So I'm guest posting it today over at Rabia Gale's about writing short, long, and tight.
Oops! I said it out loud. Ah, well. These are from arliddian. Comment if you want your own.
1. What is your favourite sweet treat?
Cheesecake. Bar none. With kiwis on top.
2. There's a fire in your house! What are the first five things you try to rescue?
My family. My writings. My PDA and backup hard drive. Oh, and underwear/change of clothes.
3. A time machine is malfunctioning and is going to deposit you in the past, with no way to return to your own time! You have just enough seconds to set the time period of your choice. Which would you choose and why?
Five years ago. I'd get back to where I am a whole lot faster and be able to finally have two of me. Answer to prayers, y'all.
4. What is your favourite thing to do in summer?
Write. What else?
5. What kind of music do you listen to when you need inspiration?
Celtic. Christian contemporary, mostly pop and acoustic, none of this rock and roll stuff they're calling CCM anymore. More celtic.
6. What are your top five tips about writing original fiction?
Focus on stories. Forget the writing; the writing will take care of itself. Focus on what inspires you. Read. Live through your character's eyes. Know what makes people tick. Know the stories you love and how to get from point a to point b with as many complications as you can throw on there. It's about stories, people.
Fuel selectively. If you fall in love with something (I'm looking at you angsty ships!), it will come out in your stories. Pay attention to the things that unleash your inner fangirl. Fangirl your own fiction. Make it yours. Explain it. Juggle it around until you're satisfied. Love AU (hereby go to original) but make their lousy, crazy canon nonlogic into real logic without changing anything from canon at all—if you can. Learn how to feed your own muse.
Never assume anything. Know your characters, the rules of your world, and a handful of outside factors to fling at them. The rest will be unpredictable—even to you, but inevitable.
Know the difference between voice and tone. Your voice is your writing. Your tone is your story. And for goodness sake, don't read out of tone when you're working. Keep the reading and the writing separate if you're tone-hopping.
No matter what you do in writing, what choice you make, it's fine. As long as you do it consistently.
7. How much do you think you have changed in the past two years?
Goodness. Much. And nothing. Some days, I know. Some days, I don't. I try to stay in the present, know what I want to change and where I'm heading. I'm not a journey person. It's about the destination, and that's where my eyes are fixed.
I have always preferred to write chronologically. It suited my brain's play-it-out approach but caused all manner of bogdown, since it did not suit my speed of creation and crossreferencing proclivities.
I scribble down snippets, all the time, bits of dialogue I want to remember, ideas for stories and what-have-you, but a lot of snippets I never got around to writing down.
Thus, it finally occurs to me to stop trying to change my habits and leverage them instead. I'm giving myself the freedom to scribble a book. Not write it, not plan it, just scribble it.
I've taken a bunch of scenes and ideas and started new files on my PDA for each individual scene. I write what I have, whether that's a line of narrative or dialogue or just put this here.
You know what? I think it's working.
Mood is one of the most important keys to inspiration and tone in fiction. I have to be in the right mindset and mental voice to produce something that flows with the rest of the story. I always thought I was quite normal and accomplished this by music or rereading my own work.
I was wrong.
I read. Copiously. Excessively. Sneakily. Sideways. In every minute I can cram another word in. Late last week, I was reading and it was inspiring me on my own fics, per usual, and it finally clicked what was wrong with Safe and why I wasn't able to get the next chapter written. There is only one fic I read that puts me in the right mood to write it.
Stories inspire me. When I wrote In This Wood, I kept the movie Hoosiers almost on permanent checkout from the library because it always put me in the right space. When I was writing fanfiction like crazy, I would work on different fics based on what I was reading. No wonder I can't seem to keep myself limited to a project or two until they're done. I'm cutting my own legs from under me every time I pick up a book.
So, as promised, I'm about to do some serious violence to my readerly self and make reading lists. While writing certain projects, I am limiting myself to reading only the things that inspire it. And the Bible. I don't care if it inspires story or not—I need that one.
I'm picking a Christian fiction novel under one pen name, a Liana novella/novel, and a fanfic: Safe. These are it. I can still update backlist, but this is my current frontlist.
How does reading affect your writing? Does it change your mood or writing style? Does it make you want to write something totally different or use different characters?
So there's something to be said for this writing by numbers game, though sometimes I wish it was easier to make cooperate. Let's talk muses, those silly parts of ourself that define which aspects of our minds are actually in use.
