When I’m so involved in the story that my ego just flat dissolves away. Those moments when characters borrow my face to figure out how they feel about things, and I don’t realize I’m doing it. Moments in public, sitting in front of a page, mulling over the words and being asked why I look so intense, or murderous, or angry. Being able to answer that, no, none of those things, just that a person in my head is having a very bad day.

Thankfully, people befriend me anyway.

I also like the idea that its something I’ll never really master.

I think there is an element of entrapment involved in establishing a writing ‘desk’. Nothing is more frightening to a writer than a blank page, and nothing is more terrifying than completing that perfect writing space that we dream of. Because once we finally build that perfect place we have no more excuses to not sit down and write something.

Writing has to be about writing, not about the place we can find the clarity to write. We can endeavor to find silence, or peace-of-mind in order to concentrate, but for me, it has to come from inside, not my surroundings. There’s always reasons not to write. So the most useful discipline I’ve nurtured is writing in spite of distraction, in spite of my silence not being absolute. If I allowed myself to believe that the space I’m in determines my ability to write, I’d be hiding at my desks confronted by a blank page unwilling to make itself interesting.

I identify with a lot of different storytellers, to innumerate quickly: Brian Jacques, Diana Wynne Jones, E.B. White, Neil Gaiman, and J.K. Rowling all on the shortlist, but as a student of writing I have to pay homage to a lot of extraordinary writers like Dickens, Poe, Hemingway, Stevenson, et al.

I think it’s really hard to say who a favorite author is as a young author because it’s more than just being a fan at that point. These are the people who struck such an intimate chord with you that it actually sat you down to work.

But my favorite author, if I’m really answering the question, might have to be the Poet/Philosopher David Whyte, simply because he’s the one on my list I have actually managed to meet in person, and who, arguably, impacted me in the most significant way.

I’m a wandering writer, I kind of branded myself that way even though it has little to do with what I actually write. I travel a lot and have since I was twenty, though I’ve never yet written a travel article. For some reason I find myself unwilling to write about those experiences directly, even when I try, those adventures are stubbornly internalized. I do, however, expect them to sneak up on me and influence my stories as I go along.

I grew up in Los Angeles working as an actor. From the age of four until my early teens I spent my afternoons in casting studios or on sets after school (or, at the best of times, instead of school) but a great deal of that time I was sitting in a car on highways, staring out at the endless gray of LA. I attribute this to my writing in two ways.

First, as a child confined to a car. I listened to music and audiobooks, staring out the window, lost in thought, and lost in fantasy. This nurtured my creativeness in a huge way. I entertained myself. I think most writers and actors have to have that ability; the impetus to create things that fascinate you, and are real enough to keep your attention.

The second is that I grew up surrounded by actors. Actors have an amazing ability to connect with fictional characters and empathize with them. That was my earliest education in character study and storytelling. I learned from some of the best what it means to dive into the make-believe.

The first one I wrote and the first one I finished are both important to me and have neither of them seen the light of day in their entirety.

I started writing an epic fantasy when I was in my early teens. Then I read Harry Potter, and decided I wanted to change focus away from fantasy and try something (in my mind) new. When I was about sixteen, my closest friend and I were looking for things to spend our time doing besides following in the footsteps of our circle of friends, who were mainly devoted to doing a lot of drugs and having babies by accident. He was an excellent artist, and I had grown up reading scripts, so I suggested that I could write an outline and he could draw it, and we would have our very own comic. Over the next couple years we spent thousands of hours at coffee shops between college hours, and part-time jobs, somehow managing to spend about 3-5 hours a day sitting at a table, drinking coffee, creating our post-apocalypse world. While he took his time, I grew impatient and the outline became a screenplay, became a novel, and then became a Tolkien-esque anthology of speculative swashbuckling.

While still in my teens I was given the opportunity to pitch the idea to a senior editor at HarperCollins. The feedback I got was that it was great, BUT there was no market for that kind of stuff, and that I should look into publishing it myself. Then Hunger Games came out. I asked again if there was no market and the response was, well, yes, a year ago, but now the post-apocalypse trend has run its course so you’re too late.

When I was twenty-one I met Michael Crichton’s former publicist (just after Crichton’s untimely death) while working as a bartender in Los Angeles. He provided me with my education in the reality of modern book publishing. He read my manuscripts and advised me. I went back to my roots with the intention to build a career for myself, and the next thing I wrote, Hollo, became a book.