Today, I'm turning the blog over to Ami Blackwelder, author of She Speaks to Angels and The Mers. Please relax and enjoy her musings.
How do authors come
up with ideas for writing?
As a reader you
must often wonder how us writers come up with our ideas for books. While I
can’t speak for all authors, I can speak for me. I imagine most writers have
similar processes, but this surely does not encompass every writer.
Sometimes we are
impassioned by political or social events and this leads us to form a seed of
idea, a theme we want our story to have.
Sometimes the story
comes from the redundancy of story lines on TV and in books, and a simple
desire to read or see something different.
Sometimes the
stories come to us in dreams.
Where ever the
initial spark, the story then must undergo a process of plot development and
character development.
When I wrote The
Hunted of 2060 the character April came first. Her identity as an alien
offspring with the ability to shape shift was the catalyst for her character.
The story developed around her character.
Yet when I wrote
She Speaks to Angels, the story or plot lines came first and the characters
grew out of the story. A story can be written anyway and it really depends on
what you are comfortable with and how the story comes to you.
Often story tellers
say we are merely vessels, a medium in which a story unfolds itself. Perhaps
the stories dwell in another realm, in another time and they reveal themselves
so that the voices, the emotional truths, can be heard and witnessed and
learned.
Stories often speak
to authors, and then so do characters. When I wrote The Day the Flowers Died, a
romance set in 1930 Munich, Germany, I wrote the story because of the intense
emotional dream I had which compelled me to write their story.
Often writers use
an outline and each scene might denote a chapter. But many writers veer off the
outline as the plot thickens and the
characters develop a mind of their own. As a writer, you often have to be
flexible enough to allow your characters free will so to speak.
But many writers
write without an outline, sometimes the story is in their head, or they develop
the story as they write. It really boils down to what works best for you as a
writer.
I have always been
a story teller and I love my readers, because they get to be the ones to hear
my stories. I often try to cater to what they might like, but I stay true to my
voice and my passions. When my passions and reader interests mingle, then I
have done a good job.
My new release coming April 6th exclusively on kindle is SHE
SPEAKS TO ANGELS.
---YA ANGEL THRILLER---
Don’t fret nook owners and others without ereaders. The kindle
app can be downloaded for free on your PC, MAC, iphone, ipod and such and the
novel is DRM FREE, so nook and other ereaders can simply convert the mobi into
epub and read it on their device.
Thanks so much for having me!!
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