Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
I sure do, because it was the first taste I had of the great feeling of letting your imagination run wild on paper. It was a free-form class assignment, and I chose to invent a tale of a wolverine and a reindeer, which included the wolverine dropping from a tree onto the back of the poor victim. As I was writing this tale, I lived the wolverine's life and hunger, and blood-thirstiness, and really lost track of pen and paper as the story flowed out of me. It was a good story. Too good, as it happened, because not only did the teacher accuse of plagiarizing but she convinced my parents, too, that I must have stolen the story from somewhere--no child my age could possibly. The only person who believed that I had written it was my maternal grandmother, much to her credit (in my eyes).
What is your writing process?
It depends on the length of the story. If a short story, I just like to dream up a situation and then kick the protagonist into motion while I hang on to his coat tails and take good notes, living his or her life. If a longer story, I usually end out doing a fairly detailed outline just to make sure that the story arc actually makes sense, both logically and aesthetically.
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