Overview

In our author segment, VK talks about using her psychology degree to understand her characters and give them more depth. And since she lives in Australia, we discuss how that affects printing and buying books.

We then dig into the meat of our discussion and how authors can or should handle stories with multiple worlds. How the travel and events affect the story and what you should and shouldn't do to make sure the story is effective for the reader.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/V4CriC7mWaQ

Transcript

[00:00:48] Stephen: So let's talk some author stuff, move on to. And before we talk about our big topic of parallel worlds and writing for parallel worlds, what are the [00:01:00] tools and services you use? You mentioned expel, but what do you actually use when you're writing?

[00:01:05] VK: So when I'm writing, I use Scrivener, which is I'm sure many of you have heard of it.

It's obviously a writing platform. I use it because strangely enough of though my brain is very disorganized sometimes. I love my writing to be really structured so I can put in chapters, I can pull pieces out. I can move things on the board really quickly, and I can see where I'm at from a really structured viewpoint.

And I love it as a tool. It has, it was a life-changer for me than putting it into a simple word document where I just get completely 110% Scrivener. That's what I use all the time. Backs up automatically. So if I accidentally forget to save it still saves it for me. Happy days. Yeah. It's a great tool.

[00:01:55] Stephen: Good. Okay. And you're working on your second book [00:02:00] about to be out and your third book you're working on. What are some things that you've learned that you're doing different? I

[00:02:05] VK: guess when I first started, I did a lot more telling rather than showing. For me I've I really have noticed that I've started to grow into that, that showing how people reacting and then allowing the Rita to infer.

I think when you first start riding, you do a lot of telling, and it's not that you assume that the reduced dumb, but you do. As I'm getting more experience, obviously I'm able to take more out, but allow more of the reader to take control over that aspect. And there's a beauty to that too, because then you're not controlling their storyline per se.

You're letting them have a little bit of free reign. The character looks. For example, I don't do heavy descriptions on the characters, unless it's a world on what you need to have a lot of detail for them to understand what they looking [00:03:00] at. But for general characters and main characters, I do tend to leave a lot of it up for the imagination of the reader, because I want them to be that character.

I want them to flow with that character and feel and understand what that character, so they need to have that connect. And I think tying in too much of your own personal thoughts of what that character looks like actually pulls them back. So

[00:03:24] Stephen: I've been working on that a lot. I, I want to get that nice balance between.

Describing them. So they got a picture in their head, but not, he was five foot seven with a big eyebrows and blue eyes with long eyelashes and had some wrinkles at the corner of his eyes. And his nose was a little ball, but I don't want to be doing that. So it's difficult to get that balance right. Where you want it to feel like you said, feel a part of that character.