This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Lois Walden, author of Afterworld, a gothic tale set in the Deep South, recently answered a few questions for our Novelicious readers.
Can you tell us a little about your average writing day?
My usual process is to spend a long time researching, thinking, note taking and planning. Then figuring out the beginning and the end. After that it’s just filling in.
When you are writing, do you use any celebrities or people you know as inspiration?
People I know, people I’ve met, people whose stories interest me. Not celebrities, real people, real places. As a fiction writer, I fictionalize what I have experienced.
What is your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why.
I’m not gender specific about fiction. If you ask me about women writers, I’d say Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and Virginia Woolf.
What was your journey to being a published author?Long, hard, peculiar and late. Like my life.
What do you think is the biggest myth about being a novelist?You have to be able to see a whole world and create viscerally through a physical neuro-emotional and spiritual understanding of the world that you are going to enter, as the writer and the characters.
What advice can you give to our readers who want to write a novel of their own?If I can do it, you can too. You need to figure out why it’s important for you to tell a particular story. Don’t worry about what people will think. Do it because you have to.
What are you working on at the moment?
Another novel, very different from the other two. It’s an unconventional love story, told by an unconventional narrator, about two unconventional star-cross’d lovers in an unconventional world.
Thanks, Lois!