Sarah Lotz

thumb|Sarah Lotz Sarah Lotz is a British-South African screenwriter and award-winning novelist whose previous work has been translated into over twenty languages. Quotes I’m naturally drawn to the horror genre, probably because I’m a life-long Stephen King constant reader. That said, I like to try out different genres to see how they fit. Apart from say, avoiding using hardcore curse words when writing YA for example, my approach is the same whatever genre it is – many months of panicking to make the story work! I never know if it will until the very end.As to audiences, I have a group of lovely and very honest readers of all ages and proclivities who give me feedback when I’m done with the first draft. They usually let me know if I’ve screwed up audience-wise or not! When I write with Louis Greenberg, my co-author on the S.L Grey novels, we tend to write progressively, with each of us taking on a character and moving the narrative forward chapter by chapter. When we wrote The Mall, our first novel, we had great fun leaving each other’s characters in tricky situations, like a literary version of the game Exquisite CorpsWhen I write with my daughter, Savannah, the process is different as we have a very similar narrative voice, so we tend to take it in turns to write a section and then write over each other.Last year I wrote a series of ‘choose your own adventure’-style erotica books with authors Paige Nick and Helen Moffett and the distribution of work in these was easy to sort out. They wrote all the sex scenes (I’m rubbish at writing sex) and I did the bits in between (clearly they got the short end of the stick as the books were 90% sex!)Boringly, I’ve never had a bad collaborating experience – I can’t recall a single fight or hissy fit. All of the writers I work with are supremely talented and professional, and fortunately none of them are ego monsters. I’m not sure there is a great difference between writing a fictionalised memoir and a novel, as I tend to draw from real life when I do both.Writing Pompidou was interesting as my memory of that time – living on the streets in Paris in the 1980s – was murky due to the fact that I was taking a lot of drugs back then (I know, too much information!), so I had to fill in the gaps.Curiously, when I re-edited it a few months ago, I found that I couldn’t remember clearly which parts actually happened and which sections I’d fictionalised. External links Category: Living people Category:Women authors from the United Kingdom Category:Women authors from South Africa