The Write Way | ✔︎

13 | VAISHALIDENTON

I apologize for the lack of the header; my laptop has started its march towards the grave, but I will not be deterred!

Today, we are joined by the lovely vaishalidenton, also a good friend of mine and a wonderful person all around. We met just recently through Wattpad, and her work "Thirteen Lullabies" was recently added to one of TeenFiction's reading lists. In this interview we talk about the discovery of love for words thanks to a magic tree house book, dark themes in writing, as well as her experience as a writer of color.

Bolded text are mine. Italicized text belong to the interviewee. Regular text are notes added by me!

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Hi! Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. To start off, please introduce yourself to our lovely readers.

Hey guys! I go by many names (Vaishali, vai, v, winky), call me any one of those that you like! I'm 18, half Indian and about to move away from my parents for the first time in my life to pursue a degree in molecular, cell and developmental bio from UCLA.

Let's get right into it. How long have you been writing? When and how did you get your start? Was there a specific moment when you realized you wanted to tell stories?

So, for me, really it all started with my love for reading. When I was six, my ammama (mom's mom) gave me a magic tree house book to read, and that kick started my love for words. I've been a voracious reader ever since! I've always had story ideas in my head, but I never really used to write them down. I would just picture everything in my head. I believe I wrote a couple excerpts for stories in sixth grade that I turned in to my writing teacher and she submitted them to some person for a summer writing camp.

After that camp, I stopped writing anything down and simply continued to read books. I think that's probably around the time I actually found Wattpad. I would say my real start was about nine months ago, when I first had the idea for popularity algorithm. I planned out the characters and story and finally started writing, but then I took a long hiatus and restarted this summer. Since the start of the summer, I've started a couple other stories, but my focus remains on having quality chapters over quantity.

Walk us through what the writing process is like for you. Do you have any traditions or a specific set of steps that you follow, for example: do you start with the plot idea, then move to characters, or the other way around? Additionally: how long does the planning process take for you before you start writing and how long does it take to finish a story?

So, I usually have plot ideas pop into my head, and I write them down somewhere (I have an app where I write down a small blurb about each of my ideas). If I feel I can develop them enough at that point, I start coming up with characters and adding layers to the plot. I then begin planning out backstory and chapters. I'll give each character both a physical and personality description, and then I'll write a couple sentences for each chapter, so I know where I want to go with it. I'm ok with straying from the sentences if I think the story should go another direction.

The planning process varies for me. For TPA, it took me a couple days to research some stuff within the "rich people" arena to help, but I started writing the first chapter pretty quickly. For 13Luls, I figured out the setting for each chapter. Because it's partly historical fiction, I research for each chapter, which takes about a day, and then I take another couple of days to write and edit the chapter (writing doesn't take that long, but I work a lot, so my writing time gets cut short many days).

I've never actually finished a story because I'm kind of new to the idea of actually writing a full story, but I'm hoping to finish my two works before uni starts, then I have another work I want to try out!