Message Board Topic For 6/9

[Comsie]

Honestly, we have a lot of really good authors in this room reading this right now! And probably some that might be waiting to take a shot at writing something themselves someday! So I want you guys to talk about YOU this week!

 

If you're writing a series or story, either for GA or for school, or just at leisure, even if you never shared it with anybody else (Realize, however, that by even MENTIONING this situation, you are inviting HUGE amounts of pressure from the rest of us to make you post it somewhere so we can see it! Hehehe!)..talk to us about it!

 

Tell us what inspired you to write, what your particular 'method' is, what you like, what your story was (or is) about, where your characters come from, where we can find it online. Advertise a little! I want you guys to just step up to the podium and give us your experience with writing and reading in general.

 

And if you haven't written anything before, but are a dedicated reader, let us know what you guys like and what you look for. What pulls you into a story or series and makes it enoyable for ya! Cool?

 

Talk away! ::Zips Lips::

[Guest Natureslayer]

http://www.voy.com/17262/9688.html

 

That's the link to the story I wrote. Basically, the story began without a purpose or even a direction. It started as an exercise in atmosphere, trying to create a certain feeling with the words. I didn't conciously begin to write until maybe the third page, and that was only after leaving what I had written sit for 3 months or so. After that, I looked at what I put on the page and started to think about where I wanted the story to go, what theme I wanted to present, what basic idea I wanted people to know. It was then that I realized how much better the story worked in second person as opposed to the first that I was using previously. With that idea in mind, the entire theme became much more prominent and powerful, especially the universality of it with the inclusion of the purposefully androgynous love focus. The whole story took me about 6 months to fully write and edit, with the title being the last thing I changed. In my other stories (all unfinished) and in my poetry, theme is all-important, even more so than plot and character and even style. When I write, I need to have a purpose in it. I've tried writing purely for plot... but it always morphs into something with a definite idea behind it. So, basically, that's my whole philosophy behind my personal writing.

[Graeme]

I started out as a reader. I had found a number of stories that had 'touched' me, but I didn't have any inclination to write until I read some narrative in one story, where the lead character was reflecting on how he lost a couple of friends when he came out, but for opposite reasons. One rejected him because he's gay. The other rejected him because he hadn't trusted him enough to tell him earlier.

 

That got me thinking on the impact of someone's coming out on those around him. I realised there wasn't any stories (at that time) that covered that subject, so I thought I'd try to write one. Before I started, though, I visualised one scene and tried to write it down. If the written words didn't have the impact that I wanted them to have, if I couldn't give that scene the emotion I wanted, then I was going to stop. As it turns out, I was happy with what I wrote, so I went back to the beginning of the story and started to write. I had a couple of people offer to edit and review the first couple of chapters, and that was that....

 

I hadn't wanted to write something that had been done before. I didn't want to do 'just another story', so until I had what I considered to be a unique slant on a topic, I wasn't interested in writing. Even after I started, I tried to make my stories as unique as I could. Now, I'm not as fussy. I'll use story ideas that are fairly well known and just put my own spin and style on them, but when I started I was scared to be considered to be a copy-cat. If an idea was 'original' I wasn't going to write it.