[ CC ] I wrote these stories recently here on WP , and would like to share them with my friends ; however , I feel like they could be tuned up a bit . Any thoughts on how to make improvements is greatly appreciated .

You have a lot of good habits, which is rare. It shows you care. Tenses, quotation attributions. You gave voice to a narrator, which is strongest at the beginning of Daniel's story. You're about ready to bust something awesome out. I hope the following can help. 
 
 
 I actually think your dialogue mechanics are pretty solid. You're avoiding unnecessary attributions, and that's great. You can make the dialogue descriptors work harder for the story, though. Make them add to the voice of the narration, advance the story, and/or emphasize a character's dialogue. Experiment with dialogue descriptors that even contradict the dialogue, or foreshadow. They should n't just be space fillers. 
 
 
 Work on these: 
 
 
 1 ) Remove all the adverbs outside of dialogue. Either replace them with something descriptive, or eliminate them altogether. Adverbs rob you of creativity. They make you'tell' instead of'show'. 
 
 
 2 ) Identify where you're'telling'.'Telling' is spoon feeding. Ex: You edit your story. Write'showing' prose, instead. Ex: You read each line out loud, weighing words on your tongue, listening for literary syncopation, pursuing every potential for depth.'Telling' is *normally* OK in dialogue. Dialogue is actually a great excuse to'tell' and cover a lot of ground quickly. Use sparingly elsewhere, and only if it enhances the voice of the narrator as you read out loud. 
 
 
 3 ) Under normal circumstances, the only place a writer should try and get away with'telling' vs'showing' is in dialogue. However, that's about all your dialogue is:'telling'. The King, Mom, the Private. They're telling the story. And their voices are n't fleshed out, unique characters. And what they are telling is straight and flat as a prairie road. And they're preachy. And since your stories are so dialogue heavy, you're going to need to make the characters' voices compelling. Make the way they speak, and the intent of their words evident in their vocabulary. Give them their own mannerisms and vocabulary, unique to the character. The King seems cunning. Make the subtleties of cunning come out in his speech. Mom is a great ol' gal. Make me love her before she dies, not with all this sage insight stuff. Both the King and Mom could actually be telling stories to their others. The King, a fable of gratitude, or loyalty. Mom...? Mom can start off with, `` When you were little, and you did x, I was so y, but then...'' Try and make the dialogue expand the depths, push the story outside the quotation marks. 
 
 
 4 ) Biggest issue. You did n't get me emotionally invested in the characters. They're flat. Put some depth in them. Make me give a damn. See above. Daniel, you almost got me interested in him. Daniel's intro shows how you can establish a good voice to the narrative. Conjure whatever you had working for you there, because that's what you'll need. Stuff the sentences with character expansion. Look at this: 
 
 
 `` He stares at her, his eyes traveling beyond the sight of her frail, withered body, and into the memories of his childhood.'' 
 
 
 `` He stares at her, his eyes traveling beyond the sight of her frail, withered body, and into memory. Before the last divorce. Before graduations and births. Past his first wedding, past college, into the memories of his childhood.'' 
 
 
 Now Daniel has just pulled us along with him. We got to see his character fleshed out, get some insight, and we're interested in him a little more because we took the time to float past all those life events on the way to his childhood memories. 
 
 
 5 ) Locate every cliche. Every. Single. One. Are you using words in a sentence commonly seen together? That's a cliche. Look again. Are your pairings of adjectives and nouns cliched? If it is a common pairing of verbs/nouns, nouns/adjectives, etc it's a cliche. They are demanding your *undivided attention*. Maybe change the order of the words. See how it looks after your *attention demands dividing them*. See what changing the expected adjective or noun in a cliche does for you. Maybe you can turn the *adjective* into a noun. Maybe *nouning* the verb. That's often interesting. Hear how they sound. Cliches are only excusable if sparingly used in dialogue, or to underscore something really clever. Change them up. Take this sentence: 
 
 
 `` The pupil falls to his knees, coughing up blood, face turning red.'' 
 
 
 falls/knees 
 
 
 cough up/blood 
 
 
 face/turning red 
 
 
 All too common. Dig into your vocabulary, whip out the thesaurus, change the order, do what ever you have to, because this is a huge killer of your stories. Combine this with removing adverbs and your stories will become fuller, because you'll be forced to'show' so much more when you ca n't use the prose thieving'tell' traps of cliches. 
 
 
 Let's use the above sentence again. I'm gon na try it, without common cliche pairings, and without adverbs. And because it's a death scene for a character that has had very little development, I'll seize this opportunity to try and make the reader at least a bit more interested in the character ( also, it's a death scene: go nuts! ): 
 
 
 `` A shade in demeanor colors the Pupil's bearing. He slumps to his knees, face wet and crimson, clawing at his collar. He makes to speak, mouth moving but wordless as a beached cod. His eyes, searching out through tears for his King, the frantic eyes of a desperate animal. A combined contortion of confusion and agony twist his visage. And now upon all fours, heaving breath and arched back, a supplicant dog vomiting blood, a corpse's cacophony echoing the halls.'' 
 
 
 OK, so maybe that was purple, but sometimes you got ta summon George `` You're not gon na like how this ends'' RR.
