QUESTIONS ABOUT WRITING

What piece of advice do you want to give to beginning authors? / If you could go back, is there anything you’d want to tell your beginner author self?

Oh, pfoe, well, a piece of advice I’d like to give is that there are going to be so many times where you just want to give up, when you feel like there is no point in doing this at all or that nobody is ever going to read it or care about any of the effort you have put into your work, but that you should continue regardless. If I had given up on any of those rough days, just deleted all the files and never looked back at this story, I would never have come to this point in my life where I feel comfortable calling myself an author because I have published chapters out here on my website. And there’s no shame in taking it slow or doing things at your own pace. There have been days when I didn’t write at all, didn’t illustrate at all, or just indulged in sketching my characters just hanging out together and having a good time because that’s important, too, and you can have fun in writing your story. I have heard that writing means suffering, but I don’t agree, ‘cause if you put in the effort and work on your story consistently, those little moments of effort build up and what seems like very scarce amounts of effort on a daily basis add up to hours upon hours in a year and to a project you can look back on and be proud of for creating.

 

I recently had a moment where a friend asked me how my characters had changed from their original design to now, and without really thinking about it I took the first drawing I had ever made of my characters and I put the redesigns of the respective characters under them to make the comparison (see banner of this Q&A part). And when I’d done that and sent the final result to my friend, it hit me that I had actually finished creating the redesigns I had set out to do in 2019 and that all of those character studies, discarded sketches, frustrated days because I couldn’t get the essence of the character right like I had them in my head and hours upon hours upon hours of sketching and refining and reworking had finally paid off and that what seemed to be the impossible task of redesigning all of my main characters had come to a close one and a half years later and I could now recreate that original lineup I made as an excited and admittedly overly ambitious teenager first bringing these characters I hold so dear to life and look at it and see just how far I’d come- so don’t give up just yet and keep going.

 

Why are you writing? Just in general, cause sometimes ideas just stay an idea but what specifically made you want to write it?

 

What do you want to achieve with writing your book?

 

How thoroughly do you outline your book?

 

How did you decide on the pacing of your book?

 

What helps you with developing characters? Like traits, looks, etc? What makes the process easier? What’s the dos and don’ts you have for developing characters?

 

How do you really get into the head of the character that you’re writing?

 

What scenes do you find most difficult to write?

 

What is the end goal or final emotions you wish to leave your reader with after the series is finished?

Solace.