Welcome to the Blog World Tour! Over the next twelve months, I will have twelve different fantasy writers as guests on my blog. They will answer a handful of different questions about writing, editing, and the fantasy genre. So, let’s begin with my very first guest and one of my closest friends, Corinne Morier! *waves* Hi Corinne! And welcome to Hypergraphia!
Corinne Morier is a bibliophile-turned-writer with a penchant for writing stories that make readers think. In her free time, she enjoys blogging, playing video games, and swimming. Her motto is “Haters gonna hate and potatoes gonna potato.” You can keep up with her latest by following her blog, Facebook, and Twitter.
Q: Where do your ideas come from?
A: That’s very simple. There’s a company called Inspirations, Inc. in Colorado, and every so often, when I’m out of story ideas, I send them the processing fee of $15 and they send me a list of ideas I can use for my next book.
Just kidding. That’s a nice way of saying my muse is a jerk. I have to write or else I’ll go crazy. And sometimes my muse will make me write things I don’t even want to write. They come from all over the place, but mostly they just come from asking “What if (insert situation here)?” The story is born through answering that question.
Q: Did you come across any specific challenges in writing your current work? What would you do differently the next time?
A: I run into this problem a lot with my novels, but I’m a notorious under-writer. My biggest problem is that I tend to be bored by description, so a lot of times, I’ll wind up with a barebones first draft to which I’ll have to add description to help create the image in the reader’s head. I don’t think there’s anything I could have done differently, because when I read, I don’t pay much attention to description, either. It’s just a problem I’ll have to deal with.
Q: How long on average does it take you to write a book?
A: Depending on how much time I have to work on it, I can bust out a workable first draft in a month or so. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. It did take me closer to a year to write the first draft of my current manuscript because I wrote it in high school, and back then, I had barely any free time to write because I was so busy with my classes and after-school activities.
Q: What motivated you to become an author?
A: I’d say that was one specific day in middle school. I was sitting in Algebra and very bored (with apologies to my algebra teacher, Ms. Jones), and I started just scribbling a story in the margins of my class notes. Now, almost a decade later, I look back and laugh at what a terrible story it was, but back then, I just started writing it without really thinking one way or another about maybe publishing it or anything. And I had so much fun writing that story that I just kept going, and now here we are today.
Q: What inspired the worldbuilding of your novel?
A: Well, I’d say the first thing that inspired me is Lord of the Rings. I watched the movies and fell in love with them, and then later read the books (and also fell in love with them). I wanted to create my own fantasy world, so I sat down and started writing a novel. All of the actual worldbuilding (like geography, linguistics, history, culture, etc.) was made up on-the-spot as I wrote. I didn’t plan any of it before writing the book.
Q: What’s your protagonist’s favorite drink?
A: It doesn’t actually appear in the story, but I invented a drink called the Elven Harvest – peach schnapps, passion fruit juice, and ice, along with a sprig of mint. It’s reminiscent of the Elves’ harvest – peaches are always in abundance from all the tress that grow around the Elven palace – and I think that my main character would enjoy a drink like that.
Corinne’s short story, The Photo, was published in June by Roane Publishing. Now she’s working on a fantasy trilogy.
I can’t wait to follow the rest of the Blog World Tour! You can check them all out as they post by clicking on the Blog World Tour tag at the bottom of the page! Maybe I’ll get a link up soon.
My next guest will be here on August 1st! See you then!
~Allie
Loved the interview! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
Very cool! Thank you for helping me learn more about Corinne and her writing.
Great interview! Elven Harvest sounds delicious.