Royal Interviews

Interview | Eight

With warm wishes, let's welcome axgirl13 here, who is the winner of Esthetíque Grand Awards 2022-23, from Fantasy (group 2) genre, with their awesome story Till death do us part. Let's head over to hear what the winner has to say about their success journey.

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I: Interviewer
K: Winner

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I

: Hello again, I'm Ria, your interviewer for today. I hope to make today's interview session interactive. Can we begin by getting a short introduction of you?

K: Sure! My name is Kamila. I'm Polish, but live in UK. I've been active on Wattpad for around 3 years now and in this time wrote a few novels. I'm a huge nerd and love all things fantasy and sci-fi. My favourite things to do are writing, reading, gaming and listening to music.

I: Kamila, a pleasure meeting you! Well, then, let's move to our next question. My first question to you is, Are you a Panster or a Plotter?

K: A bit of both to be honest. I do make a rough plan before I start writing. I write a bit about most characters and then do the skeletal outline, like around 10 main points that need to happen. But as I write that outline often goes out of the window, as concepts change and new ideas come up while I write

I: Oh, that's an interesting fact to know about you! Most of the time, writing a book in the fantasy genre requires deep as well as wide research, which I can get from being a fantasy author myself. How do you approach this process?

K: I watch a lot of youtube videos. But in all seriousness, I've been an avid reader of fantasy my whole life and I've seen hundreds of different worlds and magic systems and so on, so I think that gave me a bit of general knowledge of how the made up worlds function and which aspects make them more believable and immersing for readers. Basically I'm mostly write the stories I enjoy reading, so I don't focus too much on building complex worlds with 500 years of history, that nobody is really that interested in (I sadly never manage to read Silmarillion even though I love Tolkien's books). I'd rather focus on characters and their stories and the world around them is more like a background. But I do go to youtube and wikipedia every time I need some details about some weaponry, or fighting styles etc

I:Woah, I'm amazed truly. As you mentioned you watch YouTube Videos, do you follow any Authortubes or writing videos that provide tips and tricks for writing?

K: I don't follow any particular channels. It's more like if I stumble at something that look interesting then I watch it. Or if I look for a specific topic, like how to write believable characters death or something then I watch a few to see how other people approach the topic. When I was writing my first novel I got a pass for Master Class  videos for my birthday so I watched a couple of authors like Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood talking about the writing. That was very helpful.

I: Do you take inspiration from classics or published books while writing your stories?

K: I think a lot of things affects our own writing. For me it's a mixture of all those things. For example I come up with the general idea for Till Death Do Us part while reading another book published by an indie author. It was a very small side plot, with arranged marriage and I though: I would approach that theme in completely different way. And that's when the first idea of the story popped into my mind. Another time I saw a very interesting character in some TV show I was watching. Again, it wasn't a main character, but a side one, not too important, but a whole idea with a very charismatic person thinking they are doing a good thing, when in fact they are going completely different path making whole lot of trouble. And I filed that as a type of character I want to use in one of my stories. I also get loads of inspiration from music. For example when I do chores or walk with headphones in my ears, or do anything that don't need much brain power, my mind just spin the tales that come up with specific music. My story Justice for the Fallen was wholly inspired by an album Beth out of Hell by the Murder of My Sweet band. I listened to it and thought: Dang, this is such a great story potential, I want to use that.