Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comment | Post #39304 |
On the other hand, I would have no problem with a site that said, "This is my site and I reserve the right to delete anything I don't like and kick off anyone I don't like, and here are my general principles, just so you know. You have zero rights, and you make zero promises. You are here at my indul... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39304 |
Now, it is vanishing unlikely that I would ever have done anything to violate that code, but by being forced to accept that code, I was forced to subscribe to the ideology behind that code and that, on one particular point, I could not do. Most people would not scruple about it as it do, but a signif... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39304 |
@ArtOfCode, I was just reading through the thread that Monica pointed to, and as I was reading it, it occurred to me that there is a certain futility in trying to establish rules of conduct that people are asked to agree to up front and which they can then appeal to in cases of dispute. For me, as le... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39305 |
Actually, no, it looks like a bug. When I try to ask a meta question, I get the banner saying it is a meta question, but then when I press ask, I get a banner saying I am asking on the main site. So it does not seem possible to ask on meta right now, or else I'm missing something in my question and w... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39305 |
Sure. Thought I was asking on meta though. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39306 | Initial revision | — | over 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why does the second act 'reaction' and then 'action' need to be drawn out? I'm all one for structure, and awareness of structure, but some of these paint by number descriptions of the three act structure strike me as going a bit far. Just as you say, one gets stuck trying to figure out exactly what is supposed to happen at every one of these points. At the other extreme... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #39305 |
Well, my stuff is listed as user16226 on SE, but it appears as "System" here. But I wouldn't know how to reclaim them even if I found them. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39305 | Initial revision | — | over 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Reclaiming you content if you no longer have an SE account It's not the end of the world if this is not possible, but I would like to reclaim my content. The problem is, I no longer have an SE account of any kind. I asked them to delete my main account because I felt I could no longer subscribe to the code of conduct. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39304 | Initial revision | — | over 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: A Code of Conduct, dare I say it I just heard about this place (thanks icanfathom). Willing to give it a try. Of course, the first thing I checked on was the code of conduct and, no surprise at all, the only item of contention in the code of conduct is the harassment clause. So let me offer some suggestion on why harassment clauses ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How can I make it so that my story isn't resolved so easily? Your story is resolved too easily because no one pays a price for the ending. People face all kinds of practical problems every day and they resolve them in practical ways without much drama. Stories are about the kind of problems that are not solved by merely practical measures. At the heart of a st... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Do we simplify descriptions when they sound weird? If you are going to refer back to something that a character used earlier in the story, give it some significant characteristic that will help the reader identify it when it comes up again later. Thus is if you want the reader to remember a box that the woman took something out of earlier, give it a ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do you write short-short nonfiction? You can most certainly write a nonfiction of 80 words, but, as Galastel says, it won't be an essay. An essay is an argument. It martials evidence in support of a point of contention. You can't do that in 80 words. In 80 words you can pen a proposition or an anecdote or an aphorism, all of which would... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How can I make "acts of patience" exciting? I had to think about this one for quite a while, but finally I realized that there are two distinct kinds of patience, which I will call anticipatory patience and enduring patience. Anticipatory patience is what gets you through the period of waiting for some exciting event. It is kids waiting for C... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Can you pitch an outline? If you are a bestselling novelist, you can pitch an outline. Otherwise, you have to have a finished manuscript. Nonfiction is different. You pitch a book proposal, which usually includes sample chapters. But there is a lot more to a book proposal than just an outline. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Describing the taste of food Is this bad writing? Yes. A great description should be precise and evocative. Food neither runs wild not explodes (both would have unpleasant consequences for the eater). They are just the wrong words to capture the intensity of a flavor and the surprise that you feel when you experience that flavou... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is anything like the propulsion systems (warp/impulse drives) copyrighted from being use in other sci-fi novels? Yes, it can be confusing. The basics are simple, through commonly misunderstood, but there are grey area along the borders. The first and most basic rule of copyright is that you cannot copyright an idea, you can only copyright the expression of an idea. