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21 Questions: A Meme for Writers
16 years ago
(Nabbed from Poetigress and TakeWalker)
1. When did you start writing?
2. First drafts: Handwritten, typed, or some combination?
3. Do you keep any kind of notebook or writer's journal, and if so, what kinds of things go into it?
4. Do you set any quotas for your work (number of words per day, number of hours per day, etc.)? Why or why not?
5. Are you most comfortable writing short stories, novels, or something else?
6. What's your favorite kind of story to write?
7. Talk about a story of yours that was easy to write and one that was difficult to write, and why.
8. Which of your characters is closest to your sense of self? In other words, who do you most identify with in your own work to date?
9. What work are you most proud of right now?
10. What do you feel your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer?
11. Name a few writers who have influenced you or your work in some way.
12. Talk about something you've written that you later found embarrassing for some reason.
13. Talk about the earliest stories you remember writing. What were they about?
14. If you knew you would be successful, what would you most like to write?
15. What inspires you?
16. How many projects do you tend to work on at once?
17. Who reads your work before it's released to the public? Do you have beta readers, a critique group, etc.?
18. When you're not writing, what do you do for fun?
19. Advice to other writers?
20. What are you currently working on?
21. Share the first three sentences of a work in progress.
1. When did you start writing?
2. First drafts: Handwritten, typed, or some combination?
3. Do you keep any kind of notebook or writer's journal, and if so, what kinds of things go into it?
4. Do you set any quotas for your work (number of words per day, number of hours per day, etc.)? Why or why not?
5. Are you most comfortable writing short stories, novels, or something else?
6. What's your favorite kind of story to write?
7. Talk about a story of yours that was easy to write and one that was difficult to write, and why.
8. Which of your characters is closest to your sense of self? In other words, who do you most identify with in your own work to date?
9. What work are you most proud of right now?
10. What do you feel your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer?
11. Name a few writers who have influenced you or your work in some way.
12. Talk about something you've written that you later found embarrassing for some reason.
13. Talk about the earliest stories you remember writing. What were they about?
14. If you knew you would be successful, what would you most like to write?
15. What inspires you?
16. How many projects do you tend to work on at once?
17. Who reads your work before it's released to the public? Do you have beta readers, a critique group, etc.?
18. When you're not writing, what do you do for fun?
19. Advice to other writers?
20. What are you currently working on?
21. Share the first three sentences of a work in progress.
2. My first three drafts are always on legal pad in pen.
3. I don't keep a writer's journal per se-- it seems so intentional and I'm very superstious about talking to myself about doing something rather than doing it. I take a lot of notes in my legal pads and keep them.
4. I don't set quotas on working at writing; life interferes.
5. I most comfortably write poems. Somehow I feel empowered to complete a thought in that medium-- even when they're epic in length and quite a struggle.
6. I like writing erotica and surrealist and/or referrential fiction.
7. Most of the pornographic epic poems I've written, e.g., What Egleez Forbids, Epyllion of Cocoa and Drumtalker, were easy to write because for obvious reasons pornographic scenarios come vividly to mind almost fully developed.
8. I've intentionally worked on a pseudoautobiographical character who's a Woolly Mammoth Shaman.
9. I'm fairly proud of an epic poem about Cacomistles and a mythical plant, that I wrote last year, "Coming of Age as a Jill Cacomistle."
10. I find verse and realistic dialogue easy, and I have fun with character development, but I'm lousy at plotting, and at really finding the zest in a good plot of my own that finds closure.
11. The writers who've most influenced me would I suppose include LeGuin, Hesse, Herbert, Nabokov, and Adams.
12. I'm significantly embarassed by nearly all the pornography I've written.
13. The earliest stories I wrote were mostly vapid science fiction space opera stuff.
14. If I knew I'd be successful, I'd most like to write a book of philosophy reconciling reason and imagination and putting the lies of religion permanently to rest, for the broad reading public.
15. What most inspires me is: The Dream. I use the definite article here improperly.
16. I usually work on one or two things at a time.
17. Unfortunately I don't have anyone with any real interest in reading what I write.
18. When you're not writing, what do you do for fun?
19. Advice to other writers?
20. What are you currently working on?
21.: Three sentences, you say?
Hadrian, the non-euclidean geometer
And antiquarian to whose prodigious erudition
Even educated oneirometers defer
Is not an academic myth. In fact, his circuition
In the middle decades of his life, of everywhere
That's bounded by the midnight oceanum veritatem
Founded modern cartographic art. But his repair
To Aancalar's environs in his twenty-second autumn,
Autocthonous, the very foothills whence his forebears spring
Not to mention bloodlines like th Ushers, Groans, and Carters
Was formative for him in ways of which he's never spoken.
19. Accept that prosody is something real and specific. It may not be your thing, but it is exactly: speech that is given rythm in order to be more memorable, and to penetrate through to the imagination more readily. All the usual facts of verse really do matter, really are powerful, are not at all just one idiosyncratic corner of "all things that can be done with language."
20. See 21.
*smiles... you are such a good poet hun - I am truly envious...
V.