Writing asks: 5, 7, 11, 19!
What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?
Quite possibly Mark these days, to be honest. He and his desire to empathize with and understand everyone and put up with too much are very relatable.
What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?
Minimalistic description, straightforward, to-the-point, not-very-interesting prose, close third person limited, adverbs/semicolons/dashes depending on at what stage in my fanfic career you’ve caught me. I think in general that’s what other people say about it too.
What do you envy in other writers?
I envy anyone who writes beautiful, fluid prose. Putting into words what is happening in a story has not ever been one of my talents; I wrestle with most every sentence of narration I write, and to the extent that I’m at all okay at it today, it’s because I’ve struggled very hard to practice it for eighteen years. My writing looked like original TQftL until I made painstaking conscious decisions to do it differently. Today I think I can mostly get the point across without being too painfully awkward about it and I think that’s about the best I can hope for.
Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)
There are a lot of turns of phrase that crop up a lot in my writing, thankfully mostly reasonably mundane ones that hopefully don’t draw too much attention to themselves. People do a lot of pressing lips together and love to say things “without looking at” the person they’re talking to. Things are constantly happening either “quickly” or “slowly”. Lots of people taking deep breaths (every chapter but three from chapter 32 of TQftL onwards contain at least once instance of “deep breath”, including all of them from chapter 56 onwards). The word “looked” is everywhere, and when it’s not “looked” it’s “stared” or “glanced” or “gazed” or “fixed his gaze on” or “squinted”. The scenes I’m seeing in my head just have a lot of people giving each other looks or looking away or looking back at them okay. That one Tumblr post about “Look,” he looked, lookily, it’s me.
If you wanted to parody my writing style it would just be a bunch of people looking at each other and breathing with some adverbs sprinkled on, honestly.
