Coffee Talks

With David J. Thirteen

Hi David, thank you for taking the time to get involved with Coffee Community. It's great to hear from authors like yourself and get to know a little bit about what motivates you to write longer works of fiction.

So, to begin, tell us a little bit about yourself as an author on Wattpad. For anyone who hasn't met you before, how would you describe your fiction?

I joined Wattpad nearly five years ago and I'm currently a proud member of their Stars Program. My novel Mr. 8 has received a little over 800,000 reads and has since gone on to be published. I usually tell people that I write horror because that's the simple answer. But my work tends to be dark themed genre mash-ups.

Writing for sustained periods is a hurdle that every writer, beginner or experienced, faces from time to time. What powers you through those longer bursts of creativity and keeps you focused?

Longer works, especially novels but novellas too, are big commitments. It's a relationship. If you see it through to the end, you're going to be living with the story every day for months and probably years. The thing that keeps me going is my primary goal of entertaining myself. I'm the first reader of my work, so I write it for me and I try and keep the work as fun and engaging as reading a book would be. It's not always easy. Sometimes it's hard slogging work. That's inevitable. It's part of the process. But it can't be all of the process or you'll begin to resent it and quit. Whenever I feel I'm losing interest, I add something which will surprise me or make me laugh or something else which will get me back to having fun with the story.

It's like you are married to your work, does your wife know about it? XD What other top tips would you advise for getting a novella or a longer piece of fiction off the starting line? What kind of story developments motivate you to see it through to the end?

The key thing is starting with a story. Not knowing your story is a pitfall I fell into when I first started and one I've seen many other writers struggle with. It's easy to get fired up and be filled with inspiration over a concept. But a concept is only an element of a story. It's a scene, a setting, a character. And as a writer, you can be overwhelmed by how wonderful the idea in your head is about this solitary element, but a concept will rarely sustain you for the long haul. Most longer fiction never makes it past chapter five because all the author had was a concept and eventually, that plays out and the question of what comes next can be insurmountable.

You need to have a story -- a beginning, middle, and an end -- to know where you're going. This doesn't mean you have a detailed outline or every scene planned out. I like the idea of trail markers, flag identifying the start of the story, a few pointing out significant events in the middle, and one at the ending. They can change along the way, but the point is to always have something up in the distance you can look at and work toward.

We have a fair idea about your meticulousness, but how much do you edit on the fly? Or do you prefer to edit after you've finished the initial draft?

For Wattpad, where I tend to post weekly, what I like to do is get a good portion of the story in rough draft. A dozen chapters are ideal. Then, while I'm still drafting, I go back and edit the first one. I do a lot of rewriting so I'll go over it four or five times and once I'm satisfied with it, I post. I try to keep up this rhythm of drafting a new chapter while editing an old one every week.

This means there's usually about three months between drafting and editing and I gain a lot of perspectives letting the chapter rest like that. It also has the side benefit that when I go back to it, I know a lot more about the story and I can insert important details and even foreshadowing, which didn't occur to me earlier. And if I get really stuck on the story and need extra time to work out the next chapter, I have this buffer of drafted chapters I can go to and post something even when I haven't written anything new that week.

Personally, what kind of novella -- be it any style, theme, or genre -- would you like to see emerge from the Open Novella Contest?

That's a tough question because I enjoy so many different types of fiction. I suppose that it comes down to what I'm always looking for in a story. I want to be surprised. I want the writer to put on the page something that is unique to their experience, imagination, or worldview and take me someplace I didn't know existed, open my eyes to something my own imagination would never have come up with, discover something I never thought of before.

Lastly, because we're always curious... What was your ever first experience with the power of the written language?

It probably was back before I could read. I was the youngest child in my family and by the time I came around all my brothers and sisters were in school, so I always had someone to read to me. It made me cherish books. A lot of those incidents bleed into one another and it's all so long ago that they're getting foggy, but one stands out clearly.

When I was about five, my mother and I took a train across Canada. It was a pretty big deal. It was the longest trip I'd ever taken, the furthest from home I'd ever gone. On the train, she read to me Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. That story has always been intertwined with that trip for me, one memory doesn't come without the other. There were some incredible sights on that journey and always in the background, like a soundtrack, there's that book.

It's been great hearing from you, David, and thank you for sharing your valuable knowledge in storytelling.

Best wishes for your future endeavours from Coffee Community!

Our goal is to bring you many more exclusive interviews with people who aren't just Wattpad Stars or Staff, but also some pretty awesome authors.
In that quest, next we will be talking to Dan, so stick around for more fun!