F: What’s your favorite book? Favorite author?
I truly, truly can’t pick just one. The Lord of the Rings has haunted me ever since I first read it as a kid. I was already primed for a life of sci-fi/fantasy, but it sealed the deal. C. S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy turned me toward a love of strong interior narratives and stories that explore the psychologies and dark corners of the characters’ minds. Considering I’ve written no fewer than three papers on it, I’d say it had an influential effect on me. ^_^
But I had three bookcases full of my favorite books in my room, growing up. Those were just the ones I wanted to keep close. They included the entirety of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (a collection to which I proudly continue to add), Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, which opened me to the vast possibilities of fantasy, various selections from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion mythology, which redefines the scale of ‘epic’… Yeah, I’ll just stop there.
O: What motivates you to write?
Questions, usually. This might be why I find myself drawn more toward fanfic. I’m inspired by the plotholes, the character paradoxes, the empty spaces in the narrative. I want to fill them, to find out for myself what happened in the gaps.
W: What’s your biggest pet peeve in writing?
Things I do that drive me nuts… Oh! I HAAAAAAATE it when I write too generically. It’s…actually a stage of my drafts. I tend to write from a pseudo-internal POV at first, less in the character’s head and more paying attention to their physical environment and choreography. So then I read through and everything feels kind of cliche? Less what that specific character might do or think and more a generalized idea of what someone might do or think in that situation—the sort of thing you’d pull off a list of ideas rather than something individual and personalized.
That stage drives me nuts, though. Especially since it’s often not till near the end of working on a story that I really click into the POV character’s head and end up rewriting swathes of the story.
I also hate writing stories that I feel like somebody’s written before. If I can’t think of something unique for me to do or say with the story, then it feels like a waste of time to me. This goes for all sorts of things—genre-level (write wingfic? Okay, but everybody’s done that, mine’ll just be yet another copy) down to scene-level (“Stupid porn scene. EVERY PORN SCENE EVER IS LIKE THIS, IT IS BORING.”)