My Favorite Conversations (Interviews)

RadioSpirit

This is my interview with RadioSpirit

They have 317 followers at the moment and 8 published works including Darker Places and The Fall which has 1k reads.

1. You have been on this site for two years according to your page. Have you been actively writing this entire time and if so do you still enjoy it as much as you did when you started?

I have been writing this entire time, but "active" is a bit of an overstatement. Keeping to a schedule and updating frequently is one of my biggest problems as a writer, though I like to think I'm getting a little better.

I definitely do still love writing as much as I did when I started, though. I've been trying to challenge myself as a writer more, and it's been incredibly rewarding for me to see how people are responding to it.

2. Do you like reading on this site as well or mostly writing?

As much as I sometimes make fun of the clichés on here, I do really love supporting the work of other writers (and, of course, fanfiction is my eternal guilty pleasure).

Something that has always irritated me is when users complain about how "everything on here sucks" – and then spend every breath advertising their own work and don't bother to actually engage or promote the books of more innovative writers. I strive to be the opposite of that, and I take a lot of pride in engaging on Wattpad not just as a creator, but as a reader as well.

3. Do you have a favorite character you've written so far?

While my favourite main character is probably Kendra from Darker Places because her psyche was really interesting to delve into, I've always liked writing side characters best so I'm going to have to go with Lena, the main character Kacey's best friend, from The Fall. Even though her role isn't super important plot-wise, she practically flew off the page for me because in a lot of ways she reminds me of myself back when I was still kind of a baby social justice warrior.

She has the political parts of social justice down perfectly, but she's not quite there on the personal ones and that's something I really related to for a long time so it was very easy for me to channel that into her interactions with Kacey.

4. Why did you first decide to start writing?

I decided to really start writing about four years ago when I was kind of pushed into it by a friend of mine, epichorn31. We were still getting to know each other at the time, and I was talking to her one night when she told me about a novel she was working on and asked if I had any ideas for something of my own.

This eventually led to the publication of a Harry Potter fanfiction that in retrospect was really grimdark and terrible, but in my defence, I was twelve and I don't think any of us are particularly proud of what we wrote at that age.

Luckily, I like to think I've improved since then – I'm still way too serious for my own good, but at least now my angst is more creative and well-written.

5. Do you have a book of yours that you would recommend for people not sure where to start?

It's very new and doesn't have many poems in it yet, but I'd have to say my current poetry collection, Sprawl; the second chapter of that book, "Black Lung," is probably one of the better poems I've written.

Prose-wise, although it definitely has its flaws, I really think Darker Places shows off my strengths very well.

6. Where do you get your inspiration to write from?

This has always been a complicated question for me, because my answer to it has changed so much over time.

A little while after I started writing, I had a really awful spat of depression that ended up leading to suicidal thoughts at its worst. I got help and I'm doing a lot better now, but a side effect of this was that I ended up deluding myself into believing I was some kind of tortured artist and that powerful writing could only come from acute mental anguish.

It's only now looking back that I can see how toxic and stifling that mindset was for me, because here's the thing about depression writing: it doesn't exactly provide you with much emotional or topical range. The only thing I could write about was how much everything sucked for me personally, and even the main characters in my fiction stories were basically self-inserts.

A huge part of unlearning that outlook was training myself to find inspiration everywhere and write things that connect outward to society a bit more instead of only looking inward.

So I have this very diverse list of things that have inspired my more recent writing – Born as Ghosts is a product of the political tension as of late, and The Fall was a deconstruction of bad boy tropes, for instance.

I still write what I know, but I guess I've just realised I know about a lot of things that aren't related to being depressed.

7. Is there something you wish you could change about Wattpad besides the bugs and glitches?

I think the rating system (if you could call it that) is deeply flawed on this site. It's completely binary, so you can't delineate between different levels of mature content, and mere themes of self-harm are enough to warrant your book being blocked off to large segments of the Wattpad user base.

Something I think would really help is a system of checkboxes, modeled after the AO3 Archive Warnings, where before a user hits Publish they are asked if their story contains any of a small list of sensitive topics: everything from your usual graphic depictions of violence and sex scenes, to things like sexual assault and self-harm or suicide.

Readers would see these warnings next to the tags in the summary of the story, and could then control and blacklist certain warnings in their profile settings. This would be easy for writers to apply, and would combine a sort of standardised trigger warning procedure with a way to rate stories.

8. Do you have any plans for new stories in the future?

Once I finish my current fiction project, Born as Ghosts, I have two story ideas I'm considering writing next. One is a light teen romance and ode to emo culture, and the other is a more serious miniature road trip novella about a group of girls in a poetry club on their way to an open mic.

I have a lot of trouble finishing things, so I try not to get too into new projects while I still have one in progress, but watch out for one of those soon.

9. Do you have a future goal you would like to reach on Wattpad?

A personal goal of mine is to get three thousand reads on a story, and also to rank again; although anyone who's ever ranked before knows how addicting it can be because you start obsessively monitoring where you are on the list.

10. What has been your best moment on Wattpad so far?

This is actually a really nice segue, because my proudest moment was probably when Darker Places managed to rank in Short Story. It's this fairly dark and emotional technothriller with a black female protagonist, and when it started to pick up steam I saw it as a win for diversity, both in genre and character demographics. I also think it helped me get more confident in my skills.

Darker Places was the second fiction thing I wrote on here, and the first, Countdown, dealt with depression as the main theme. I'm still proud of Countdown, but the fact that I was able to get just as much praise for something that didn't deal with my own angst at all was incredibly motivating for me.

I hope you enjoyed my interview with the lovely RadioSpirit

Don't forget to comment suggestions for other authors I should feature next.

Love you all xxx

- starr