So there is a literary ponzi scheme going around. I thought I dodged it, but alas, Kris Ramsey pinned it on me! So, here are my answers. Enjoy!
1 – If you could time travel and steal somebody else’s novel/short story/film for yourself, what would it be?
Oh dear. I never like these kinds of questions, because if I’d written someone elses’ book, then it wouldn’t be the same, would it? I like the book I like because I like the way it was written, as much as I like the plot and the characters and the worlds.
Having said that, I would choose Anne Marie McDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Goodmorning Juliet) because there is some high-level meta-storytelling skillz going on there and that play is the absolute bomb. It’s what made me fall in love with Mary Sues and meta-narratives.
2 – What writing sin do you actively have to struggle against in your own work?
Uhg, Boring Sentences and Trying Too Hard phrasing. It is a constant struggle to try to find the balance between:
“No,” he said.
and
“No,” he wailed, clutching at the soft vee of his chest hair and throwing his perfectly chisled chin back to howl his grief through the word, like a majestic lone wolf in the freezing subarctic wild.
No really. It is.
3 – Pick three writers, past or present, that you would want to have dinner with. Why those writers?
Jane Austen, because she was a witty, clever woman and we could giggle over the fact that people still think that she was writing just love stories. (Satires. SATIRES.)
Mary Shelly, because she was fascinating, feminist, and sometimes so miserable. I would like to make her smile and laugh, if only for one night. (Also, Polidori, Byron and Shelly in one room? Please. That is one lovely helping of Romantic Poets.)
I would like to have dinner with a writer in the future who claims my own work as an inspiration to them. I want to know why it is important to them, what it meant to them to read it, what it helped them believe or accomplish. I want to create work that stays with people, lives in their hearts and in their minds, and I want to learn how to do it better. I want to change the world for the good with my books, and I want to figure out how to achieve that.
4 – You have forty-two words, write a story.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t dark and stormy, or no hay-wagons, or that someone had let Netherfield Park. It was that her story had started and she hadn’t noticed. There was a perfect opening sentence somewhere back there and she’d missed it.
*
In revenge, I tag Ruthanne Reid, Laurie McLean, and Elize Morgan.
You have one week to answer the questions above and choose three people to keep this going. You can ask different questions, but I liked the questions I was asked, so I’m sticking with them.
