Today’s Invisible Stories guest is author, screenwriter, producer, director, actor, and journalist, B. Danielle Watkins. She is an international award-winning filmmaker, and creator of LGBT focused web series. She is also a professor of writing. B. Danielle’s novel, The Alyse Diaries, explores the life and death of a young woman struggling with her sexuality. 

 

In this podcast, B. Danielle and I talk about how she drew inspiration from real life when writing her fiction books. B. Danielle tells us about:

• How she decided to set the book in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how she drew on the universal themes of self-discovery to relate to readers. 
• The different experience of writing a novel compared with writing a screenplay, and how writing a book involves more characterization and building out of a character, as opposed to screenplays in which the characters are more influenced by the actors portraying them.  
• How there is still vulnerability in writing fiction, because we still put something of ourselves into our work. You still are influenced by your life and your writing is still being critiqued, even if it isn’t a memoir.