Ask the Author: Jennifer Fales
Answered Questions (4)
Jennifer Fales
Start. NOW. Go read Bukowski's poem "air and light and time and space" for perspective. There will always be excuses, but that's all they are. You are the only thing stopping you. You want to know what I do? I travel with a laptop. Before that it was a pen and a notebook. And music on my iPhone to block out anything but the stuff in my head. Many people have admitted later that they saw me writing somewhere and I looked so intense they were afraid to interrupt me. Mission accomplished! —Think about it: Breaks and lunches, cancelled flights and missed trains, time spent bored out of your gullet, making awkward eye contact with strangers in a doctor's office...these are all opportunities, gifts of time given back to you. Use them. Describe what you see around you vividly if nothing else comes to you. Capture sights, and sounds, and smells. Turn yourself into an idea factory, with lots of material to come back to and use when the muse strikes.
Jennifer Fales
You control what you create — the flow of time, people and their actions and reactions, and everything in between — from the time of day and the color of the sky to whether someone wins or loses, or lives or dies. If you could do that in real life, you know what the world would call you, right? A god.
Jennifer Fales
There's a mantra that I try to use, especially when I get stuck writing, editing etc. —sight, sound, smell. It's that simple. Immerse yourself in the moment, in the world you are building. Sometimes it helps me to think about an aspect of the place rather than forcing the scene. If I'm stuck on what happens next —what actions the character takes — I think about objects in that space, what people are wearing and doing around the main event, what kind of noises there are and where they come from, that kind of thing. It puts you into the place and time, feet on the carpet, hearing the air conditioning whoosh from the vents, looking around with your character(s) and noticing the world around you.
Jennifer Fales
For The Robusta Incident (and the Robusta Corporation), it all started with horrible tasting "eco-friendly" paperless coffee in a break room at work. Essentially caffeinated sludge in a sack that mixed with hot water and spat out a tube at the bottom of the machine. Someone, at some point, invented the idea, tasted it, and said, "Ummm...yeah, this is close enough to coffee, right? Let's market it." And as for Howard Danishefsky... well, he's my alter-ego, pure and simple. I've always wanted to be an evil genius, you know.
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