New Guest Post Series Coming Up

I loved the last Guest Post Series about why people wrote the Genre they wrote.

Now, I'll be hosting a brand new guest post series where we will get an insight into Why People Write? I've already got some guest authors lined up, and I will be sending a few more requests. If you would like to participate (and I would love for you to do it), send me an email at lostwanderer5 [at] gmail [dot] com, and I will send you the questions.

This series will start on Friday 10th of September, and there will be a post every Friday for the foreseeable future.

Hope you all are entertained, inspired, amused by the series.

Read and Be Inspired

If you don't know who Annie Dillard is, you are missing something that you don't even know you are missing. I had to read "The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" for a class at University. I didn't just enjoy that book, I appreciated the beauty of the language (even before I had decided to be a writer), and I read that non-fiction as if I was reading fiction - hooked. To give you an idea of how amazing it was for me to like that book, I should also point out that I hate insects - all of them - and I am not particularly big on nature details as a subject. You are talking to a city girl through and through. But this was beautiful. This was the kind of language that makes you realise why you love language. This essay from Alexander Chee describes what it was like to have Annie Dillard as a teacher. Here is a little sampler: Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science, it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I’m writing. Talent could give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent, promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident at the beginning to a writer, and I learned that from her.

A Dose of Inspiration

This is a scheduled post, while I enjoy a little city break in Berlin. Hope this massages your muses a little:

• In most branches of human endeavor there is said to be a right and a wrong way of doing things. In writing there can only be your way, whether you pose as an aesthete, or whether you frankly admit you write for money. - Jack Woodford
• Do not hesitate to give your hero lusts of the flesh, dark passions, impulses to evil; for these dark powers, fused with their opposites - the will to good, the moral impulses, the power of the spirit - will do to your character precisely what the opposite powers of fire and water do to the sword blade. - William Foster-Harris
• Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick. - Red Smith
• The novel of a thousand pages begins with a single scene. - James Scott Bell
• When you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. - Wilson Mizner
• Let your characters have their way. Let your secret life be lived. Then at your leisure, in the succeeding weeks, months or years, you let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting, you relive it. - Ray Bradbury

AW July Blog Chain

I am participating in AW July Blog Chain, where each person asks writing related question to the next person to answer on the blog. Adina's question for me: What is your favourite subject to write about and where do you get your inspiration? Not necessarily a favourite subject, as that would be too limiting for a writer, but my favourite genres to write are Fantasy and Indian fiction. I have tried writing various different things and so far these are the two I am focusing on, as those are the stories that call strongly to me. Indian fiction simply because of my background. I feel a natural affinity to those stories. Fantasy, because I love it. I love reading it, I love dreaming it. Fantasy offers the ultimate escapism as well as an opportunity to wonder what kind of world one could create. Though I think possibilities are endless in any form of fiction. I have an interest in science fiction too, but I am not quite ready to write it yet, though it is also a definite possibility for the future. My inspiration - it comes from anywhere and everywhere. For example, last weekend I was chatting to my mom over the phone. She said something, and later on that evening I thought what if that actually happened, and voila, I have an idea for a novel. It needs developing, but I have got the main theme. And if I manage to get it plotted, that's what I will be doing for NaNo. For novels, I never lack ideas. For short stories it's a different matter. I have only tried to write short stories with markets in mind, which means following guidelines, and I have really hard time coming up with ideas. But since I have decided that short stories aren't my thing, it doesn't matter. So inspiration for novel - that's always there, because I get inspired from all different sorts of stuff. I have started a story from a name, from a situation. My WIP 1 started when I wanted to explore the lives of three best friends who are moving into adult lives. For a fantasy novel, I thought of a family, then a city they would live in. And then the plot came. I think inspiration is just a matter of thinking WHAT IF. If you ask the questions, answers will come. My question for the next person in the chain, upsidedowngirl - you are a freelance writer. Do you enjoy the subjects/articles you write, or do you pick what's available as a job? What difference does it make on the level of your motivation and enjoyment if you have to write about things you are not passionate about? Is it the act of writing that's important, or the act of writing what you want?