Ask the Author: E.L. Ward
Answered Questions (7)
E.L. Ward
I usually deal with it by being blocked for a long time. BUT... again, the best advice I can give is Brandon Sanderson advice. He did something like a forty minute video on combating writers block. His thesis: "Write anyway".
E.L. Ward
Getting to talk with people about what you wrote. Seeing how they responded to it. Especially, of course, if you manage to move them in roughly the way you intended.
E.L. Ward
I'll have to get back to you on that, since I'm still one myself. The best advice I can give right now is to regurgitate something Brandon Sanderson said, essentially: "Write the books you want to read but no one else is writing." Seriously, if you want good advice, look Sanderson up. He's got wonderfully frank, conversational, buddy-buddy youtube videos that are full of nice nuggets like that.
E.L. Ward
I am writing a new book cooperatively with a good friend! It's a great writing experience... different in nearly every way than writing my first book was. I'm learning a lot and having a good time doing it. If you want to learn a little more about it, you can find a blog entry I made here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
E.L. Ward
I force myself to do it. I'm still hoping I can be a storyteller, and this is the best medium I have tried so far. I had originally wanted to make films, but that is a job for hundreds of people. I am only one person... which, as it turns out, is all you need to write a book. So I learned to love writing.
Inspiration for storytelling as a whole can come from anything. One thing I recommend most highly is listening to good soundtrack music. Zimmer and Williams and Giacchino and Shore and stuff. That can give you some mighty cool ideas!
Inspiration for storytelling as a whole can come from anything. One thing I recommend most highly is listening to good soundtrack music. Zimmer and Williams and Giacchino and Shore and stuff. That can give you some mighty cool ideas!
E.L. Ward
There are zillions of ideas in the book, and they are borrowed and adapted from too many source inspirations to mention. But the Theme I want to address... if not so much in this book, then at least in the series as a whole... is very personal. Life is frustrating. In my attempts to understand why, the most profound thought I was able to arrive at was this: There is what I want to do, and what I am destined to do. They may at least overlap at points... or they may not. I am constantly stuck with knowing what I want... but I am no more likely to know what I am destined for than anyone. And there would seem to be two major ways of dealing with these truths. I can either look at destiny (here called Purpose) as the nasty thing that is always jumping in the way of me getting what I want... or I can look at what I want (here called Will) as that curse of distraction that is probably the chief thing stopping me from discerning my Purpose (and hopefully finding a way to make peace with it). As with so many other things in life, you tend to get stuck in the tension between these two polarized ideas. Feeling that I - and people in general - should try to hold ourselves to a high standard, I naturally argue that Purpose is the more noble force. There is no excuse for always going after what you want: Unchecked, you become so self-serving as to be a menace to society. But I also wrestle with the question: Why should anyone's Purpose be so irreconcilably different from their Will that they find their entire life to be an unbearable misery? And how would one resolve such a conundrum? Is it really possible to fundamentally change your Will? Or must you simply resolve always to act in spite of it, no matter how much it wears on you to go against your own grain, year after long year? These are the questions I want to write about, but not answer. I am not wise enough to answer them. It is just a perplexity that means something to me, and that I thought could be the core idea of a rather significant body of writing.
E.L. Ward
I'm dusting off all the "Junie B. Jones" books by Barbara Park. They are a STITCH! Only light reading will do, at this point. Output takes too much time to allow for much input.
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