Marisa Orton
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Tell us a little bit about you:
At fourteen years old, my favourite hobby without a doubt is writing. From short stories and novels to articles and book reviews, I love writing in all forms and styles. I was raised in England and have been living in France for five years now, an incredible experience, which is the reason I can now fluently speak French and English. I study at an entirely French college. I live with my mum and playful cat in a fantastic mountain village in the south of France. Consequently, learning languages and enjoying the great weather are favourite activities of mine.
What do you like most about your craft?
What I love most about writing is how it opens doorways to so many other unfathomable worlds. As a writer, you become involved in the stories you’re writing to the extent that they become a part of you. When you write a story you’re passionate about, losing yourself in it is almost a subconscious activity; you no longer live solely in your ordinary day-to-day life, but also in the brilliant universes and situations you have created. The most magical thing about writing is the freedom of it. Your stories are created completely from your own imagination, which means that your characters are never disappointing or your scenes uninteresting. You are the omniscient power, creating this fantastic world beyond the clutches of reality. Only a true writer can tackle the situation of real life effectively enough to travel beyond it, to a world so similar and yet so utterly different to our own.
What inspires/influences you?
There are a myriad of different aspects, which have inspired me over the years to be as fascinated by writing as I am now. Firstly, reading. Despite having certain genres I most prefer, I love to read almost anything and from a young age, the stories I read of different places and people inspired me to go on to creating my own stories. I could also say I have been inspired by the concept of dreams. I have always wondered about dreams. I mean, where do they come from? They are thoughts like the ordinary thoughts you have while sitting in physics and wondering what’s beyond the mountains you’re staring at out of the window, but I think they’re more than that. Dreams are fragments of imagination, so, would ultimately, we should be the ones controlling them- but they just seem so real. They’re like real happenings-things you have no control over, things you can’t even predict. They’re like actual events, but ones, which occur in a different world, a different life… It’s as if we open the door to a new and fantastical world by falling asleep. I don’t think it’s true that dreams are merely thoughts. They are so real- but only in an alternate world that we just can’t enter in our waking hours. I’ve had some amazing dreams and part of the reason I started writing was to be able to put some of those night-world experiences into stories. Those would be my main inspirations, but I do believe that one with a great imagination can see the simplest thing and be immediately consumed by inspiration. Some of my best story ideas have come from walking around the supermarket aisles.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I am working on a plethora of short stories, flash fiction and book reviews for various destinations. Yet my principle work currently is my novel, entitled Unfathomable.
We at Good Guy Publishing are mad on books, what are you reading at the moment?
I just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and also the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I’m now reading the Twilight saga in French, Paper Towns by John Green and the Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson.
Which three books would you list as your favourite all-time reads?
My three all-time favourite books have definitely got to be the following:
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson
- Flip by Michael Bedford
What are your hopes for the future?
My main aim for the future is to continue writing and to one day be a great author. This has been an ever-lasting dream of mine. I would also like to study to become a specialised doctor here in France and then travel around the world helping people in different countries. Another great aim of mine is to study Spanish further and to become trilingual.
Do you have any advice for anyone wishing to follow in your foot-steps?
The first piece of advice I would give to anyone wanting to become an author would be to write about something you care about or find interest in. Writing is not about typing words as fast as possible on a computer, but about what you write. I can say from experience that writing the first story plot that comes into your head or writing merely because you want be able to claim that you’ve written something is probably not going to make you a writer. That’s exactly what I used to do when I started writing and at first it seemed a tedious activity. Then I realised what was missing. Great writers can write the way they do because they write about a topic or story they are passionate about. And when you do that, the sensation of going on so many experiences and rides with your characters is amazing; you have to lose yourself in the story, live and breath your story and most of all, become part of your story. Nobody wants to read anything that has no feeling entwined into the words and frankly a story you don’t feel anything for will be simply a misery to write. So always keep your imagination open- try to amuse yourself by looking at common objects and letting your imagination run wild. Always have a vivid imagination. Make sure that you slip into your characters’ shoes every so often to add that extra bit of sensation to your writing. Most of all- don’t give up. It’s unlikely that your first pieces of work will be the next worldwide best-sellers, but if you enjoy it, keep going. If you want something badly enough, you can do it and writing is no different. It doesn’t matter what anybody else says about your work, because if you enjoy it, the world will too.
Where can you be found online?
