Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I started writing more with my voice in mind.
I write, having seen what's happening already in my head. I see it as a movie, and I'm just writing down what's happening in front of me.
I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.
I enjoyed writing for someone else's voice, but I wasn't very good at it.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.
Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.
I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.
I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.