For the writer ask meme: 8, 9, 18, 24
8) favorite genre to write
Fantasy, mainly; urban fantasy in particular. I used to be super into high fantasy when I was in middle school, but somewhere along the way in high school and college I transitioned to mainly urban fantasy. I blame Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman for that. I also like dabbling in horror/ghost stories, though I’m still new to that.
9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?
Lots of things, whatever works at the moment; listening to music is a good one. What exactly I listen to depends on what I am working on; as a result my playlist is kind of all over the place. Looking at pictures online also helps; Pinterest is a lot of fun in that regard. It just helps me get a feel for what I want to do with my story.
Probably one of the best ways to get inspired is by observing people and events around me; you can get a lot of information and ideas just by watching and listening. I’m a pretty quiet person when I’m not around friends, but I am pretty good at watching and listening. It could be something as simple as seeing people interact while I shelve books at the university library. Anything can lead to somewhere.
I’ve also found that a lot of stuff I read over time just accumulates in my brain and ideas go from there, though not without additional planning. For example, I’ve always been interested in Russian folklore, but never really wrote about it. But last year I was able to talk to a couple of immigrants from Russia and we exchanged folklore and I took lots of notes afterwards; it was very interesting getting the perspective of someone who actually came from the country and grew up hearing about Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless, instead of just reading books on the subject. Now I have something in the back of my head, but I don’t know what exactly it is, yet. But it’s there, waiting, growing…
18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?
Way back when I was in middle school, I started reading A Series of Unfortunate Events and really liked the writing style there; some of my first stories show that. Later on in the same year I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and that influenced me a bit, too. But I think the biggest influence on my writing in the long run has been Neil Gaiman’s work. Rick Riordan was a recent influence as well, mainly in how from him I got the idea of starting a story from the second chapter and filling in the important information later on. That comes in handy a lot in short fiction.
24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?
Oh yeah, constantly! And it leads me to learn about some… interesting stuff. For example, due to the plot of my last finished story, I’ve learned the different ways that a teenager might hide their pregnancy from their parents.
I’ve also recently learned about Russian naming conventions, like how the gender of the person determines how their last name is formatted, and the whole thing about patronymic names. I needed to know that for a character in my story.
