Tara Maya's Tales

One of the first novels I wrote, 
when I was, ye gods, twelve or thirteen, I don't remember (or I have 
thankfully blanked the memory from my brain) was Star Trek 
fanfic. On the first draft, the dialogue looked something like this: "Maybe the attacker was a Klingon," said Kirk. "That is not logical, Captain," said Spock. "But he looked like a Klingon," said Kirk. "But then he turned into a furry white snow monster," said Spock.
 "That's what puzzles me," said Kirk. And so on. image: Marc Wathieu Well, neophyte though I was, even I could tell that was 
terrible dialogue. (And it tended to go on for three pages). But why, WHY did it suck rocks? That's what I needed to pin down. Probably 
because so much was wrong, I settled on the most obvious (to me) 
problem, the boring repetition of "said."

Rayne Hall   has published more than forty books under different pen names with different publishers in different genres, mostly fantasy, horror and non-fiction. Recent books include   Storm Dancer  (dark epic fantasy novel),  Six Historical Tales Vol 1, Six Scary Tales Vol 1, 2 and 3   (mild horror stories),   Six Historical Tales   (short stories),   Six Quirky Tales   (humorous fantasy stories),   Writing Fight Scenes   and   Writing Scary Scenes   (instructions for authors). She holds a college degree in publishing management and a masters degree in creative writing. Currently, she edits the  Ten Tales  series of multi-author short story anthologies:  Bites: Ten Tales of Vampires, Haunted: Ten Tales of Ghosts, Scared: Ten Tales of Horror, Cutlass: Ten Tales of Pirates, Beltane: Ten Tales of Witchcraft, Spells: Ten Tales of Magic  and more.   Her short  online classes for writer...

In an earlier post , I mentioned that to improve a scene or entire novel, one question to ask is, Can I raise the stakes? Maybe the answer is Yes. Great! How? The principle is simple--any activity that differentiates a living being from a rock raises the stakes. Yes, yes, rocks don't have midlife crisis about whether their spouse is leaving them or whether their Art is Truly Great, but that's not what I'm talking about. High stakes have to touch a basic need of living things. Put yourself in the shoes of your main character and imagine one of these needs is at risk: 1. Your life. The most obvious thing to put at risk is the character's life. Escape a predator, a hired killer, a band of orcs. Don't crash the plane, survive on the island, be the winner in the televised fight to the death against other human contestants. 2. The life of someone you love. Humans are social so there may be goals even more important than our own lives. The lives of our...

Or you could just add Taylor Kinney. There are seven questions you can ask your about your book before you begin to write it, which will make it a stronger book. Those questions work best if you ask them before you actually sit down to write. Now, if you're like me, and sitting in front of a computer with a finished or progressing manuscript, these questions might frustrate you--it's a little too late to change the stakes of your entire novel. It's not too late to help strengthen the novel scene by scene , however. As you know, I'm a strong proponent of the idea that strong scenes make a stronger book . I've blogged on this before. (I label each draft of my novel with a letter of the alphabet, and I usually get to those squiggly ones near the end. This is undoubtedly excessive. But as you can see, I obsess over making my scenes awesome.) So look at each scene individually and ask yourself these seven questions: 1. How can I raise the stakes? There are ...