Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How to organize ideas to start writing a novel? The thing you have to understand about writing a novel is, it's impossible. It can't be done by any method known to science. Sure, you can try writing an outline. It won't have any heart. Your characters will be flat as cardboard. You can try writing character biographies. Then you novel will be ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39429 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39532 |
For a character, yes. For a reader, thought? Not so much. That is why dramatic irony is powerful, but false suspense is deadly. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39535 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is it alright to add scenes that don’t move the plot forwards much but develop relationships/character? Every scene should produce a change in story values, which almost always means some change of state for the character. From the beginning of the scene to the end, the character should be more in love or less, more in danger or less, more tempted to sin, more moved to pity, more pained by rejection, m... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39534 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: How could the disregard for both plot and dialogue tell the story? You can call the cat a minivan but you still can't drive it to Costco. A story is what a story is. If you create an object that has none of the characteristics of a story, it is not a story. You might consider it a literary work, given that it is a work made of words, but being a literary work do... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39533 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Do living authors still get paid royalties for their old work? Author royalties depend entirely on the author's contract with the publisher. If the contract says they get royalties, they get royalties. If the contract says they don't get royalties, they don't. The issue of copyright, which other answers mention, is beside the point. The author licenses or se... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39532 |
But that is a real minefield. If the danger that the reader thinks is there turns out not to be there, that is letting all the tension out of the story when it is revealed, and is likely to come as a huge disappointment. Unless the book is really about something else entirely, and real tension lies e... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39532 |
Keep it uncertain for whom, the first protagonist or the reader? There is a fundamental principle in drama called dramatic irony, in which the audience knows something that the character does not. This can be a powerful way to build anticipation and dread in the audience. (Classic example: the cheerl... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39532 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Does a point of view need to be introduced when or right after the character is introduced? The point of view of a story is the point from which the reader experiences the story. What you do with point of view should be based on what the reader will want to experience at any given point in the story. I often see writers decide on a point of view long before they have figured out what th... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39526 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Transitional sections How does that travel change your characters? The iron law is that every scene should leave your characters in a different state from when they began, or, at very least, leave the reader with a different appreciation of their state from the one they had at the beginning of the scene. If the only c... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39517 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How to write an introverted main character with accidental charisma The way you make a reader feel anything about a character is by how he acts. You can try telling the reader stuff about him that is contrary to how he acts, but it won't work. The reader will still judge him, will still feel interested in following him, or not, based on how he acts. So this makes... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39515 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: What are good ways to improve as a writer other than writing courses? I think you need to distinguish four aspects of writing and focus on the ones that you most want to improve on. They are: The mechanics of writing: Sentence structure, punctuation, etc. For this books and/or classes on grammar and composition may be useful. The craft of writing: This has to ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #38330 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39513 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is having elaborate metaphors ever a bad thing? Metaphors must be apt. They must make the reader's experience of the scene they are reading more vivid. The problem with many metaphors, particularly those created by inexperienced writers, and most particularly by those that think they are obliged to fill a certain quota of metaphors, is that they a... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39511 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to realistically describe pain? You can't. You can't describe pain. You can't describe what things taste like. You can't describe much at all about our physical sensations of the world. Language just does not seem to work like that. There are no adequate words for any of it. What you can do is evoke the memory of sensations tha... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39499 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39505 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Should a scene break always be put in place when there is change in location, times, and dates? A scene is a small dramatic arc within a story. Usually scenes take place in a single place and time, though that is not always the case. Usually it is clear that one scene has ended and another has begun, thought that is not always the case either. Where there is a possibility that it may not be cle... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39504 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is it cliché to have two best friends fall in love? Human beings are pretty simple creatures are heart. We are formed by evolution to pair up and reproduce. The forming of romantic bonds is therefore central to our lives and central to our stories. And there are only so many choices for the people we can form romantic bonds with: friends, acquaintance... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #38290 |
Post edited: typos |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39503 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Doubt about a particular point of view on how to do character creation A character is a bundle of desires. (One could debate whether that is an adequate description of a human being, but characters are not complete human beings, they are artefacts of story.) When you create a character, you know what they desire, because that is what a character is. A simple character h... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39498 |
Post edited: typos |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39499 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Are worldbuilding questions on topic? It seems to me that there are two types of worldbuilding question. One is about the literary craft of creating the story world in which every story exists, even those that are ostensibly set in the real world. That would strike me as obviously on topic here. The other deals with the mechanics of f... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39498 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: What's the difference between time-tested and formulaic? I think that the answer, broadly, is that structure is necessary but not sufficient. You need both structure and vision. Yes, you can have works that don't follow conventional structures, or don't do so in obvious ways, but their appeal tends to be limited. It is also true that there are some... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39491 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Alternatives to develop relationships without dialogue What Amadeus says about body language is true, but it can be hard to convey in prose. It is the kind of thing you can rely on actors to do well in film, if that is the medium (as the 90 second time limit suggests), though that really doesn't leave you much to write. In prose (and in film as well... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #38859 |
I think you are confusing point of view with object in view. The point of view character can observe several other characters acting, and can turn their attention from one character to another, while the story remains in their point of view. A point of view change changes where the action is reported... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39321 |
I'm noticing that the questions on the Lottery page seem to be highly weighted towards recent questions. Often, some of the same questions appear on the lottery page and the front page. Since the purpose is to dredge up older questions that might need a review, is there a way to weight its question s... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39488 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
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A: Introducing a new POV near the end of a story POV is all about letting the reader see the things they want to see. One changes POV so that the reader can see things from a different angle. We often do this in life. We move around a scene so that we can see it from different angles. But there is a time for changing points of view and a time f... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39487 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How to integrate letters, in-universe book Snippets and the like into a story This is simply backstory, so the rules of backstory apply. Backstory should only be given when the reader wants to know the backstory. Backstory slows the forward momentum of the plot, so it should only be given when the lack of backstory would make further forward progress of the plot impossible. ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39471 |
Post edited: typos |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39477 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39477 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39477 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Choice of words on writing Travel writing is not about the destination or about the journey, it is about the company. It is the personality of the travel writer that make travel writing worth reading. Otherwise, you might just as well read a guide book. So your travel writing is not about taking your reader on a trip, it is ab... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |