Heather Abella
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Thank your for responding, Here's my questions What inspires you to write your stories? How old are you when you started writing stories? What advice do you have for writers? That' all thank you very much Lois Mcmaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold
To answer in order, I have begun to believe writing fiction is actually a high-level dissociative disorder. Besides that, certainly the material for a story comes from everything the writer has ever done, read, watched, or experienced. What forms that material gets shaped into will depend on the writers' internal psychological needs, or interests, and what material they have encountered. (Starting, at the most fundamental level, with what language/s they speak, and what forms of story their culture presents them with.)
I suspect imagination begins almost as early as consciousness and memory -- what children have not played "Let's pretend!"? -- but certainly I was making up scraps of story by grade school, and writing them down by junior high. My writing that was good enough, and original enough, to make the grade of professional publication began in my early 30s, after I had acquired more learning and life experience to draw upon.
More (than you wanted to know) may be found in my nonfiction collection Sidelines: Talks and Essays, or in the interviews section on the Vorkosigan wiki, http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Auth...
I direct all aspiring writers over to Patricia C. Wrede's blog, http://www.pcwrede.com/blog/ , for one of the more sensible writing-advice sources on the internet (go back to the beginning, read it all), or for the compact version her book Wrede on Writing.
Ta, L.
To answer in order, I have begun to believe writing fiction is actually a high-level dissociative disorder. Besides that, certainly the material for a story comes from everything the writer has ever done, read, watched, or experienced. What forms that material gets shaped into will depend on the writers' internal psychological needs, or interests, and what material they have encountered. (Starting, at the most fundamental level, with what language/s they speak, and what forms of story their culture presents them with.)
I suspect imagination begins almost as early as consciousness and memory -- what children have not played "Let's pretend!"? -- but certainly I was making up scraps of story by grade school, and writing them down by junior high. My writing that was good enough, and original enough, to make the grade of professional publication began in my early 30s, after I had acquired more learning and life experience to draw upon.
More (than you wanted to know) may be found in my nonfiction collection Sidelines: Talks and Essays, or in the interviews section on the Vorkosigan wiki, http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Auth...
I direct all aspiring writers over to Patricia C. Wrede's blog, http://www.pcwrede.com/blog/ , for one of the more sensible writing-advice sources on the internet (go back to the beginning, read it all), or for the compact version her book Wrede on Writing.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Shane Castle
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Influences on the imagery in Cazaril's, erm, epiphany? I suspect Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception'.
Strangeattractor
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
What helps with figuring out how to tell a type of story that isn't told often? For example, when you were working on the Sharing Knife books and realized you had set up demographic and long-term problems that your characters would tackle in books 3 and 4, what helped you come to grips with how to do it? How did you bridge the gap between wanting to write a story with an unusual shape and actually doing it?
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