AMA? What the what?

AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything". I first ran across the term on Tumblr but since then I've seen writers and artists hold their own AMAs on everything from Twitter to Reddit. So I posted around Facebook that I was looking for writing questions and these are the replies and answers! 

Daniella Bernett Where do you get your ideas?

From everything. Sometimes it's a TV show. Something I read. Things combine and recombine in the subconscious and then get filtered through the things I like. Ideas come from everything! I sort of can't stress this enough. Sometimes it's hard to pin down. Sometimes they are conscious. Sometimes it's a writing prompt that gets the ideas to flow! 


Brieann Starr Okay! What's the best way to draw a scene out? Say you write a scene, but it didn't last as long as you feel it needed to for its importance in the story. How do you decide what sorts of details to use to flesh it out?

That can depend on the scene and it's function. (This is a really good question by the way!). If I have just changed scenes to a new location I spend time on the setting. Describing sights and smells, and people, and whatever I need the character to notice. Another thing not to forget is what actions your character is performing during the scene. Are they drinking? Are they fidgeting? Playing with something? If it's an emotional scene I will spend more time in the POV character's head while they think about what is happening and often that includes a lot of reflection and judgements and bad descriptions of their feeeeelings! LOL! Ideally all of these will be in place in any given scene. A balanced scene will have specific details of the environment, interesting dialogue, and emotion. 

Josh Langston Tell me why I shouldn't kill off the characters I don't like.

LOL! Well if you hate them that much who am I to say you shouldn't? BUT sometimes, if it's a character the readers/audience love to hate you may want to keep them around for awhile. A good antihero/villain can add a lot of spice. Also, you may want to save killing the character for later because you may come up with a good idea for them either later in the book or in a sequel. Otherwise kill them off in a satisfying way that pushes the story forward.