Ask the Author: S.K. Paisley
Answered Questions (4)
S.K. Paisley
If you want to write, you should do it. Have the confidence to start and don’t be afraid to think what you’re writing is good. I think if you have ambitions to write and the drive to take pen to paper, that’s 90% of it. The rest is hard work, perseverance and the energy to polish, polish and re-polish what you’ve written for as long as it takes you to be satisfied with what you’ve got in front of you.
S.K. Paisley
I take a lot of inspiration from my favourite books, films, TV Shows, paintings. When I was writing "Take a Breath", I also had a playlist of ten or twenty songs that I used to listen to, to get me into the right mood when I was writing. When I see or hear other people creating beautiful things and putting them out there in the world, it makes me want to contribute in my own way too.
S.K. Paisley
I’ve started my next novel and I’m trying to get a first draft done just now. It’s about a girl who moves to live on an island in Scotland (undecided as yet), with her new boyfriend and his strange mother who is recovering from illness. She starts to find out some quite disturbing secrets about his family history. Isolated, and completely removed from her own life, her mental health begins to deteriorate.
S.K. Paisley
"Take a Breath" started out as a play, which I had to do as part of my degree. It was about the disappearance of a girl called Lena, who appears as a ghost/dream. Her sister lures Lena’s ex-jailbird-boyfriend, Stu, to her home to find out what happened to her.
I wasn’t very happy with the final result, the plot and characters were completely undeveloped. I decided to work on it further, to try and extend it into a full length play but I found it too difficult as the plot elements just wouldn’t come together. That’s when I decided to start "Take a Breath" again, this time as a novel. I had the idea that if I started writing prose, the plot would work itself out because the structure is a bit looser than a play and there’s more room to play with the story. It was a scary decision at the time because I jumped headfirst into it, not really knowing where it would go, just going where my thought took me that day, developing it as I went along.
It took me a long time to finish. With the first draft, I got to 60K and realised I didn’t like where it had ended up, so I had to cut it right back to 30K and more or less start again. I can’t say I recommend writing a novel this way, next time I’ll start with the plot in advance.
I wasn’t very happy with the final result, the plot and characters were completely undeveloped. I decided to work on it further, to try and extend it into a full length play but I found it too difficult as the plot elements just wouldn’t come together. That’s when I decided to start "Take a Breath" again, this time as a novel. I had the idea that if I started writing prose, the plot would work itself out because the structure is a bit looser than a play and there’s more room to play with the story. It was a scary decision at the time because I jumped headfirst into it, not really knowing where it would go, just going where my thought took me that day, developing it as I went along.
It took me a long time to finish. With the first draft, I got to 60K and realised I didn’t like where it had ended up, so I had to cut it right back to 30K and more or less start again. I can’t say I recommend writing a novel this way, next time I’ll start with the plot in advance.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more