Tara Maya's Tales

  Do you write every day? Do you want to?   Here are some ways you can set up a daily writing routine.    1.      Tie Your Writing To a Current Habit The first step in establishing a new routine is to tie it to a routine you already do. Pick a time of day you already do something regularly, like brush your teeth at night or go for a jog in the morning, and then remind yourself that every night for half an hour before you brush your teeth, or every morning for two hours after you jog, you will sit and write.   2. Choose the Right Time to Write Choose a time of day when you know you'll have some uninterrupted time to write, such as early in the morning or late at night. Make this your designated writing time and try to stick to it every day.   3. Give Yourself Space You Enjoy Set up a comfortable and inspiring space where you can write each day. This could be a desk in a quiet room, a cozy nook in your home, or a favorite coffee shop. If y...

  I worked out this "Four Block" method of writing a scene for my AI for Authors Fiction Writing Guide . Then I discovered, hey, you don't need to work with an AI for this method to be useful.  So I present it here as a writing tip on its own.  First, let's review what constitutes a scene. Bear with me if you know this already. It's a short review. There are two kinds of scenes, and, confusingly one kind of scene is called Scene and the other kind of scene is called Summary. Think of them as Show and Tell. I know, you've heard it a million times to Show Not Tell. Mostly, that's right. The fact that Steve the AI tends to Tell rather than Show is one of the reasons purely Steve-generated stories sound more like a synopsis than a real story.  A Show scene is a detailed and immersive portrayal of a moment in the story that focuses on action, dialogue, and sensory details. Scenes usually involve characters interacting in a specific time and place and move the p...

This is an excerpt, plus some additional thoughts of today, from 30 Day Novel : Here are three devices that can save you centuries of torture in that special writer’s hell reserved for writers who describe a nine day week. Ask me how I know. I am so bad at this basic step. So, so, terribly bad. I always think: weeeeeelll... THIS time, I don't need to do all that work before I write... I can just dive in... Wrong. So, so wrong. I'm in the process of belatedly FILLING IN MY CALENDAR for all the events of Books 10-12 in my epic fantasy series, The Unfinished Song, something I ought to have done last millennium.  But better late than never.  1. Calendar – Start with backstory and continue to the end of the book or beyond. Put every offstage and onstage action onto a calendar. Account for all major characters. Trust me. This will save you so much grief! (I have such a hard time with this that I often STILL don’t do it, even though I know better, and then I suffer for my stu...