Tuesday Spotlight: Kiyara Benoiti

Many people ask me questions like what inspires me or how long my writing sessions are. There really isn’t an answer for either one of those questions. I never know what will inspire me. It could be anything from an aroma to something I see on television. Although music does help me get in the mood to write, it seldom inspires ideas.

My writing time is usually during the day. Once my husband gets home from work I close the stories and we spend the evenings together. Weekends are normally devoted to family things. I’m a private person, and dedicated to becoming a successful author, so I’m the type of person who keeps her nose to the grindstone. When it comes to writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, I take it very seriously.

My desk is a sea of scribbled notes on scrap paper, Post-It pads, notebooks, and even the backs of receipts and bills. Pens lay helter-skelter, reference books topple this way and that way, and there is always grammar books mixed in the madness. On a nearby shelf, my little stereo system keeps me company with pop or rock, and if I grow bored with the radio, I turn on my computer’s music program.

My mind is constantly buzzing with ideas, plots, characters, that perfect sentence just waiting for a home in the perfect manuscript, and my husband just looks on and says he can almost see the worlds and people in thought bubbles over my head.

Romance is a dominant theme in my stories, but whatever the genre or the premise, life is portrayed as it really is. Characters must be real, and for them to be real, a writer must be one with them.

See you Wednesday!

Wickedly yours—Kiyara Benoiti