50+ Questions of Literary Enquiry

Final Questions Part 1

Have you ever written a story before?

I have written several short stories, often for school, and a lot of my stories actually are developments on those short stories; some of the short stories I write do make a little bit of an appearance in some of the stories I’m writing. But I haven’t really wrote anything that’s extremely long, often because I don’t have the time to do it, but I’m hoping that once I finish school, I’ll have time to write a proper story.

 

What is the longest story you’ve ever written?

As I’ve said, the stories that I’ve written have always been short stories, so most of them aren’t longer than...I’d say five A4 pages. I think the longest story I’ve ever wrote was back in 1st year, I think I wrote a, like, ten page story. That was I think the longest thing I wrote.

 

Would you consider going on internet forums, passing around select ideas in hopes of inspiration?

Not really. I don’t like passing around my ideas, because I have a dreadful fear of someone stealing an idea and me being unable to prove that it was originally my idea.

(That’s why I say a select idea; it doesn’t have to be...)

I know, but a select idea is something someone can take and use it, and I don’t want anyone doing that.

 

Would you consider going to your friends or family?

I would consider going to my family for ideas. I trust them, so I don’t think they would steal my ideas, and a lot of them have a lot of genuinely good ideas for things I can do. In fact, one of the characters did have some inspiration from my sister, and I also would go to my friends for the inspiration as well, because they can give me some genuinely good ideas as well, and criticism as well, I’m always accepting of those.

 

There are a lot of recurring themes, character types, and plotlines in your stories. Are you determined to get this type of plot out for the public to see, no matter what it takes, or is this all just a coincidence coming out from your subconscious?

Um, with the recurring themes, there aren’t that many recurring themes for my stories they actually have a unique theme for each of them. But character types, I would say that the characters are based on people I know, with the main characters often being based on myself, so the similarities between them would often overlap, because of the fact that they are based on the same people. And the whole thing with a villain and a hero fighting in an awesome climactic battle, is really because I think that’s how stories that have a good villain and hero should end, they should have a climactic battle between the two. And of course, having a strong female character in it that’s not all girly, or the complete opposite, sort of, the stereotypes that are usually portrayed, I like that. I don’t like stereotypes. So, I like making characters that are different from the stereotypes. The characters with anger issues are because that has a little bit of comedy in it, because you can have fun with the characters with anger issues. And I think every story should have a comic relief character, someone to lighten the mood really, to make the story a little bit less serious. Even in a story that’s meant to be dead serious, it should always have a character that lightens the mood just a little, OK, because people don’t like dead serious stories, and the ones that do, even they take joy at a little bit of humour.