4: What was the first fic you wrote?, 7: Which character of yours do you most identify with (if any)?, 18: Have you ever written a personal experience into your fic?--pretty please :-)
4: What was the first fic you wrote?
I’ve always had stories in my head and I either acted them out with my barbie dolls, my legos or just played pretend. I would write stories and such for school, but spelling was something I struggled with a lot. So I didn’t really love to write things down. The first fic I really remember writing started as a story for my 7th grade english class and it was basically a Hanson fanfiction but I think i changed the last name. I don’t remember exactly. It kind of took off after that and I consider that the point where my love for English and writing in general took off.
7: Which character of yours do you most identify with (if any)?
Definitely Ellie! She’s the one that is closest to who I actually am (with some notable differences) so yeah…
18: Have you ever written a personal experience into your fic?
Yes and no. I try to “write what I know” because sometimes you can tell when a writer hasn’t done enough research on something or is just making stuff up… but there is a lot of stuff that I have no personal experience in (all the sex and relationship stuff) that I have learned about through reading, videos, gifs and the internet in general.
Some yes examples are dealing with family stuff because I come from a large Irish Catholic family and we’re loud and crazy. There are so many different personalities that I think are vital to who a character is. I’m just realizing now that of my three original female characters (Ellie, Wren from Perfectly Imperfect and Nikki from Adventures in Parenting) Wren is the only one that doesn’t come from a large family.
Another yes is Chris visiting a therapist in Perfectly Imperfect. This last year has been a really rough one for me. I lost the grandparents I was closest to within six months of each other. Grandma was expected (she had Alzheimer’s and was pretty sick for the last three months she was alive), but Grandpa’s death came out of nowhere really. He was fine and then he was in the hospital and he never recovered. I had already been struggling with depression and increased anxiety before my grandma passed, but it kind of made it all worse and I started going to therapy every three weeks in August and it’s been a great help in dealing with everything. I actually had an appointment the day after my grandpa passed away and it was the first time I was able to just cry without feeling like I needed to be strong for everyone else. So my positive experience with therapy definitely influenced Chris’s experience.
I’m sure there is more but I’ve already written a novel-length answer to this question so I think I’ll end it here. haha
Thanks for the questions Ashley!