Member Spotlight: Leslie A. Rasmussen

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? I love sharing my point of view with readers and I enjoy reading other people’s points of view. Writing is a way to not only entertain, but also to educate and be educated. It’s also a way to travel to places or times in history that you haven’t been to and learn from the past.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? The only way I know of is to walk away and do something else. Taking my mind off writing relieves the stress and anxiety of trying to come up with something. Reading has always helped, even if it’s just reading a magazine. I let my mind wonder and usually the thing I’m struggling comes to me. When all else fails, I sleep on it, and a lot of the time in the middle of the night, I will wake up and write something on my phone, that will solve the issue.

What is your favorite time to write? I always write around 10:00 in the morning. I get up at 7:00 and work out, then come home, make a cup of coffee and start writing. By 4:00, I stop for the day. My mind is freshest in the morning, so I can concentrate and get a lot done.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? The best advice I’ve been given is to listen to the difference in how men and women talk. In order to make dialogue that sounds real, you need to be able to hear the speech patterns of both sexes, and it may be a generality, but most men use fewer words than women.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? I’m excited to have contemporary stories to tell that my readers can relate to and not feel like they are dealing with issues alone. Also, even though I haven’t self-published yet, it’s so nice to know that you can control your own career if you choose to do that.

Leslie A. Rasmussen’s The Stories We Cannot Tell is out now with ‎ Touchpoint Press.