My guest this week is the young fantasy author, Sarah Buchynski, who shares her passion for writing; along with some great insights into how she feels is the best way to engage her readers. Wonderful stuff! Welcome, Sarah, and thank you for being here.
Today, I am supposed to write about something I am passionate about in life. However, what really is passion? I would like to think of it as something in one’s life that brings them great joy. So, what brings me great joy in life? There are many things, but I am going to focus on writing. More specifically, creating a piece of work that others will be entertained when exposed to it. While I am writing, I am thinking of many things at once. How can I write down the ideas that are swimming in my head to convey them to the reader without boring them to death? What would sound better: It was morning and it came fast. The sky was filled with many colours; or: It was now dawn and it had come swiftly. With it came swirls of pink and red clouds. The colours painted a beautiful canvas in the sky. Just for the sake of illustrating a point, the first quote is relatively dull. It does get the information across, but is it entertaining? Will the reader be entranced by the scenario, and does it allow them to “enter” the story? I personally think it would not. The second example has a bit more detail – this detail can help a reader see the story inside their minds as they are reading. For fiction works, I think that it is important to paint a picture inside the reader’s mind. Since I am passionate about entertaining people through my literature, this concept is a priority for me to incorporate into my work.
Everything I do in my writing relates back to how to entertain the reader. After I get my canvas of words painted on a tangible medium, I then ask myself another question – how can I make my story larger than life, but still believable? This may seem like an oxymoron, at first. However, there is a thin line as to where the two are no longer compatible. For instance, in fantasy, a lot of its elements do not exist in reality. So when writing, you have a lot of freedom. Yet, I cannot give a character such weird ability that will leave the reader thinking, “Okay, as if that could really happen…” Sometimes you cannot make a human character have ultra superhuman abilities, since we live in a reality where people can never be like that. So, since we are used to that reality, we naturally feel this way. However, for something that does not exist in our reality, I can make it larger than life because we do not have the ability to anticipate all the possibilities.
A thesaurus, adjectives, treading the line between fantasy and reality, and research are my best friends and tools to making my passion come to life. The research is like “eye candy” for a reader. I find that many readers appreciate and enjoy it when writers incorporate a storyline around mystical concepts like ancient times (people, artifacts, places, etc.) or mythology. However, I sometimes find that simply alluding to these concepts, rather than dwelling on them full-blown in the story, can add that extra “tease” to spark one’s interest in the story and characters.
I hope that whoever read this blog was entertained, while I shared my passion with all of you!
Bio
Sarah Buchynski is a young author that showed a passion for writing even as a child. In her grade school years, she placed second in an essay writing contest for the Royal Canadian Legion and has two poems published in a student anthology with Creative Communications and several works in school-based anthologies. Now she has expanded her writing ambitions with her first fantasy series, Before True Light, which is available as a Kindle eBook on Amazon.
As a writer, one of Sarah’s main techniques is to paint a vivid picture into the reader’s mind through carefully constructed imagery. In addition to the embedded metaphors which older audiences can enjoy along with the story.
Sarah’s other technique is research. Almost every name of places and characters have been carefully researched so that it is relevant to the storyline. Sarah believes that everything in a story should have a purpose to an extend, so that makes research even more important even for works of fiction.
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