shadesofbrixton asked: orange! indigo! white! ...was i supposed to pick just one?
Orange: who is your greatest literary inspiration, and why?
AUGH, ONE?
Okay. Getting thinky here.
Homer. My first and foremost dead literary boyfriend. Homer is why I’m incapable of writing anything that’s not epic. Homer is probably why I’m obsessed with homecoming. Homer is not necessarily why I’m drawn to true ensemble stories, but his casts of thousands help. He isn’t necessarily in every story I write, but he was one of the ones who really got me started on this path. He was one of the first storytellers who moved me so much I had no other choice but to respond with art. So if anyone counts, it’s probably going to be him.
Indigo: what do you think is the greatest flaw in your writing?
I was super hoping someone would ask me this question, in part because I kind of always want to, but I worry about asking it, and I shouldn’t. So.
I tend to write the same story without realizing it until I’m hip-deep. I also write my protagonists quite close to myself, and to other characters I’ve written before. I also know that I can have a hard time building emotional vulnerability into characters; I’ve often worried that Imogen, for instance, is too overwrought, so I scale her back, and then someone asks why she’s so stone-cold. I’m not as comfortable with emotional truth as I’d like to be; I love my concepts and the abstracts I play with and, often, the ways I can come up with to screw my characters over, but I get blocked with it comes to actually allowing human emotions to be fully formed and dynamic. My greatest fear is bloodlessness, which I think is fueled a bit in part by my reliance on bouncing off of already created characters.
