Project Athena | Author Spotlight

High_Priestess_Elena

When it comes to negative feedback, and by that, I mainly think of non-constructive feedback, I do first of all try to find something in it that can be constructive. If I can't do that, then I try to be happy that at least something in my writing motivated them to read and comment on it. What I think also is important about feedback that might end up upsetting you is to never answer, if at all, when emotional. Always sleep on it and look at it later with a fresh pair of eyes.

What do you do when you encounter writer's block or feel stuck in your story? How do you get unstuck and keep writing?

It depends a bit on why I get stuck. I would say that the most common thing is that I don't know how to continue. I would identify myself as a pantser, though I do still outline a little. However, that outlining is limited to maybe 5 major plot points and a clear idea of the MC's backstory. So there are times when I get stuck because I don't know how to continue. In those cases, I brainstorm with a friend. I don't actually usually expect her to answer me or give input when I brainstorm, but doing it "with" her still helps to get all the thoughts floating in my brain organized. If it's a block due to more of a burnout, then I know I need to just push through. I have tried letting it rest and wait it out, but that's never worked that great for me. So I basically force myself to write until I'm out of the block, and yeah, those chapters that are forced never turn out that great. But that's what editing is for!

Can you tell us about a character from one of your stories that is particularly meaningful to you? - What inspired this character, and how did you develop their personality and backstory?

Oh gosh, I find this question extremely hard to answer, not because I don't know the answer, but because the answer is certain characters from books I've written that will never be published, well, anywhere, but I'd rather pick a character from something that is or will be published on Wattpad. The reason why those characters are meaningful to me, though, is because they are my favorite characters from the first book series I ever wrote. It was a series I wrote on from when I was 14 until I was maybe 20 and it meant, well still means, a lot to me. But now that I have more experience writing and have gotten better at it, there's too much editing needed to be done for me to ever want to show it to the world.

If I am to pick someone from what is or will be published on Wattpad, it'll have to be my second female lead in volume number 4 of "The Five Cursed Witches". A lot of this is because she is a character whose story I felt passionate about writing before I even came up with the idea for this series. She is my retelling of a Greek myth and it's one of those myths that has me angry because a woman is punished for a man's wrong-doings while the man walks away without any consequences. What has me even more upset is that she is almost always depicted as a villain when she appears in modern stories with little, if any, regard for her backstory. So my desire to write her is to give her the story she deserves and show her as more than the monster that she is almost exclusively described as.

Can you tell us about a particularly challenging scene or chapter in one of your stories, and how you tackled it?

The ending of "Zoe, the Witch of Innocence"... Honestly, when I wrote it the first time, I really had no idea how to go about it and it was so, so bad. It became boring and anti-climactic and just blah. To fix it, my first step was to write the bad end-fight and just finish the story. I do live so much by the idea that you can always edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank page (Jodi Picoult) in my writing. So once I had finished the story I started tackling other things that had popped up while writing that I knew that I needed to edit. For instance, there were two of the characters that were basically the same character in the first version, so I knew I needed to either remove one of them or change one of them. As I made my decision on that, my idea for how the end-fight would happen completely changed also, so really in the end it wasn't so much editing as that I completely removed what I had written and wrote a whole new scene. But if I hadn't forced myself to write that bad scene first, then I would have been stuck much longer without finishing the book.