Posts by Mark Baker
What distinguishes YouTube is not the number of contributors, though that is huge, and essential to its success, but the number of viewers, which is extraordinarily large. What makes a content pla...
Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. I...
I don't think I seen a closeup on a document in any movie made since the 40s. It simply isn't done that way. The way it is done if for the character to be handed the document, open it, and immediat...
First and foremost, it an an analytic category. This means it is a category that is used to do literary analysis of existing texts to group different texts according to common features. There are a...
You use the past tense to report past things and the present tense to report present tense. Death turns a number of present facts about a person into past facts. "John is Chair of the Board" beco...
A useful way to think about this is to recognize that all stories are experiences, not propositions. A philosophy is a proposition, so it is not the matter of stories. But living with the consequ...
You need to make a very clear distinction between imaginary history and story. It seems to be quite common for aspiring writers to construct elaborate imaginary histories and then struggle to write...
That first story is long lost in the mists of time. Indeed, it could reasonably argued that it is the first and universal story. In a very real sense, this is the story written in the human heart, ...
How a time change is indicated in the finished film is up to the director. You just need to indicate to the director that the time has changed, not specify how this is shown.
Algorithms cannot detect plagiarism. They can detect a similarity between two text which might or might not be a sign of plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing someone else's work off as your own. You c...
You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is n...
I think this is a false dichotomy. Art is a form of communication. It fails if it does not communicate. We hear a lot of talk about "expressing yourself" but that is hollow unless you are expressin...
While words with multiple syllables do have an internal stress patterns, stress is more a matter of the role a word plays in a sentence. Often a writer who is sensitive to this will recast a senten...
There is no real way to tell if you are doing enough, of doing the right things, just from a brief description of your product and your users. The questions you really have to come to grips with ar...
This is absolutely a problem with critique groups. On of the fundamental facts for 90% of critique groups is that your critique partners are not your natural readership. Most of the critiques I giv...
I think this is what separates the pros from the amateurs and the unpublished from the published. Writing is hard. Getting it right can take a huge amount of work and many writers report being roya...
Going to writing conferences will increase you chances that a literary agent will read your manuscript, compared to the chances if you simply submit over the transom. It will not make it a more pub...
There are two reasons for a reader to read something, because they are interested in the subject matter and because they like how it is written. The risk of using humor in business or technical w...
I think it is important to remember where these creatures came from. They are all religious in origin, and as such represent fundamental religious themes that have a corresponding resonance in the ...
This is a very common technique among aspiring writers. It feels like playing tricks with the narrative line solves all kinds of writing and story problems for you. But this is largely an illusion....
The purpose of fiction is to give pleasure to the reader. The use of profanity, like anything else, works when it gives pleasure to the reader. Of course, certain profanities will displease certa...
The term writing is kind of like the word walking, except that writing gets used as a collective term in a way that walking does not. Lots of people walk as a major part of their jobs: letter carri...
It strikes me looking at this that what the difference between true self and false self here can be summed up as contentment vs discontent. I would like to think that contentment was the true sel...
If you are using POV characters to explore a world, you are not doing storytelling, you are doing world building. That is a perfectly legitimate hobby, but it is not literature and the normal conce...
There are three basic reasons for using figure references in a document, rather than just putting the figures inline in the text next to the point where they are referenced: You are referencing a...
