How can you reset your creative motivation when it has fallen to the wayside? How can you balance your life to give yourself the most willpower for your creative pursuits? And where do you need to re-evaluate your life and your habits? In the end, it’s all about finding the balance that works for you, your life, and your creative goals!
How did 2019 go in our writing lives? And what lessons have we learned about how we have balanced, or failed to balance, our writing with our life? How can you shift your perspective from the outputs to the inputs? And how can we achieve that balance where our lives feed our creativity, and our creativity our lives?
Has Alina refilled her creative well, or recharged her creative batteries? What would she advise those of us who need to find that balance in our lives? How do we write out of our own experiences? And how do we go out and get more of those experiences?
How did finishing a project bring Alina to a realization about herself, and her life outside of her author career? What experiences did she undertake in order to refill her creative well? And how does working on a project outside of what you previously finished help broaden your artistic horizons? We finish with a poem from Alina’s new book, Fire by Night.
How will your personal history affect how you portray death? What about if you have never experienced anything as tragic as your character is experiencing? How can you use the element of surprise to turn a story on a death? And how should you use death in Act two? We talk about the problem of proximity in death, and whether or not death has genre conventions. In the end, we all agree that this is a great book, if you are ready to really sit and think about death!
What was our experience with The Art of Death? What were our biggest takeaways? What makes death meaningful for the story? And what tools should you bring to write a death well? How can we make them authentic? And what is the power of the point of view?