A little warning before you read on: This post will have spoilers after about halfway through, but for those of you who have not listened to the Bright Eyes Podcast yet, I have written up a little introduction just for you to get you interested. (After you’ve listened to the latest episode, you’re more than welcome to come back and flail over theories with me. Cheers!)
Today, this blog will be blessed with its first ever author interview! I don’t know about you, but I’m super excited to share with you what K. L.+Pierce has to say about writing, her book, Two Lives, Three Choices, a revision, and future publication.
Hey look! The wonderful Hannah Krynicki tagged me in her post for the Liebster Award. She’s an awesome person and writer with brilliant ideas and thoughts, so please, check out her blog and give her a follow. Thanks Hannah!
So, tags have rules. I need to answer 11 questions, list 11 random facts, tag 11 people and give them 11 questions to answer. You’d think the person who created this tag really liked the number 11. Now, on to those questions from Hannah.
A writer can write something with a certain theme, idea, or message in mind, and yet ten individuals can listen to or read that something and each of them will be impacted in a different way. Different people, depending on their own perspectives or walks of life will take something away that was totally different from the writer’s intention.
People may argue that writing a song with a specific message or theme that can have multiple potential perspectives is achieving the height of the art. I think that success comes from delivering a message in a song or story that everyone who reads or hears it not only identifies the writer’s intentional theme, but also notices other ideas and messages that they take away form it based on their personalities, current life situations, perspectives, etc. And I think that that is achieving the highest point of success when writing anything. I want to impact others with the message I weave into my story or song, and yet I want listeners or readers to take other things away from it that I didn’t put there that inspires or encourages them or causes them to think about things I never even thought of associating with the thing I wrote.
If you’re a writer, you may at some point have set a word count goal for a story you were writing. If you’ve ever been a NaNoWriMo participant, you know the real struggle and pain and the hard-earned reward at the end of the month once you finally reach 50K. Sometimes writing for word count goals can be useful for people but personally, I’ve found that there are also some unhelpful and fruitless qualities about the exercise.
Psychology has always been a fascinating subject of study and scrutiny for me. Only last week I identified the source of frustration I constantly felt about people: I just want to understand them. What goes in each of their little minds that causes them to do, say, act, feel? What thoughts and emotions and beliefs make them stand for something, hold a particular perspective, feel a certain way? What is it like in your funny little brains?
Of course, the answers to these questions have to do with other things besides psychology. In fact, a person’s psychology is shaped and built on that human’s early life, their childhood, the parents that raised him/her. And history and life circumstances impact a person’s psychology even more than we think.
Bethany Jennings, a wonderful blogger, Christian writer, and homeschool mom (wow! talk about being an inspiration) has this hashtag called #WIpjoy, in which she comes up with a question for each day in whatever month it happens (usually three times a year). The last WIPjoy was in January, and I blog posted about my WIP Fiction’s Lie. This month, however, I’m switching over to Netherworld, because it’s been around way longer than any other story I’ve been working on, and it’s my favorite to think, write, and talk about.
So, without more ado, here are some answers to some favorite WIPjoy questions concerning Netherworld. I did tweet a few of these, but failed majorly to answer them all on Twitter.
