Ask the Author: E. Ellis Allen
Answered Questions (6)
E. Ellis Allen
To combat writers block, I will rearrange paragraphs or scenes to see if it will get my momentum back. However, sometimes I simply work on something else that's creative for a while, such as refurbishing furniture, until an idea sparks.
E. Ellis Allen
The best thing about being a writer is change; a new world created to explore, a new persona to develop, and a new perspective to be researched and understood. The best thing about being a writer is the pure selfishness that creating something allows you.
E. Ellis Allen
My advice to aspiring writers is to write, write, write. Write through the isolation and frustration. Write until you understand it, the world you live in and yourself. Write because nothing else makes you happier and because it connects everything to what you are.
E. Ellis Allen
I'm currently working on a short story called, Garbage Island. A band of people, the broken, the orphaned, the deserters have found a new life in a massive landfill, the size of Oklahoma, during the last stages of the apocalypse. Five years later, the world has begun to stabilize around them, unbeknownst to the landfill residents, until one day two men enter the dump and find a young girl.
E. Ellis Allen
My inspiration for my writing usually comes from a thread of an idea; a news headline, a street name, a what-if question. That thread then works into a particular scene in my head, complete with the setting and a character or two. I'll rework the idea into story form. Sometimes, I can find several stories from one thread.
E. Ellis Allen
I got the idea for my most recent story from a biography I'm working on about a German Soldier, who served during WWII. In doing research about soldiers of the Axis, I came across an account of a Wehrmacht entering a city in Belarus, occupied for some time by Germany. The soldier described piles of human remains lined up along the city streets. I wrote a scene of what it might have been like for that soldier.
When I found out that The Utah Horror Writers Association was accepting submissions with the theme of "It came from the Great Salt Lake," I reconfigured my original scene with the setting in Belarus, to a short story set on Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
When I found out that The Utah Horror Writers Association was accepting submissions with the theme of "It came from the Great Salt Lake," I reconfigured my original scene with the setting in Belarus, to a short story set on Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
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