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.

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