Tara Maya's Tales

A guest post by Rayne Hall Several words close together starting with the same sound can either empower your writing or spoil it, so use this technique with thought. Here are some examples of skilfully applied alliterations from famous books: ...the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks.... (Moby-Dick by Herman Melville) … the baked red ruts of the road.... (The Beaver Road by Dave Duncan) A sliver of soft sunlight pierced a crack in the silk drapes (Panic by Jeff Abbot) … tokens of the mitred, martyred St Thomas (Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin) ….the all-over tan, the tailored teeth... (How to Kill Your Husband and other Handy Household Hints by Kathy Lette) Fires were a common occurrence, leaving more and more buildings blackened and boarded, and discarded drug paraphernalia clogged garbage-filled gutters. ( Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich) Alliteration is an effective technique for creating impact. If you want to emphasise a sentence, perhaps f...

"The poet seems to proceed from a faith that the refinement of observation is an inherently satisfying activity. To see is joy and scruple, privilege and duty." - Mark Doty, " The Art of Description: World Into Word "

I've found a great way to come up with ideas for new blog posts is to just steal them from The Literary Lab and I've done that again. This post of theirs on revising has been percolating through my mind for some time now: I consulted a poet friend that I have mentioned once or twice here before. His name is Craig Cotter, and over dinner I asked him why he made certain word choices or phrase constructions in several of his poems.... What I realized was that Craig had initially limited himself to what edits he was allowed to make. The source of his inspiration, the motivation that got him to write this poem in the first place, he felt, was preserved in that first draft, not in the idea of that first draft. That meant that he couldn't revise everything. He couldn't start from scratch with the same idea, because that would be a different poem--one that he could write at a different time. My gut reaction reading this was to think, "But prose is different from poetry. ...

The Literary Lab had a post recently about making each word, each sentence count in a novel. There was some argument in the comments about whether this was possible, or even desirable. One interesting accusation was that novelists who try to do this are secretly short story writers who haven't figured out the difference between 1000 and 100,000 thousand words. It may be even worse. It may be that novelists who try to do this are secretly poets. At times, especially if I've been off my meds for several days, I think of my novel as a ballad or epic of the ancient sort, in heroic rhyme. And why not? Much of the source material, the original epics upon which modern fantasies base their structure, were book-length poems. When I become stuck in my prose, and everything I type is ugly and repetitive, when all beauty and simplicity escapes me, I fall back on poetry. Seriously. I write a scene as a poem. Sometimes even with aliteration and rhyme, though often just with unrhymed mete...