Welcome to the Literature Edition of Undiscovered Weekly

Riencuran's Interview

I started scribbling poetry and telling stories when I was a kid and  never really stopped. I get struck by an idea or a phrase and I write it  down on whatever happens to be handy, whether it's an email draft, a  receipt, or a random envelope. I have snippets lying all over the place,  in drawers, notepads, books, my car, my purse. I went through a very  cliched phrase, I suppose you could call it, writing about pain and  heartache and everything else that plagues teenagers, and really tried  to morph it into something a little more elevated, to make it a step  above what my peers were writing. Recently, I'm interested in things  that make people uncomfortable--because they're real.

Life--the same thing that inspires everyone. Nearly all of my prose has  an element of my own experiences in them, with an event that happened to  me, a person I knew, or something I felt. My experiences trigger my  writing, whether it's the excitement of staying up all night with  someone you love, a bottle of bad Chianti or a worse sort of tragedy.  When you write what you know, it becomes a part of your soul, an  extension of your existence. That doesn't happen when you write about  something you've never experienced.

They all mean so much to me, but if I had to pick one story, it would be  "Nothing to See." It's written from the perspective of a man who  stumbles upon a gang rape in an alley. He recognizes the evil taking  place and wants to put an end to it, to help the young woman, but his  cowardice holds him back and he shuffles on, knowing that he is  ultimately as wicked as the alley gang. Despite the acts of evil that we  witness every day, people often do nothing. They shut their eyes and  close their ears and keep moving, cocooning themselves in their own  lives, as if everything will go away if they ignore it, as if it can in  no way affect them. "Nothing to See" is an example of that global  abandonment and is also deeply personal.

Riencuran's Gallery Feature

hfeather53's Interview

I'm Heather. I fidget a lot. Hoodies are security blankets for me. I  play the guitar (but not well), I sing (I'm ok with that), and I write a  lot (also ok with that). The white paint on my keyboard for the letters  "m" and "n" is completely gone.

I use writing to get things out of my brain. Most of my work is  extremely personal and highly emotional. My life has unfortunately been  surrounded by tragedy... I write a lot about my past... I try and figure  things out. I end up getting stuck on the whys too often. When I was  younger someone used to say, "Build a bridge and get over it." I  sincerely wish it were that simple.

It's about my mother. She committed suicide when I was four. I spent  (spend) lots of time trying to figure it all out... It was nice to be  able to write about it... To be able to share bits about my memories of  her. I spent a lot of time being angry at her and hating myself for what  she did. I'm finally inching passed those feelings and I felt a release  like I've never before had in my life while I wrote.

hfeather53's Gallery Feature

mistressofquills's Interview

My deviantART name is MistressofQuills, which was actually a suggestion  from a dear friend of mine (=EclecticQuill) I'm primarily a  literature artist, but I like to dabble in photography sometimes Right  now I'm a second-semester freshman in college, and I'm majoring in  English with a Creative Writing focus.

It is my goal to become a  published novelist sometime in the future, so I see my dA community as a  place to learn from other amazing writers and to try my best to improve  through critique and community. I think what I'm best at is prose  fantasy fiction, although that's not the only kind of writing I do.

What  I love most about writing is that I'm able to take a moment of  inspiration and turn it into something that is my  own, and yet be something that others can be touched by. I  love crafting characters and constructing scenes and imagining new  plotlines, and then weaving them all into a cohesive unit that can speak  with its own voice.

Poetry is my emotional outlet. I love getting  the kind of inspiration that just fills your heart up to overflowing  with some emotion until you simply must put it on  paper or else explode! It's fun to mix potent stuff like that with all  kinds of images that fit together like a puzzle.

Well in case you hadn't already guessed, I think emotion is what  inspires me the most. It's not the only thing, but I think it's one of  the major ones. So many things can be born from an emotion - a poem, a  story, a scene of a larger story... It's how most of my work started  out, actually. When an idea comes to me, it's usually in a moment of  great emotion, and a scene starts to take shape in my mind, building off  that beginning emotion. My novel began that way, and so did most of my  poetry

I consider myself a novelist first, so I feel the most attachment to my  longer works, especially my novels (I'm in the midst of writing three,  but only Pain's Fangs is uploaded to dA). Tori is a  character that I fell in love with from the first moment she began to  develop in my mind. I always strive for depth of character and  personality in my protagonists, and I think Tori is a pretty good  example of what I can do - though, I'm not done with the novel yet. I  think every person is complex in their own way, and so I think  believable characters should also be complex, with pasts that  continually influence them in their present. Tori, then, has a very  complicated past (which hasn't been fully revealed yet), and I can't  wait to do more with her and her story!

:devmistressofquills's Gallery Feature

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