Author Insight: Intimidating Ideas

Have you ever gotten an idea you were afraid to write or didn't feel ready to write? Did you ever take it on?

"Not particularly. I’m a 'dive right in' kind of writer. If it’s not working, I’ll just set it aside, but nothing has every stopped me from giving it the old college try. What’s that saying? Something about trying and failing, then trying again and failing better. That’s pretty much my writing motto." - Lauren Morrill, author of Meant to Be.

"No, my ideas tend to come to me in shrunken form and then have to be kicked repeatedly to get them to grow to a respectable size. At the start of things I’m very unambitious. I’m all about not frightening myself." - Margo Lanagan, author of The Brides of Rollrock Island. 

"There’s a really elaborate fantasy I want to write. I don’t think I’m there yet. I want to be better before I take it on. I want to have more patience while I’m writing." - Dan Krokos, author of False Memory. 

"That describes pretty much all of my ideas worth pursuing. If they don't scare me, then they are not sufficiently awesome." - Martha Brockenbrough, author of Devine Intervention. 

"Yes. I've wanted to do a YA noir for awhile and I'm only just taking it on." - Joy Peble, author of Anastasia Forever. 

"When we first moved to Austin, I had an idea about a comedy set in the Texas Hill Country, but felt I didn’t know it well enough yet to do it justice in a humorous way.  The idea is still there, but I have several other projects in the way first." - Greg Leitich Smith, author of Chronal Engine. 

"Actually, the very first novel I started to write involved backpackers getting kidnapped in Central America. I was just 2; fortunately, I realized I did not have the wisdom to take on Central America politics and so forth. I still don't. So I wrote a joyful backpacker book instead." - Kirsten Hubbard, author of Wanderlove.

"I did! I think I wrote a few pages of it but chickened out. It was a historical." - Cyn Balog, author of Touched. 

"I feel this way about all of my books at some point in the writing of them. There is a scene in the second book of the Dogs of the Drowned City series where my main character does something terrible and cowardly with devastating consequences. I struggled with the scene, worrying that I had gone too dark, and still find it hard to read. I am working on the second book in the No Safety in Numbers series and find I am putting a lot of myself into it and that’s scary, to have so much of myself out there for strangers to examine. But it’s also necessary to give the characters’ life—what am I offering in my writing if not myself?" - Dayna Lorentz, author of No Safety in Numbers. 

"Yes, and recently. For most of my writing life, I’m kept very close to realistic fiction. But as a reader, I’ve long been fascinated by Magic Realism – Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even W.P. Kinsella -- where, in the context of realism, a grandmother hanging laundry in the backyard might float into the sky, gone forever. There’s a powerful truth to that kind of fiction. I recently had an impossible idea that didn’t fit with anything I’d written before. It daunted me, and I’ve puzzled over it for a full year, writing slowly all the while, gradually gaining confidence in it, still a little baffled. Definitely out of my comfort zone – and a great challenge, too." - James Preller, author of Before You Go. 

"Yes, I have two storylines that I would love to someday write, but I’m not emotionally ready. I fully immerse myself in my characters when I write and sometimes I need a break from writing about dark subject matter." - Katie McGarry, author of Pushing the Limits. 

"In one of my manuscripts I have a character who is biracial. At the beginning, she is very self-conscious about it (so she can grow to accept herself later on). I found her very challenging to write and I’m not sure if I’ll go back to her story or not." - Sarah Tregay, author of Love and Leftovers. 

"Yes, all the time. We discuss all kinds of ideas, no holds barred, when we are diving into a new project, and some of them get rejected outright because we don’t feel that we could do them justice. For example, we don’t think we could pull off a highly detailed paranormal novel in which an entire universe is created from scratch. We are, however, working on a YA thriller, which is completely out of our wheelhouse, but we’ve stuck with it and are falling in love with the genre. Hopefully it will reach the shelves of a bookstore someday in the not-too-distant future." - Stacy Kramer & Valerie Thomas, co-authors of From What I Remember. 

Stop by Thursday to find out if the rest of the authors have ever gotten an idea they were scared to write. 
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