365 Interviews

Interview 101: Jisabella

1. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

I am a sixteen year old high school student who has many different interests including writing, reading, digital art and photography (occasionally), competitive swimming and rowing. I’m constantly indecisive and tend to be interested in things that have zero relation to each other, just to make life more difficult for myself!

2. What inspired you to write?

To be honest, probably reading. I’ve always preferred my own imagination to playing with (when I was younger) kids my age, and then talking to teenagers my own age, so I was super quiet and shy and read a lot. Now, I’m a lot more outspoken but I still have a passion for stories and writing, it’s the reason my writing is available on Wattpad and that I don’t just show it to friends. My writing feels extremely personal to me, so it felt safer to post online than to tell people about it. So now I can get feedback and further my skills without having a heart attack every time someone reads it.

3. Do you have a specific writing style?

I would certainly say so. My writing tends to be very descriptive and sometimes abstract, I focus more on character development and inner-turmoil than just surface things, and there tends to be a lot of narrative in it. That being said, in my works you will find a darker plot with tragedy as an undertone to the plot paired quite often with suspense, mystery, action and adventure. I focus generally on one character predominantly, but throw in other POVs when necessary to the progression of the plot.

4. How did you come up with the titles of your stories?

Beautifully Damaged was originally called ‘White Light’ when all it was, was a disembodied prologue that wasn’t meant to go anywhere, let alone become a novel. What named it wasn’t all that special, really. I was chatting with some friends on Skype a couple of years ago, also kind of writers, and one of them said something that contained the phrase “beautifully damaged”, and I immediately informed her that I would be stealing her words to use as a title and she was fine with it. So I guess that was just a little bit of spontaneity, right place right time kind of stuff.

Beautifully Betrayed came about because it was a sequel and I wanted to have an obvious link between the two, and one of the main themes in the novel, once I resume writing it, will be Betrayal, though it’s not nearly as transparent as it seems. It just sounded cool and I stuck with it.

Survival was another spur of the moment idea; I got tired of reading a lot of the Werewolf stories based totally on romance, as I’m not much of a solely Romance reader. I prefer a plot filled with the kind of things I write about, full of conflict and struggle, even if romance plays a part in it. So I knew that I wanted the core of the plot to be based around something darker that lent a lot of room for intersecting plots and many varied characters, so I based it around survival and called it that.

Instinct is the sequel to Survival so it was named for a similar purpose.

5. Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Mainly, in Survival, I just wanted readers to see the inner struggle of different characters with different personalities and different backgrounds but placed in similar situations. We all know that in stories there tends to be that borderline person who appears bad but turns out to be good in the end when they sacrifice themselves for the greater good, but I wanted them to see why that might or might not happen. What leads people to make the decisions they do, and how it affects everyone else. It was mostly just me wanting to explore these different ideas. I don’t think that there was a driving message throughout it, just a challenge to see how realistic I could make it, how I could write things from wildly varying points of view.