Oh Why Not (Writing M-Thing)

[dawn_felagund]

As seen at heartofoshun's LJ and apparently done by half of everyone ... I have been working hard during the day to get ready for the school year but all work and no play makes Dawn a dull girl, right?

Pick the number(s) of the questions you'd like me to answer about my writing. (Like Oshun, I love talking about writing. Most writers do, I think

Comments

[binkaslibrary]

5, 6, 7, pls.

[dawn_felagund]

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

Boromir. I have always written 99% Silmfic, and when I write LotR, it tends to be Elf-based. I never had any urge to write about Gondor.

Then last year, during MPTT's Yule Fic Exchange, there was a participant who had claimed a prompt by keiliss but appeared to have fallen off the face of the earth, missing check-ins and failing to reply to messages from the mods. This was not the only instance of this happening, and we were facing a possible FOUR (!!) missing stories, including this one. (It turned out that most of those authors turned their work in on time. But there was part of a day when things got pretty scary.) We mods were scrambling to see who could pinch-hit at the last minute, and when I read Kei's prompt, it just clicked. It was an amazing prompt, the kind that can get you interested in part of the story you'd never been compelled to think much about before. I was quite pleased with how the resulting story Víressë turned out, and it was the most fun I'd had writing a story

[samtyr]

16, 23 & 25 please. :)

[dawn_felagund]

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

Not really. I was very afraid of writing Feanor when I was a new writer. For one ... wow, what a powerful voice I needed to do him justice! But this wasn't helped by the fact that every time I embarked on writing him, something weird and disastrous happened to the chapter.

Nowadays, I've mostly abandoned the practice (so common in my early fandom days) of treating "muses" like real people who become angry and withhold their help, etc.

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?I've drawn a lot on my experience/knowledge as a calligrapher and illuminator in writing Tolkienfic. Some of it is just having the kinds of minute knowledge that adds a touch of realism to writing: how inks and paints are made, the proper terms for various materials, the process by which books and manuscripts are made. A lot of it is experiential, though, things that one only knows when one spends a lot of time playing with paint and ink! :) Details like Maedhros licking his quills and

[dawn_felagund]

From the darkness at the end of the path, a shape emerged; the shape had broad shoulders and a wide, beautiful face with amber-colored eyes. There was dirt on his hands, for he’d been sowing new life within the earth even as his husband had been taking it within the forest: Nandolin. He carried an old tin lamp, the kind that held a candle quivering within it. All of the lamps of the house had been smashed and their stones taken, and we blinked in surprise at the light

[heartofoshun]

1, 18, 24

[dawn_felagund]

1) is there a story you're holding off on writing for some reason?

I have multiple stories more or less written in my head (or at least with enough strong images and emotions that I could write them easily in a sitting) from later in the First Age. The problem is that I haven't gotten through parts of the First Age yet where important things happen that I don't want to spoil later on down the line! Which means I really need to get my butt in gear in picking up the AMC series, I know ...

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?Writers who are masterful in their use of imagery and language always inspire me and make me want to write. I can often tell the quality of a story (in my opinion) by whether or not it makes me want to write my own

[shirebound]

#15!

[dawn_felagund]

15) why did you start writing?

I think the time I tried to stop writing illustrates better the answer to this! :) I honestly cannot remember beginning to write. I always made up stories, and once I learned to write, putting them on paper was so seamless that I don't remember starting to do it, although I remember some of the stories still. I have always made up stories in my mind, playacted them with anyone I trusted enough to allow into that part of my head (mostly my sister and my husband at this point), and sometimes written them down.

I tried to stop writing once in my mid-20s, disillusioned by trying to write literary fiction (when I was always pulled more toward speculative but explicitly told by teachers and mentors that this was a waste of my talents!) and trying to publish this half-assed stuff I was writing. Unsuccessfully, of course; my heart wasn't in it.

The drive to eventually write based on The Silmarillion once I read it a couple of years later was almost a compulsion, and I started writing what I would later learn

[shirebound]

Thank you for sharing that. :)

[indy1776]

2, 9, and 11.

[dawn_felagund]

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

Pretty much everything I wrote before I started writing fanfic! I still have a lot of it, either in the quintessential notebooks maintained by our generation of young writers or on server backups of my files made by my dad. I don't quite have the courage to read any of them and hope I'm never famous enough that anyone wants to! :D

It was typical awkward young-woman writing: often romantic with fumbling sex scenes and some very overblown language. (Which is saying something since my language still tends toward "overblown.")

9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?Art and solitude inspire me