Ok got about a third of one of my essays first drafted so going to answer this 🙂 thanks for the ask! I love questions 🙂

journal: do you ever write just so you can enjoy something to read?
Erm … always? I don’t usually reread my own writing unless I’m revisiting the verse. Personally I feel egotistical reading my own work, I don’t know why, especially after some time has passed because sometimes I read it and I’m like – “I wrote this???” because it feels so foreign. Anyway, I’m rambling but I guess what I’m saying is I don’t tend to write anything I dislike. I write because I want to tell that story. I want that story to exist, it’s in my head and I need to make it corporeal. I need it to.. well like I said – exist! So yeah I write because I want to read that story.

backstory: how did you come to love writing?
I have stories in my head and I want to tell them. Writing is, for me at least, the easiest path to making those stories exist – to getting those stories out of my head and into the world. I mean it probably goes back to what I was encouraged in when I was little. My mum isn’t an artist, and she would have struggled to help me with that means of expression. Instead I read voraciously, I had a reading age of an adult by the time I was 8. So I had all those words in my head and that’s the means I used to tell my stories. It’s still the primary means I use because I’ve had over 20 years of practice now, it’s still what comes most naturally to me.

parchment: how often do you or your personal life influence your writing?
Probably far more than I think. It’s funny this is asked today because for my essay I’m doing an argument about perspective (post-structuralism, experience shaping people’s interpretation of stuff etc. ) when it comes to realism in fiction. It’s one of those topics that makes you think and my conclusion if you like, is it’s me that does the writing, therefore everything in the story springs from me and so even when I’m consciously trying to write something different from me, or my experiences, it is still based on my understanding of whatever this different environment/perspective etc. is. I’m shaped by my experiences and so my writing is shaped by me. I have no idea if that makes sense. Hopefully my essay is more coherent :p

critic: what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received about writing?
There’s the old standby “I can fix a bad page, I can’t fix a blank page.” (Nora Roberts) – I need to tattoo this on my brain to be honest. However while that is undoubtedly good advice I think the best piece of advice I’ve read is “Measure your worth by the dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures”(Elizabeth Gilbert). The reason why I like this quote so much is I beat myself up all the time. I feel like I’ve failed because I set goals and don’t meet them, I’m constantly frustrated because I want to do more and just can’t manage it. However, this quote is a balm because it’s basically like ‘so long as you keep trying and don’t give up then you are ok’ and that is advice I need. No matter how much I want it to be different I’m never going to be as fast, or as good, as I’d like, but the tortoise beats the hare – so long as I stay dedicated then I can have hope that I’ll get there. I need that hope in my life.