Tara Maya's Tales

Bad guys can make a story great. Evil people make terrible neighbors but riveting characters. Do stories need evil characters? After the "Joker" shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, I wondered if in writing about evil people, we risk glorifying evil, and encouraging rather than discouraging horrible acts. I know some writers don't see themselves as having any moral obligation in their writing, but I see writing fiction as a profoundly moral act. Imagination and spirituality are linked at the hip; you cannot imagine something without engaging both your empathy and your ethics. How we imagine the world impacts how we live in the world. But this does mean we should only write about good people, who always do the right thing and have happy endings? No fricken' way. Because that has nothing whatsoever to do with our struggle as human beings to be ethical or empathetic. We struggle all the time to be better people in a world filled with truly horrid people -- li...

I'm an introvert. It's not easy for me to open up to people, but this doesn't mean I don't care about others. There have been times when strangers thought I was "cold" or uninterested in them just because I was too shy to socialize. I'm ashamed to say, there have been friends who thought that too. I admit, I live in imagined worlds far, far from the physical locale of my body, and not everyone understands that. But I don't want to be so preoccupied my with my own worlds that I ignore the people I care about. When I was in school, I found it easy to maintain friendships, because I was forced to be with friends. Now, however, it's all too easy to drift apart. I have friends on the internet, but even then, it's easy to let those relationships be no deeper than a Facebook post or a 140 Twitter characters. So recently, I've made a private pledge to keep in closer contact with friends and people I care about. Here are the five things I...

Just a little sketch I did on Photoshop.

This century started out poorly, let's be honest. Barely a year in, and what have you got, but morons flying planes into buildings, war, more war and economic depression. It seems like at home and abroad there are fanatics trying to drag us back into the dark ages. Hello, was this what the Twenty-First Century was supposed to be like? Heck, no. Here, however, is something that finally makes me feel like I'm living in the Twenty-First Century I was promised-- 3D printers for your home ! How awesome is that? Only $1300. We had to get the plumbing fixed in our home (which was built in the dark ages), so sadly this is not something we can afford. But some rich yuppies somewhere will buy it, and help bring the price down for the rest of us. (See? There is a good use for the idle rich!) In a few years, I hope, this tech will be better and cheaper and I will buy one. You may be thinking, "Why do I need a 3D printer in my home?" This is the beginning of having...

I have a neat little thing I'm doing in my wip (Book 5, Wing), which is introducing each chapter with a special scene, told in first person. A few of these scenes show a dramatic event in the character's life. Others simply establish a mood or a central symbol. All introduce us to the interior life of the character, which is what I like about these scenes, and why they are important to the book. The other thing that I like, but which is also sending me in circles about my own tail, is that there is no faking it in these scenes. Unlike the more standard, third person, plot driven scenes of the novel, characters cannot hide behind their current predicaments to disguise who they truly are. These scenes demand that I know the voice, the history and the deepest concerns of the characters. This is a problem, because there are one or two I still don't know. There's one in particular who is hard to catch. I'm rewriting his scene over and over again, in a different voi...

Every now and then I feel sorry for myself that my novels will never be literary masterpieces. There's that law, passed by Congress, that Tara Maya may not write such things.... Although, after resisting literary literature all through school, I have come to appreciate the genre, I'm still not willing to sacrifice the story I want to tell on the altar of High Culture. My books are much too "full of rape and adverbs," as Elmore Leonard once (through a character) dismissed Romance novels, contemptuously . However, Janet Fitch's 10 Rules for Writers surprised me. Seven of them, I'd read before, but three were bits of advice that struck me as fresh and useful. Probably none of them are new, but that doesn't make them any less useful. Maybe it's that we are open to hear the advice we need when we are most in need of it. That's a nice thought, at least. These are the four "rules" I found I needed just now. 1. Write the sentence, not jus...

How's that new outline method working out? (I forgot to tell you, I've dubbed it "Scene Helper.TM"*) Awesome, thank you. At least for the material that I've already written for Wing. I've had insights into what I need to edit, external vs. internal action and the problem of empty characters. If I were a better blogger, I'd make each of these its own topic and schedule them for days when I don't write any posts, but I'm honestly too lazy. I'm just going to throw it all at you, and you can re-read it during the next three month period I neglect my blog. (Uh huh, Tara, that's how to build traffic. Woohoo!) Outlining To Edit So, yeah, I went back and retroactively applied it to all the scenes I've written so far. In that sense, it was a good aide to planning edits. For one thing, I could see clearly that I'd left out any smells, sounds, tastes and touches, and sometimes even any visual descriptions, out of about two thirds ...