Last week I was tagged by writer friend H.L. Burke to share 7 things about my writing. When I came down with a nasty 24-hour bug or food poisoning last night, I didn’t think there would be a post this week. Then I realized I could recycle the Facebook tag game for a post! 🙂 So here, rather randomly, are 7 things about my writing…
1. In June this year, I will have been working on my main project, The Kraesinia Trilogy, for a whole decade. It’s my magnum opus and heart song. The characters are like dear friends who are always on my mind because I know them so deeply at this point.
2. My writing process is very stop-and-start. I take a long break, then work passionately for a few weeks, then take another long break. I often jump between writing projects (partly because spending a whole decade on only one project would be exhausting!), or I eagerly play with a new idea for a week, only to file it away for later and return to a main work in progress. When I’m writing a scene, I often struggle out 3-4 false starts before the scene rolls out in earnest. I have a hard time writing “rough” drafts of things…I want things to be polished right from the start, so I edit a lot as I go, and often ditch entire sections and re-do them before continuing.
3. My characters come to me as they are, as their own person. I don’t base them on people I know, although sometimes I draw inspiration from actual people. So don’t worry, I probably won’t “put you in my novel and kill you.” 😉
(3b. Actually, I don’t tend to kill characters much anyway.)
4. One of my favorite things I’ve ever written is Shreds of Dignity, a short story about one of my Kraesinia characters’ backstory.
5. As a kid I used to write fanfiction for Disney’s Robin Hood…you know, the animated one with the fox? I still have those handwritten stories, and they are hilariously bad.
6. Plot structure used to be my major weakness, while prose was always my strength. Now I’m so intensely schooled in plot structure, pacing, and all the “mechanics” of storytelling that I’m having to re-teach myself to let loose and have creative fun again rather than anxiously trying to follow all the “rules.”
7. My sister-in-law generously helps me choreograph a lot of my battle scenes and fights…we each play a part (or multiple parts) and act it out together until it makes sense. There have been many laughs, falls, and accidental elbows to the face. 😀
So there you have it!…some random info about my writing. Hopefully next week I am up to a regular post, maybe another installment to my “Love Is…” series.
One of the people I tagged was my friend Kessie, and she answered the tagging game in blog form too, using memes! Read hers here.
I love to hear your thoughts!