Winners of The Bardic College's awards share their thoughts, creative processes and exclusive insights into the stories they have so artfully crafted.
Interviews from winners of;
- The Rune Awards 2018
1) What inspired you to write your story?Where did you get the idea for it?
Feeling Middle-Earth first started with a single one-shot meant as a contest entry, which is when I discovered my love for writing in that format. I must say listening to the audio books led me to dwell on certain sentences, and those were the sentences that inspired a few one-shots. One of the most prominent sources, though, was @NoctusFury 's LOTR prompt book. Reading through so many prompts at once is what finally inspired me to put it all together as a collection. Some ideas also came from the prospective titles of existing one-shots after it was noticed that they fit perfectly for a different character.
2) What is the biggest motivator that keeps you writing your story? What is the biggest roadblock that might make working on it difficult?
My biggest motivator happens to be my own emotions. When I stumble across some sentences, be it in books or fanfictions, they lead me to ponder the emotions that lie hidden behind them- their history, the consequence, everything- and I realize that I just HAVE to write it down. The biggest roadblock is insecurity. While writing a Fan fiction, I realize that there are expectations and facts that I must adhere to- characters being portrayed accurately, and so on- and that leads to me having multiple drafts that go unpublished. One more is that I want these stories to actually reach the reader and make them think twoce about the characters as PEOPLE- not just a pawn in the plot. This means that I must speak of something that they can relate to, so having to think from so many perspectives at once makes the work slow, consequentially giving room for doubt.
3) To what extent does your story tell itself (i.e. how much deliberate planning goes into plots and scenes before they are written)?
