Ask the Author: Andrea Joan
Answered Questions (6)
Andrea Joan
I am planning on September!!!! I will keep everyone up to date. I just want to make sure it is perfect so everyone gets a finished product that they feel is worth what they paid!
Andrea Joan
Wine, my Dad, and reading excerpts from some of my favorite books....did I mention wine?
Andrea Joan
Currently I am working on After The Break, which you can now fine listed on Goodreads. But I also happen to be working on something else that I am very excited about, but unfortunately can not go into too much detail in at the moment because it is still so new. But trust me this one will be great!
Andrea Joan
First is the obvious; just start writing. Write something everyday, no matter what. I once heard one of my writing hero's Kurt Sutter say that he writes at 4 hours everyday, even if what he writes ends up being complete shit he makes sure to do it. Second piece of advice is continue to read books about how to write. Even if you think you know it all, that you spent countless hours in college or creative writing classes learning this craft, you can still learn more. I read at least one book a month that will help me learn to be a better writer. Books on Scene Structure, Dialogue, Character Development, and on and on and on. You can never know too much. Last piece of advice is know your genre. When I finally decided to write a CR book I read a little over 100 books in this genre & read the reviews from readers on those books. Why you ask? Because I wanted to know what the average reader of the Romance genre loved and hated and wished for when reading them. I wanted to tailor my book to what you, the reader, would love (and yes I know you can't please everyone but you can try and give the people what they want). I wanted to put the time and effort into writing something deserving of the readers hard earned money. I never want someone reading a book I wrote to feel cheated.
Andrea Joan
There is no limit to what can be created. I love being able to see an idea for a new story from just the simplest of things, or being inspired by certain people. It is a profession that literally has no limits or rules and one with endless possibilities and I love that.
Andrea Joan
I use to try several methods of this; meditation, taking a reading break, drinking a huge glass of wine. None of these things seem to work or show any results. Finally I had this idea that I would just start keeping journals of my main characters. If I was feeling blocked I would start journaling as that character. Just random thoughts they may have or what they did that day. I found that started helping my creativity and I was just writing for the hell of it with no end game, so the block wasn't there. Eventually I would feel the ideas to start to come to me again and even ended up using some of these random thoughts in my MS.
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