Sweet Venom Blog Tour - Tera Lynn Childs on inspiration and writing!

Sweet Venom Blog Tour

I’m lucky enough to have Tera Lynn Childs on the blog today! With the release of her latest YA novel Sweet Venom now available in the shops, I asked if she would write post and tell us all a little bit about where she gets her inspiration from. And also what her general day-to-day writing process is like for each book. Hope you enjoy! Over to Tera.

 

Tera

My ideas come from everywhere. Ask a writer where she gets her ideas and chances are she’ll reply, “Where don’t I get my ideas?” I’ve found inspiration in a reality TV show title, another book, a newspaper article… everywhere. Getting ideas is the easy part. The hard part is turning them into books.

The process is a little different for each book, but it generally goes something like this:

·         Think up with most brilliant idea ever.

·         Brainstorm. Make notes about scenes and characters, plot points and black moments, kisses and side kicks. (Note: This usually involves lots of post-its, index cards, highlighters, and white boards. And lots of gazing out windows, staring at ceilings, and drinking caffeinated beverages. This part is the most fun.)

·         Decide that enough time has been wasted on thinking.

·         Finally start to write.

·         Write blissfully for about two and a half minutes.

·         Come to a difficult word/sentence/paragraph/scene/all of the above.

·         Start at blinking cursor until inspiration strikes or coffee runs out.

·         Push through the tricky part using self-bribery, Write or Die, or sheer willpower.

·         Keep writing until it feels there are 50 pages written.

·         Check page count.

·         Realize there are only 12 pages written.

·         Get frustrated and stop writing.

·         Feel guilty for not writing.

·         Make character collages instead. Cutting up magazines and pasting images onto paper is way more fun than writing. Plus, productive!

·         Get inspired by finished character collages. Remember why idea seemed so brilliant in the first place.

·         Go back to writing, pushing through the horrid parts and making notes about how to fix them later, until The End.

·         Print it all out and start revising from the beginning.

·         Revise and repeat until novel is as close to brilliant original idea as humanly possible.

·         Click send.

 

Some books make this process easier than others. And some make me want to pull my teeth out with a tweezers rather than write another page. Sweet Venom was somewhere in between. Writing three first person characters in a trilogy (with three individual stories and three overarching stories told across three books—eep!) was probably the hardest writing project I’ve tackled yet.

Every time I got frustrated or stuck or generally freaked out about the scope of it all, I pulled out my character collages and reminded myself just who Grace, Gretchen, and Greer are and why I’m telling their stories.

You can check out her character collages below:

 

 

 

How awesome are they? Thanks for sharing this with us Tera - and for those of you who haven't yet had the chance to read Sweet Venom, what are you waiting for? It is another faboulous, light hearted read that that is full of fun, adventure and fiesty heroines! Deffinetly one to check out!