Natalie Bell, a Southern California native, currently lives in the nation's capital where she works as a freelance writer and editor.Don't Ask is her first novel.
How long have you been writing?
I have been writing on and off since I was little. Seriously, however, it’s only been a few years. I lived with a bunch of writers my junior year of college, and they motivated me to actually try writing again—something I hadn’t really done since graduating high school. I remembered how much I had loved it, and decided this was actually something I wanted to pursue. I’m very grateful to the entirety of my former housemates.
What inspired you to write Don’t Ask?
I had just graduated, was unemployed, had had some recent relationship issues…honestly, I was a prime candidate for a quarter-life crisis. Since I had gotten back into writing over the end of college, starting a book seemed like a good way to take everything many of my friends and I were experiencing and turn it into something productive to do in between job hunting.
Do you have any advice for (new) writers?
The most important thing is getting the words down on the paper. You can always edit horrible writing and make it better. You can’t edit an empty page.
What was the hardest part about writing your book?
Keeping myself from over-identifying with the characters. Knowing people who had gone through things similar to the book and being able to closely identify with most of the characters made writing Don’t Ask simple in some ways, but it also made it very difficult to let the characters do what they needed to do at some points for the story. You don’t want to let bad things happen to your characters when you can very deeply identify with them.
If you have some more questions for Natalie, or you just want to find out more about her, she has a website, a twitter account, and a facebook page.
Just FYI, that green font is really hard to read. I had to highlight it to make it legible.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up! I'll go change it to something more readable.
Delete