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What are the rules for punctuating a conversation? With all due respect to Lauren's answer, there is a fourth rule. 4) Speech that is incidental to action stays with the paragraph that describes the action. That is, if the character runs, jumps, yells "Stop", and tackles the person they are chasing, that is one action paragraph, including the dialog... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Maintaining distance Interesting question! Here's what occurs to me as the first principle of distance: From a distance, you can't see the small stuff. At a distance you can see fear of dragons, but you can't see fear of bees. At a distance you can see high romance, but you can't see petty infatuation. At a distance y... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: I feel like that misinformation feels too artificial as a plot-driving force in my story, how can it be more natural? Panics have deep roots. They don't come out of the blue. They arise out of our need to make sense of our lives, to find patterns in randomness. Pattern finding is how our brains work, and it serves us well most of the time. But faced with a series of unexplained events, we seek connections, and when ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is it the right call to title my romance a 'legend'? Distance is an important element of the design of a story. In some cases you want the story to feel very intimate, as if the reader is right there with the protagonist, in their thoughts, in their immediate present. This is the most fashionable way to write today and it is reflected in the overuse of... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do you show, through your narration, a hard and uncaring world? There are two roads from Santa Fe to Taos, New Mexico. One runs through the gorge of the Colorado river. The other runs over the mountains through pine forests. The one through the pine forests is considered the scenic route. I drove both routes a couple of years ago. I live in eastern Canada. Half ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Parenthesis Types in Fiction Comma, dash, and brackets are not simply different degrees of parenthesis, they are different types of parenthesis. Comma parentheses denote modification or clarification of the main point. > His father, John, was a clergyman. Brackets denote secondary non-essential information. > His father, Joh... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to plausibly write a character with a hidden skill A story is an experience. The reader has to trust that experience. If they stop trusting the experience, they essentially drop out of the world created by the experience, and once that happens, their enjoyment of the story is over. Exactly what creates a trustworthy experience is not entirely straig... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do I introduce a large cast in an interesting way First, understand what a character is in fiction. A character is not simply a person. A character is an instrument for making a story work. You can't simply sit down, dream up a bunch of people, and then expect to insert them into a story and have them work. Characters have to be designed to drive th... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to write a sincerely religious protagonist without preaching or affirming or judging their worldview? Avoid the imputation of naiveté. In the real world, of course, all most all people hold their beliefs reflexively and naively. Most atheists have not thought through or are even aware of the epistemological and ontological difficulties of their position. The same is true of most Catholics, Jew, Hind... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to "Start as close to the end as possible", and why to do so? I would take this as an expression of what I think of as knowing the difference between history and story. Every story is embedded in a history. A history is a sequence of event connected by causality. A plot, in itself, is a history. A story takes place within a history, but the story is not the hi... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What makes a character irredeemable? No character is irredeemable. If professional wrestling teaches us nothing else it teaches us that any character can make a face turn just as any character can make a heel turn. But authors don't really write that way. If an author intends to redeem a character, they lay the groundwork for that rede... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Writing about real people - not giving offence You don't. Turning a life into drama will almost certainly cause pain to those who remember that life. Life is more subtle than drama. Drama needs a definite shape that life lacks. That is why we value drama: it gives a shape to human experience that our pattern-seeking brain craves but cannot find i... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Double lies as sources of conflict in a single arc There are two theories of character. One, to which most people give lip service (at least) today, is the one that Galastel has expressed: characters, like people, are complex multidimensional constructs. This view of character seems to come from the modernist school of literary realism. It can, accor... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Documenting framework features and descriptions I would definitely not recommend using Word for this. It is just not what it was designed to do. There are multiple documentation systems that have been developed specifically for the purpose of writing developer documentation. They provide frameworks and tools, and, what may be more important to yo... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How can I get into the mindset to write? Writing is a stupid waste of time. It will make you lonely, but it won't make you rich. I can think of only two legitimate reasons to write: 1. A profound and unshakable regret for not having written. 2. A publishing contract with a deadline attached. It follows that the only reasons to write ar... