30 Day Writing Meme: Catching Up to Day 16

July 18, 2016 § Leave a comment

Since I missed a few due to being offline for the weekend, here are three for catch up.

Day 14 → How do you map out locations, if needed?

Oh, yes. It’s worthwhile to map out anything from a room to a world. Rooms, houses, and streets help me visualize how the character moves through the scene.

It’s not just a kitchen, Kiyomi’s kitchen has a round center table offset from the refrigerator/freezer. Proceeding counterclockwise is the back door, a window with some furniture under it (a pie safe if I think about it), about five feet of wall, then the doorway to the parlor, and so on.

With terrain, I have to know what my characters know about where they live as well as what they don’t know. I know the miles of sand that frighten Farasa as she is abducted through the desert, and I know where her abductor is taking her.

Day 15 → A writer you admire, whether professional or not!

Kam Oi Lee, Jess Faraday, Helen Angove, and Wendy Barron all been tremendous help, inspiration, and support over many years. Lauren Dane is so successful after all her hard work and perseverance, I’m happy to have known her when she was starting out.

As a reader, I have a long list of admired writers. Ursula Le Guin, because I feel that her writing expands my mind. Lois McMaster Bujold because she is masterful with cross-genre. Michael Marshal Smith because when I read his work, I want to write! Connie Willis, because her layered stories show how interest in everything creates story ideas.

Day 16 → Do you write romantic relationships? Are you good with those? Do you write sex scenes?

I don’t write romance (the genre), nor are romantic relationships focal in my writing, yet how can any story about people not have love in it, and be worth telling? There is so much variety to how love is expressed. Focusing on romantic love, to me, feels limited, restrained. We have seen so many of those stories!

The romantic relationships I write about are never a simple boy-meets-girl. I don’t know, myself, what shape that mythical creature is.

Am I good with those? I hope so! Sometimes it takes a lot of drafts to get it right.

I do write sex, smut, physical relationship and expression. It’s sometimes very necessary, in order to understand the characters and fullness of the story. A story is already such an intimate thing. With a modest character, someone who wouldn’t kiss-and-tell, showing that aspect of them can connect them to the reader. With an exhibitionist character, I can’t avoid writing their sex scenes; they demand it! (Whether or not those make it through to the final draft is another matter altogether.)

#email posting

Cris de Borja