Maggie du Maurier:

Three things you love besides writing/reading?

1) Theatre

2) Movies

3) Photography

Three things you hate?

1) Incorrect spelling and grammar. (G.S.Glow Commentary - preach it girl!)There are so many wonderful stories on Wattpad but I find some of the errors in them so glaring and jarring, it distracts me from the plot. I want to get a red pen and edit them on my computer screen. (I think there’s a blonde joke in there somewhere)

2) Hypocrisy

3) The passage of time. Every year I get older and feel I’m one step further from accomplishing what I want in my life. I’d love to invent a time machine so I could have more time to write.

Why do you write?

Good question. With my full-time job, I write to pay the bills. With fiction, I write to keep myself moderately sane. Sometimes life can become too much to handle and I escape into these little worlds I’ve created. When I was a child, I kept them in my mind and visited them at bedtime, before I went to sleep. I still have that same habit as an adult but when I wake up the next morning, I write down what I imagined in my “other” world. (Great, now I sound like a kook!) (G.S. Glow Commentary - only the best of the best do! *_-)

Out of all your stories, which is your favourite?

I have several stories I’ve never placed on Wattpad but I guess my favourite would be the one I’m working on currently – I Want You To Want Me. That story has brought me great happiness over the past eight months and I’m madly in love with the characters.

How do you create your characters?

They come from everywhere in my life. Some are compilations of people I’ve met over the course of my life. Or different aspects of my favourite TV show or movie characters, rolled up into one person. Some just pop into my head and live with me for a while. That’s how I found Stirling, my female protagonist in I Want You To Want Me. She popped into my head one day and lived there for several years. She had many different names and different careers until finally she tumbled out onto the page. And we’ve been having great adventures ever since.

Out of your characters, which one are you most like?

Yikes! I don’t think I’m like any of them. All of them are definitely better looking than me! I probably have different aspects of all of them – I can be naïve and dense like Simon, I can be intelligent like Stirling, I can be all business like Michael, I can be a research resource like Christopher, I can be caring like Leyland, I can run hot and cold like Tegan. I’d say there’s a little bit of me in every character I write. (G.S. Glow Commentary - good answer!)

What do you do when you have writer’s block?

When I get writer’s block, I usually set aside the scene or even the story I’m currently working on and start something else. When I first started writing I Want You To Want Me, I wrote the 24th chapter first. And I worked on that chapter a long time. I don’t think I wrote the beginning chapters until several months later. I skip around a lot when I write because I’ll hit a mental roadblock and decide to skip ahead in the story and start a different scene. Not everything makes it in. I have a slush folder filled with pages of scenes and characters that didn’t make the cut but might find life somewhere else (believe it or not, I had planned on making Stirling an exotic dancer at first). (G.S. Glow Commentary - *clucks tongue* I need a slush folder!) I never throw any writing away. That sentence or paragraph may be just the spark that’s needed to start a new chapter or even a whole new story. (Stay tuned for a future story about a woman who is an exotic dancer/mercenary for hire.)

How do you plan out your stories?

I’m fairly new to this fiction-writing gig so I don’t really have a planning strategy. And I probably should develop one. I’ve seen writers who use cue cards and pin them on walls and move them around. I’m not sure I could be that regimented. Right now, I plan things out in my head. I do have studies of my main characters that outline what they’re like: their backgrounds, education, what kind of clothes they like to wear, habits, hobbies, political leanings, favourite foods, everything I can think of. Over time, the character study grows as the character does. But for the most part, I don’t formally plan. I have an idea, I have the characters, I mix them together and see what pops out. But if someone out there is using a neat system for story planning, let me know! I need all the help I can get!

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