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is it a good idea to give your manuscript for publishing to a considerably new publisher (start-up)? It depends what your goal is. If you want to build a readership and make money from your writing, then paying anyone to publish you is not a good idea. If a so-called publisher makes money by charging writers a fee, then their business model is based on collecting as many fees from as many writers as... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to identify whether a publisher is genuine or not? First, real publishers don't advertise. It is really as simple as that. No legitimate publisher advertises for submissions because any real publisher is bombarded with manuscripts on a constant basis. Their concern is not to find more. Their concern is to make the barrage stop. If real publishers are... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Two footnote numbering sequences I'm not sure that it is a given that the numbering needs to be different from the original footnote numbers. Footnotes numbers are not necessarily a canonical part of the text, and since it would be virtually impossible to ensure that the pagination of the translated work would be the same as that of... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Detail vs. filler Setting is character. That is, setting functions in a story very much the way secondary characters function: it shapes and reflects the character of the protagonist, and it functions to propel the protagonist along their arc. To a certain extent, we are shaped by the people around us, and by the env... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Recounting events in dialogue Recounting events that the reader has already seen is almost never OK. It is repetition. It is boring. The essence of drama is tension. Writing a novel is difficult precisely because it is difficult to maintain tension over hundreds of pages. Going back over old ground is very antithesis of tension.... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses There is always an issue in literature with how strength, or any other human trait, is portrayed. In movies and TV in particular, that which is within can only be shown by external action. Books can look inward, but even so, representing qualities through action is still a major part of how books ope... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Averting Bathos To build on Galastel's point, bathos is not simply about the juxtaposition of tones. It is about the unworthiness of the emotion expressed to the event that has occurred. So if you present a serious event, the death of a child, say, and then follow it with the emotion appropriate to the loss of a too... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Subverting the emotional woman and stoic man trope Subversion is not just a way to introduce literary variety. It is actually subversive. It overturns the established order. So you have to ask yourself, why does the established order exist, and what would be the motive for subverting it? The stoic male is an established literary trope because it is ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Thesis writing: consistency of symbols In any work in which you use symbols, you have to establish the scope of each symbol when you use it. There is nothing to say that you can't use the same symbol to mean different things in different places as long as you clearly scope it each time it is used. On the other hand, you should not assume... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do you use the interjection for snorting? Closest I can think of, though perhaps a little archaic: > "Harumph, you're quick on the uptake I take it." But, like DPT, I would be more inclined to keep it out of dialogue tags. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do you make characters change believably? First, TV serials are virtually impossible to end in a way that satisfies the audience. The whole dramatic structure of a TV drama militates against bringing it to a dramatically satisfying conclusion. The probably applies to book series to. The whole art of the serial is to subvert the traditional s... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is it a good idea to leave minor world details to the reader's imagination? Your readers are not going to imagine what LILLAHI birds look like. At best, this sort of technique calls forth the impression of an exotic location from their memory. For a westerner, for instance, references to exotic birds, gems, and flowers, may call to minds old Hollywood movie scenes set in Ind... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Production/edition focus order The chances of getting a three volume set of 400,000 word novels by an unknown writer accepted for publication are as near to zero as makes no difference. Such a project would be extremely expensive and represent a huge risk for a publisher. It is not entirely impossible, but it is highly unlikely. S... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Research Paper Summary: How much should be citations versus original thought? My rule of thumb has always been, don't quote anything unless you are going to comment on the quotation. If all you are doing is citing an information source to support an assertion, make the assertion in your own words and cite the source in a footnote. But a summary is not about proving or support... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Resolving moral conflict There are, fundamentally, two kinds of problem: technical problems and moral problems. A technical problem requires working out a workable technical solution. It is subject matter for a technical manual. A moral problem requires a choice between two values. It is the subject matter of novels. The re... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: As a discovery writer, how do I complete an unfinished novel (which has highly diverged from the original plot ) after a time-gap? This is the first ever draft of your first ever novel. If you were able to simply pick up where you left off and bring it to a successful conclusion, you would be a phenom. The novel is a highly complex construct. The complexity may not be apparent when you read a good novel that works well. (As in ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |