible passages? IANAL but, as an anthologist, you automatically own a copyright on the anthology -- not on the passages themselves, but on the particular collection and arrangement of those passages you have made. The anthology is new and original work even if the pieces in it are not. This is true regardless of whe... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How much science/medical detail is too much? It's not that it's not acceptable, it's that it is orthogonal. What editors care about is compelling stories in the current taste. There is nothing to say that cannot include scientific detail. That is certainly something that there is a modern taste for. As Emily Gilmore once said, "I don't watch te... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Do you need to end a story with the same perspective you start with? No. A story stands or falls on the completion of the story arc. POV is simply about camera angles. You choose the camera angle that best frames the part of the story you are telling at the moment. There is no obligation to end on the same camera angle that you opened with. There seems to be an obses... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Do many people even care about "good" grammar in novels? You have to make a distinction between good grammar and what we might call the grammar of the good. Or perhaps I should say between grammar and the grammar of the good. Grammar is the mechanics of how language works. Every comprehensible sentence is comprehensible because of grammar. Either your lan... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can a novel without any death be taken seriously? Three words: Pride and Prejudice We could name many others, but P&P is by most reckonings, one of the finest novels ever written, and it is not about death. But it is easy to see why the question might occur to someone. Every story needs stakes. Does it not follow that the higher the stakes the mor... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Where are the best places to hire good editors? First, you need to decide if you are looking for someone to fix your story, someone to fix your language, or someone to fix your typos. These are very different things requiring very different skills, and probably very different levels of compensation. Second, you need to understand where people adv... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Options for point of view in a story First of all, don't confuse point of view with person. You can write in the third person and still tell the story from one character's point of view. Second, third person is the normal mode of storytelling. All this stuff about limited vs. omniscient is largely a distraction. It is an analytical sch... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Describing big cities and using slang words while writing It very much depends on why it is New York or Chicago. Do you want the specific flavor of the city? Do you want locals to find your portrayal convincing? If so, Lauren is right. But if the particular flavor of the city is not important, you may be better off treating it as generic American city. Ther... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Generally would an onomatopoeia come before or after the source action is implied First, that is not an onomatopoeia. A slap does not sound like the word slap. Second, this technique is ineffective either way. You can't turn up the volume in prose using caps and asterisks. Nor can you do sound effects. This is the page, not the screen. All words are read as the same speed and vol... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Turning normal phrases into gerund phrases: What's the effect in the reader? While Lauren is correct about the grammatical difference, the actual impact on the reader is virtually nil. It isn't at this level that texts have impact on readers. The levels on which text chiefly impact readers are images and stories. Worrying about the difference between two grammatical structure... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Succinctly indicate that an emotional hug is not sexual As always in literature, it is all about the setup. In literature as in life, we interpret actions as our previous experience has led us to interpret them. If you want a reader to react to something in a particular way, you set up their expectations such that when the event occurs, they naturally int... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Transfer from first person to third person Third person is not just a grammatical category, it is the whole angle of attack on the subject matter. Most particularly, the third person brings the protagonist into the frame (assuming, of course, that your narrator is your protagonist, which is usually the case when people start off in first pers... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to develop a more vivid and descriptive writing style The problem with description is that description is the wrong word for it. The right word is evocation. You are looking to evoke a response in the reader which brings a sense of place flooding into their minds. You can't build it for them; you don't have the materials. You have to pull it out out of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How Can I Reliably Find Well Written Novels? Probably the best filter of all is age. Any book that is still around 50 years after is was written is probably around because it is well written. Recent books get liked for all sorts of reasons other than being well written. They express a popular political or social prejudice. They ride on the coat... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do publishers handle bilingual novels? When you sell a novel to a publisher, you sell them specific right to publish in certain languages and certain countries. Whatever rights you don't sell, you retain and can sell to someone else. Usually publishers want to buy all rights, and usually writers want to sell only limited rights, since the... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: First Person when the PoV is not the Protagonist? I believe you are incorrect. If anything, writing in the first person distances you from the character. First, consider the characters from fiction that you feel like you know well. Harry Potter? Oliver Twist? Frodo Baggins? All described in third person. Second, consider the actual effect of first... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Showing a Brief Hesitation If you have so many pauses that you feel the need to vary how you describe them, chances are that the reason it feels repetitive is that you are reaching for the same device too many times, not that you are always describing it the same way. The reason could be that you have fallen into the trap of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How best to handle revealing a main character's name midway through a long story in close-third person? In fiction (which takes place in a universe much neater than our own), a change of name almost always indicates a change of status. Thus when Strider becomes Aragorn his status changes from vagabond to king. How a character responds to the change of name, therefore, is a signal of how they respond to... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Footnotes when using in-text citation style The fallacy here is the idea that there are general rules at all. There are no general rules about what is allowed in an academic paper, or any other kind of writing. There are specific style guides -- some public, some specific to a particular institution or publication -- and their rules cover the ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Capitalization after interrupted dialogue It has nothing to do with who spoke or who interrupted. It only has to do with what is a sentence. Speech tags are part of the same sentence as the dialog the report. Separate actions occurring after the speech are separate sentences. Only the last of your examples is a speech tag, though an awkward ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can you use third person limited in a story that begins before the MC is born? Third person omniscient and third person limited are analytical categories. They are terms you use if you want to dissect the use of POV in a piece. Don't take them for rules about what you have to do, and don't think you have to even be able to describe what you end up doing in those terms. The fact... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Can we use MadCap Flare with semantic markup? I'm pretty sure that the answer at the technical level is no. But this is really a question that needs to be addressed another level up. The thing about structured writing is that it factors out certain aspects of the final publication, which then have to be factored back in by algorithms when it co... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I stop my writing sounding like a bad imitation of whatever author I've just been reading? To write fluently, you have to have a ready of flow of language at your command, and that will come from all you have heard and read. If you binge read one author, their language will invariable be what is flowing in your head for a while. The key to developing your own tone is not isolation from in... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Citing a footnote Generally speaking, citations refer to the physical page on which the cited content appears. They do not narrow it down to a logical part of the document that appears on that page. Cite the page on which the citation in question occurs. I have never heard of any style guide that does anything other t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do you write 2 or more characters saying almost the same thing in unison You don't. That is a TV thing. The page is not the screen. How you tell a story in each medium is an artifice. You are never reproducing all the elements of real conversation, all the halts and tics and repetitions, and all the banalities of everyday speech would be catastrophically boring on the pa... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are some ways of adding deeper meanings to writing? Oh Dear, no. That is not how it works. You should always make your work as clear to the reader as you possibly can. If your use a symbol or a metaphor, it should be to make your meaning clearer, not more obscure. Yes, I know that in school your English teacher told you that there were deeper meaning... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to create feeling with setting If we start with the premise that character and feeling are supposed to be at the heart of a story, it follows that the description of setting is not separate, but it related to character and feeling. Man people have a profound love of place that deeply affects their character and motivations. Descr... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Script-style conversations in a book You certainly can. You can do anything that works. Melville does something very like this at one point in Moby Dick, so there is good precedent for it. The thing is, why are you doing it? Why break convention? Any time you break convention, you call attention to what you are doing. When you follow c... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to present common foreign words in fiction? Well, whatever you do, don't convolute the the sentences around those words. Voices don't greet. People greet. `"Konnichiwa!" greeted a voice.` is grating and unnatural. There are at least four things you can do that will not sound artificial and grating: 1. Just use the word. People can deduce the... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to excite readers Excite is the wrong thing to focus on. The real key to successful storytelling is to engage the reader. There are no car chases or gun fights in Pride and Prejudice. It is a story of a courtship, decorously told. And yet is is probably the single most durable and popular novel ever written. There is... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I prevent a structure-breaking character from being seen as a fourth-wall-breaking joke? This sounds like you are describing a literary device known as Deus Ex Machina (The God in the Machine). It is a device use to get an author out of a plot hole for which there is no satisfactory resolution. The term originates from the Greek theatre in which plays would sometimes be resolved by a god... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Ethics of incorporating a supplier's technical documentation into one's own documentation? This is not an ethical question. It is a legal question. Ethics deals with professional conduct over and above what is required by law. Copyright is a matter of law, not ethics. In this particular case, however, it is also a matter of contracts. You should be negotiating a licence to use their conte... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Writing a fiction in first and third person. is that acceptable? Anything is acceptable if you make it work. For an example of a book that makes this work (brilliantly) see Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. But any change in narrative style calls attention to itself and therefore has to be handled with care and skill. It may be more acceptable to the read... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: My book doesn't seem to fall into a clear genre Genres are literary ghettos. They are places where people with particular and highly specific tastes (cosy mysteries, sword and sorcery, horse stories) can be assure that they get what they paid for and just what they paid for. Not all fiction belongs in these ghettos. Much of it serves an audience w... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: using double negatives and sentence structure English is not a programming language and negatives are not minus signs. They do not automatically cancel each other out. Double negatives are idioms and, depending on context, the second negative may cancel, weaken, or strengthen the first. `not infrequently` is a case where the second negative wea... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Restrictions On Producing A Playscript Copyright law covers the creation of derivative works. This is important to authors. For instance, if someone wants to make a movie of a novel, they have to pay the author for a license to create a derivative work. So, you need permission from the copyright holder to create a play based on a book. A... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |