Category: AuthorsAnswer

Author answers 23: What is your favourite point of view and tense to write in and why?

This is a fun question, because until not so long ago, my answer would have been: you what? Point of view? Tense? Errrr… It was only when I’d finished my first novel and introduced it to the harsh and unforgiving glare of an online critique group that I discovered just how little I knew about writing. That book, I discovered, was written in third person limited, past tense. With my second book, I moved on to first person past tense, and there I stayed for several more books. What’s the difference? With third person (’she climbed the stairs’), there’s an immediate distance between the reader and the character. The reader is on the outside, observing the character’s actions. With first person (’I climbed the stairs’), the reader is right inside the character’s head. Now, it’s perfectly possible to convey a character’s inner thoughts and feelings in a vivid and visceral […]

Posted August 13, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Author answers 22: Barring a zombie apocalypse, is there anything that could make you stop writing?

Wow, it’s more than a month since I posted anything here! No, I’m not dead, folks, just embroiled in summer holidays. So lots of catching up to do. On to a long-delayed authors answer question: could anything make you stop writing? Of course. Death, serious illness, a whole swathe of troubles affecting me or my family would do it. Writing is an indulgence, for me, but it’s not something I regard as an inseparable part of my life. Making up stories in my head, yes, that’s me, it’s something I’ve done all my life and it will probably be the last thing to go when senility overtakes me. But writing those stories down? Fun to do, and even more fun to publish, but not essential to my well-being. Footnote: Authors Answer is the brainchild of blogger Jay Dee Archer, of I Read Encyclopedias For Fun. You can read the answers […]

Posted August 11, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Authors answer 21: What is your ultimate goal with your writing? Fame? Fortune? Changing the world?

This is going to sound like a cop-out, but I really don’t have a goal except to get the books out there in the world where they can be read. Fame? No, absolutely not! {Shudder} I’m the ultimate reclusive writer. I haven’t even told most of my real life friends or family that I write. It amuses me, actually, to meet people on a regular basis who have no idea at all about it. We have the usual back and forth — how are you, what have you been up to, oh, nothing much — and I could say, well, I published my fourteenth book the other day, so bit of a celebration, and I have a promotion on the box set and then there’s the audio… But I never do. Fortune? A little bit more money never goes amiss, but I wouldn’t want enough to need accountants and investment […]

Posted May 5, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 0 Comments

Authors answer #20: What element of writing (setting, characterization, plot development, etc.) do you find most challenging?

For me, it’s definitely the plot. I’m a pantser, which means I just start writing without much thought in my head of where the story might take me. I usually start with a character, or a group of characters, in a particular situation, and I just turn them loose, so to speak, and they make their own decisions and steer the story. The setting grows around them. But, while this kind of ‘discovery’ writing, where the author discovers the story at the time without any forethought or planning, can lead to problems. You can find your characters have got themselves into a deep hole and really can’t get out again without miraculous help, and that’s a big no-no. There’s even an expression for it: deus ex machina, (the god from the machine). This doesn’t happen to me very often, since my characters tend to be sensible chaps and chapesses, who […]

Posted February 12, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 19: How did you get into writing and what made you select your genre of choice?

I didn’t exactly ‘get into’ writing. For me it was never something I just took up, in the way one might decide to take up golf or macrame or yoga. I’ve always been ‘in’ writing. At school, I loved those free-for-all creative writing exercises. Not the ‘what I did on my holidays’ dullathons, but the ‘imagine you’re a fairy’ stuff. Not that there was much of that after primary school. Secondary school was far too serious for such frivolities. So I turned to writing my own comic strips, and (later) extremely bad fan fiction, although I didn’t know then what it was. A few years later, when I lived abroad and couldn’t work, I bought a manual typewriter and bashed out most of a Regency romance. Why Regency? Because that’s what I was reading at the time, trawling methodically through the entire Georgette Heyer catalogue. For a few years, the […]

Posted January 14, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Authors Answer #18:  Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author’s published book? How would you change it?

Authors Answer #18: Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author’s published book? How would you change it?

Wow, long time since I did one of these! The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant There are very few books that get me so mad that I want to throw them across the room, but this is one of them. The author wrote a perfect historical romance, well-written, well-researched, the era brilliantly conveyed and the characters fascinating. She then destroyed it utterly by bookending it with a prologue and last chapter which turned it into something else altogether. I suppose the intention was to elevate the book from the realms of mere romance to historical fiction or even literature, and I daresay for many, possibly most, readers that worked fine. My book group, for instance, for whom this was a monthly pick, liked it well enough and most saw nothing wrong with the ending. But for me, it ruined the whole story. It took a main character who had, […]

Posted December 2, 2016 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 17: What authors, styles or intellectual movements have most influenced your writing?

Authors Answer 17: What authors, styles or intellectual movements have most influenced your writing?

For the fantasy, I can’t honestly say that anything has really influenced my writing. I haven’t read a vast amount in the genre, and what I have read is mostly of a type I wouldn’t wish to emulate. Game of Thrones is too dark and nihilistic. Robin Hobb is downright depressing — beautifully written work that I hated. The authors whose work I most admire — Mark Lawrence, Daniel Abraham, Glenda Larke, Guy Gavriel Kay — are so brilliant I feel embarrassed to call myself a writer. My own work is such a mishmash of genre tropes that if someone asks me: “What other books are like yours?” I genuinely can’t answer. This isn’t a boast, by the way — it’s a Very Bad Thing not to be able to place your own books in the pantheon of genres. It’s embarrassing, and the result of ignorance of the genres rather […]


Authors Answer 16: What are your favorite online resources/websites for writers?

I haven’t done any of these for a while, so duck while I lob my backlog out there… This is an interesting question, because the resources needed vary depending on where you are in your career path. The information you need when you first begin (what exactly makes a compelling protagonist?) is very different from what’s wanted after you publish (where can I advertise my books?). So here are some sites that have been useful to me as I developed my writing and publishing skills. For writing: Mythic Scribes When you’re in the early stages of writing – your first book, or perhaps still dabbling with world-building – what you really need is a community of like-minded people. Even when you’ve read all the craft books, it can still be tricky to apply the advice to your own work. Should I introduce my antagonist earlier? Is this a punchy opening […]

Posted August 15, 2016 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 15: Has your writing been influenced by new media?

This is a long question, so here it is in full: All of us write prose fiction (unless I’m mistaken) in an era that has an astounding variety of storytelling media. Has your writing been significantly influenced by any works of newer media? I think most authors writing today are heavily influenced by one particular form of media, and that is movies (and its baby brother, TV). Perhaps the advent of photography before that had some influence, in that ordinary people could record themselves, their surroundings and their lives, or send postcards to each other, so that authors no longer had to spend quite so much time describing the scenery. But movies and TV have  pushed authors into a more visual mode of writing, a snappier, scene-driven creation process. In even more recent times, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games with their set-piece battles and ever-more-challenging opponents […]

Posted June 25, 2016 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 14: When coming up with a new story, what comes first, the character or the plot?

Authors Answer 14: When coming up with a new story, what comes first, the character or the plot?

The character, always. Most of my books have started in a very simple way, with a character in a situation. Then I start looking around for more details of the setting, more characters, the background to the situation. Then, and only then, do I let the characters loose and see what sort of plot develops. I always think it must be tidier to start with the plot, to know that event A is succeeded by event B and so on, right down to the grand finale of event Z, and then construct characters that will show that plot off to best advantage. Such a system leads to properly rounded character arcs, and neat resolutions, and pivotal moments that occur at precisely 37.5% of the way through. Properly structured stories must be built this way, I assume. It’s just not the way I work. For example, The Plains of Kallanash was […]