Coffee Talks

With Monica

When did you start writing and what does writing mean to you?

I started writing on and off as a kid. Posting the things I write online, though, was around twenty years ago, with fanfiction. I wrote because I wanted to spend more time with those characters, to see them thrown into different situations, to give them happier endings, and canon wasn't giving me that. I have a chronical inability to say goodbye to beloved characters.

At some point last year the voices screaming the loudest for attention in my mind became my own original characters, instead of other people's characters, and that's why I shifted to writing original works. That being said, I will rage against anyone claiming fanfic isn't "real" writing. Real writing is when you write, full stop.

To me, writing means telling stories. I think we're all storytellers at heart, no matter the medium we choose — whether we write, draw, act, compose, or even just fantasise in our minds. Even when we retell the plot of a beloved film, or an anecdote that happened to us on the way home from the supermarket, we're telling a story. I'm lucky enough that the stories I'm telling are of my own making.

How has your writing journey been so far? What are your goals as a writer? 

I think I answered half of this question in the reply I gave above, so I'll just pick up where I left off. My goals as a writer are to continue to tell the stories I want to tell, and to find a way to monetise them, because that will mean I get to tell more stories. Writing is thrilling, infuriating, hard, uplifting, a privilege and a chore, all at once. I want more of all of that, even the parts that make me want to yank out all my hair, because I love doing it, in the end.

I'm hoping to be published, whether indie or trad, and to take definitive steps towards that journey next year; this year is dedicated to writing, editing, and polishing. I'd also very much like to have a Patreon, but don't think I have enough content to get started yet.

In a perfect world, with universal basic income, I'd probably not be in such a hurry to monetise, because there's a trade-off, and that's feedback. Often readers in places like Wattpad leave comments in the chapters they're reading, share their opinion of a character, or of how a story makes them feel, overall. I thrive on those comments; they feed my soul. Even when I can't find the time to reply to them, which happens more than I care to admit. I know that, once a story is a (self or trad) published book that people buy, most of that feedback won't happen. The closest to it is a review, and those don't have the same vibe and feeling of interaction. So I hope to be able to monetise, yes, but also to be able to strike a balance between monetisation and free content that allows me to have a little of both.

How did you find out about Wattpad and what do you like the best about the platform?

I came to Wattpad chasing another author — CeeMTaylor and her gorgeous series, Oceana. I'd started reading Oceana in a different site, but then one day it was gone and I scoured the internet looking for it, expecting I'd find it published and ready to be purchased, preferably in a box set. Instead I tracked it to Wattpad and found out Cee had set out to revise it and was — somehow impossibly — making it even better than the version I'd read. It's epic dark fantasy with MM romance, world-ending odds, a lot of sailing, a lot of political wrangling, and a host of characters so nuanced and complex you'll find things to love, hate, and relate to in every one of them. I seriously cannot recommend it enough. It's up there with the best books I've ever read, bar none.

What I like best about the platform: Its potential.

Wattpad has a huge reader base, a ton of talented authors, and the potential to bring them together — if it steps up its game. Right now, it's very hard for me, as a writer, to get my works in front of the kind of readers who'd love to read it. The way I know this is a Wattpad problem, and not a "me" problem, it's that, as a reader on Wattpad, I have a terrible time finding the kind of work I want to read, even though I know it's here. It's gotten to a point where I mostly read works by authors I already know I'll love, or recommended by those authors.