As per Renee Stevens' pinned post in the Lounge, this is a good way to start off a blog 😋

Authors:

Have you experienced writer's block? If so, what helped you get past it?

Yes. Unfortunately I believe the best way is to force yourself to write. First write out the dot point list of what your chapter will contain, and then sentence-by-agonizing-sentence grind that baby out of you like your bones in a meat-grinder.  It hurts and it's supposed to. Even though its a strain, in my experience the writing doesn't end up reading like a strain so it's worth it.

If your writer's block is about inspiration for a new story I recommend finding multiple inspirations, a situation from your past that was signficant to you as well as travelling somewhere.  The aesthetic and the feeling of a town or place can be enough to colour your writng.

Do you use an outline?  Why or why not?

Absolutely. You can't write a great story in any other way.  I have written stories without outlines for the purposes of fun, but I consider these amateur stories.

What was the hardest story for you to write?  Why?

Anything that was personal came out rather easily, I suppose because I haven't experienced anything too traumatic to write about. So the hardest story to write was a long fanfiction of mine that I started to lose interest in but because it had a lot of invested followers I felt obligated to continue, though updates were slow.

Do you base characters off of real life people? Are they completely fictional? Or some of both? And how does it affect your writing of said characters?

I absolutely have based characters off real life people.  Especially very minor characters like teachers. Sometimes I base individual characters off multiple real life people. It's hard to say whether any character is completely fictional, because they're probably subconsciously based off one or more thing.  To my knowledge basing characters off real world people doesn't affect my writing much, I can separate the created character from the person in my mind.

What first got you into writing?  What was your first story about?

In primary school I used to write Star Wars fanfiction with original characters, as did my younger brother. We were creative children.  In high school I started uploading stories to sites like FictionPress and FanFiction, creative writing assignments and my friends helped with this.  I've been in love with writing since.

.

I also have experience with poems, reading and editting. I'll probably answer those questions in later updates.