For the writing ask meme: 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 25, 32, 35, 36, 39, 44, 50.
Under the cut ‘cause this is gonna get really long. Also, the three questions that were answered elsewhere were copied and pasted in.
2.) What was your favorite book growing up?
-Oh gracious, do you have any idea how long ago that was? (Kidding, I’m not that old). Hm… I don’t know that I had one particular favorite. I read everything I could. I would go to the library every week and come out with half a dozen books, and I loved them all. I’m not sure I could pick just one.
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4.) Have you ever thrown a book across the room?
-No, but there is one book that really made me cry about a year ago; The Host by Stephanie Meyer. Without giving anything away for those of you who’ve not read it, there’s a scene that really hit me hard.
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8.) What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten?
-Well, its probably gonna sound odd, and the answer will be a bit long, but bear with me. Recently I attended a writing workshop that involved submitted a piece of our own work for review. The piece I submitted involved a lot of guns, but the guns weren’t used but once. The main character, Raine, was given a gun and a knife to defend herself with. She chose to use the knife. The man coming after her had a gun, but rather than use it to shoot her, he used it to fire a warning shot, aimed at the ceiling.
As everyone in the workshop read the piece, they all came back with the same conclusion; I was afraid (or otherwise averse to) guns. Which actually isn’t true, and I have another character who uses a gun all the time, but that’s another story. Point is, their feedback about how obvious my dislike of guns was made it clear that I had something to work out. I needed to get the point across without making it seem that I, the author, was influencing the story in such a way.
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9.) What’s the worst piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten?
-I’ve never actually gotten any truly negative, hateful reviews, so the worst feedback I’ve received would be from someone who I seriously doubt actually read the piece.
It was on a site that broke reviews down into categories and had the reviewer rate each section (action, dialogue, etc). In the “dialogue” section, the reviewer wrote “No dialogue”, but the entire last half of the piece was an in-depth conversation. Clearly they didn’t read that far.
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10.) What’s your biggest writer pet peeve?
-One of my biggest pet-peeves is a lack of proper comma use, and run-on sentences. In an English course last year, I edited papers for three classmates, and one of them seemed to have no idea what a comma even was, let alone that he needed to use them.
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12.) Who is your favorite author?
-James Dashner. No question. His Maze Runner series is brilliant. I own all but one of that series, and the final book is on my list as soon as I can get a copy. But I’ve read all of them, and am currently in the middle of one of them.
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17.) Would you like your books to be turned into TV shows, movies, video games, or none?
-I actually think it would be very cool to have them turned into any of thte above. There are a couple of sections that might be very interesting as video game levels (and in fact, I’ve used some video games to get a feel for how the scenes might progress). I’d be totally okay with all of it.
The one thing I worry about would be that I wouldn’t have a lot of say in the final result, and that they would be changed dramatically from what I’d written. That actually happens to a lot of writers, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to me.
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25.) What advice would you give to young writers?
-Keep writing. Always keep writing. You don’t learn if you don’t practice, right? And keep everything if you can. Even if it’s painful to look at a year down the road, keep it anyway. It shows you where you came from.
And sometimes, even if you think the writing itself is bad, there can still be good ideas hidden in your early works. They just need to be dug out and cleaned off.
I think keeping everything is probably the most important advice I could give. I threw a lot of things away a number of years ago, and I’ve regretted it ever since.
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32.) How do you feel about friends and close relatives reading your work?
-I used to have my mother read my early works (which, in hindsight, was a bad idea. I was terrible in the early days!). Now I only show it to people whose opinions I actually value or want, those who I know won’t simply criticize with no attempt to instruct or be helpful.
I really only have two close friends that I share my work with now. One’s a published author, so I look to her for advice in that regard. The other is my closest friend, and I value her opinion as both my friend and as a reader.
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35.) What’s your favorite time of day for writing?
-I don’t really have a specific time preference. So long as I can be left alone, it doesn’t matter if it’s morning, noon or night. I’ll write at 3am if I’m up and alone. Until recently, my house was a veritable tornado of activity, so finding time to write without constant interruptions was tough.
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36.) Do you listen to music when you write?
-Oh yes. I create playlists for my books, and typically listen to them while I write. Sometimes I listen to other things though. Really depends on my mood at the time.
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39.) What’s the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had?
-Hm… probably one I adapted from a dream. It involved a king whose army beasts were giant jelly fish. And by giant, I mean roughly the size of a car. But it wasn’t an underwater kingdom, so these large jelly fish were just flying through the air.
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44.) What’s the weirdest character concept you’ve ever come up with?
-Huh, that’s a tough one. I’m not sure I create very “weird” characters, in general. I mean, I suppose it could be said that some characters have odd abilities (one can summon monsters merely by singing a special song, another has transformation abilities and works as a “tracer”) so I guess those would qualify as my “weird” characters.
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50.) If you could live in any fictional world, what would it be?
-Barring the choice of my own (because what better way to learn?), I’m not sure of one specific example of a fictional place I would choose to live. But it would be a place slightly different from our world in some way. I don’t know that I would choose something that takes place in a medieval setting; I love the dresses, but not the lack of technology.
I think I would choose one of two things;
Supernatural
or
The Mortal Instruments
Because they’re both similar enough to our world that I wouldn’t have to worry about not understanding something, or how the world works, but they still offer that hint of the unbelievable, the fantastical that our world lacks.
(And yes, I am fully aware that I chose a world where angels, demons and all manner of other dangerous thing roam the earth. If I lived there, it would have to be under the condition that I was aware of these things, and could adapt my way of life to that knowledge [protect myself, etc].)