VP Profile #15: Irina Ivanova

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Irina Ivanova is soft spoken. Yet, she writes a tough cookie of a heroine. Guess you never can tell what is beneath the surface.

Tamago: When did you first know that you were going to be a writer?

Irina: I wrote my first story at thirteen, for a literature class. The assignment was to come up with a 3 (notebook) page science fiction story. After an all-nighter (a first manifestation of a bad habit of mine), I proudly presented a 22-page story (again, a first manifestation of another bad habit of mine). At this point, I still didn't know I'll one day consider writing as more than a fun pastime -- that'd take another 20 years or so. But I haven't stopped writing since.

Looking back, though, I should have known storytelling would be my "thing." I was the four-year old who would entertain herself for hours by naming her color pencils and creating adventures for them (sadly, my character-naming skills haven't improved much since -- though I'd like to believe the adventures have). For years growing up, my favorite bedtime activity was to re-imagine books and movies the way I'd have liked them to be (I had, and still have, a mild fascination with evil henchmen -- as you can imagine, there was a lot of re-imagining to do there!). Oh, and I was also a compulsive reader. I figure my career as an engineer has had it coming from the start.

Tamago: What kind of genres do you like to write the most in? Why?

Irina: I don't necessarily have a preferred genre. I've dabbled in most subgenres of speculative fiction, but I play mainly in "hard-ish" fantasy and in science fiction (usually, with stories that are a tad less grand than space operas, fall a hair or two short of hard sci-fi, and/or border on social sci-fi). I guess one of my favorite parts of writing is world-building, so I tend to be drawn to genres that let me do a ton of it.

Tamago: Has being a member of two different cultures affected your writing?

Irina: Absolutely! It's the shove-it-down-your-throat version of gaining perspective by being exposed to others' beliefs and lifestyles -- and adopting or adapting to them -- or, alternatively, getting forced out of your comfort zone: a type of experience all fiction writers should have anyway!

Seriously, though, partly because I've been a member of different cultures and partly because of the specific cultures and the events that have influenced them in these past couple of decades, I feel I have a rich source of themes, conflict, imagery, and behavior patterns to explore -- or borrow -- for my stories. Otherwise, it's just another experience, in a way unique, and in a way not at all that uncommon, that's part of life. And life affects writing, whether we want it or not. =)

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.