Hello everyone!

Today we have nick the writer of Sigma/Star with us.

Warm regards. Welcome to an official interview from TheCRYPTIC_. It's our honor to interact with an inspiring writer like you. We hope that you'll have a great time.

1) First of all, when did you decide to join Wattpad and why did you decide to stay?

Back in November of 2010, I found a college friend writing and posting online and talking about it. I was a writer who crated in MS Word, but I would post my stories on my dorm room door and tell my friends to share my stories. When I asked that friend about the writing site they were using (NaNoWriMo), they directed me to Webook, inexplicably, as the place to write content. While there for nearly a year, I found a forum post from someone claiming Wattpad had better copyright protection so everyone should post there to protect their work (this isn't how copyright works or is true, as all works have automatic protection whether you mark it or not).

Upon visiting Wattpad, I thought the UI looked way better than anything else, and it had a discover section where I could see other books, including the rankings, which drove me to want to get on those rankings and get my story out there publicly (versus Webook and other places where you just beg individual people to read your story and nobody can discover anything). So I transferred over everything and stuck to Wattpad.

2) What is the one piece of work that you are extremely proud of and why?

Sigma/Star is usually the work that I should be most proud of since it's the one that saw success. For me, my current work, Chasing Stars, is what I'm proudest of as it is the best writing I have done to date and is the closest to the style that I want to pursue and develop. But this changes every time I finish a story and move on to the next one, so it's hard to stick to anything there.

3) Why did you decide to write in the genres you do?

I don't really write by genre or make a conscious choice to pick a genre when I write. I have ideas and I often want to use them or I have a style I want to pursue. How I execute them or what they are influences the genre I have to pick when I publish, but I am not a genre writer. I don't really think anyone is. For example, a ton of stories, from Fantasy to Action to Science Fiction, have teen characters and romance in them. So where do they go? I often like to explore a lot within different genres too, so I do not want to have a story that is nothing but one thing. No story is made up of a singular genre.

4) What compels you to pick your pen and write? What inspires you or keep you motivated?

I want to share my writing and I want to see where a story goes. So if I need motivation, I read my own story and get excited and continue writing it. Otherwise I'm motivated from all the other content I'm consuming.

5) If there was one thing you wanted to say to a new aspiring writer. What would it be?

I say a lot of things to new, aspiring writers, so it would depend on who they are and why they write and what advice they're seeking. Usually it's about more reads or writing better. If you want to write better, study it, reflect on it, do readings and research and compare your work. Watch film and TV shows for study as well of why they do well. There's tons of Youtube videos of people doing analytical breakdowns of what makes a story arc or how TV shows compel people. Nerdwriter is a good example.

But if someone wants to know how to be a writer, the answer is to write and then hit publish to a place like Wattpad. Once you did that you are, by definition, a writer. You have done something only about 10% of readers do (write and post their own book). Otherwise, if you're looking to be a successful or popular writer, you need to consider your writing as a product that you are selling to consumers and investors. You need to give them the best possible product that will appeal to them. If your story isn't doing well and nobody is reading it, the first place you need to look is at your story. Mine were doing poorly when I first posted, so I looked into what a good story people would want to read looks like and created Sigma/Star to tailor to them. And it took off.

Most people run on the idea that their story would be big if it got exposure. That's typically not true. Lots of stories are given exposure by Wattpad all the time, automatically or through things like winning a Watty, and not all stories explode after getting this exposure. If a story isn't what people want to read, no matter how much you shove it at them, they won't read it. You can learn a surprising amount about how to get popular with your book by watching shows like Shark Tank and Dragon's Den. Everyone shows up at their door with a million dollar idea, and the investors often ask good questions about market and viability and how it beats competitors. These are the kind of things to take into account if you're writing for success, and readers are your investors (and they really do mull over whether reading your book is worth their time).

If you're just writing for artistic merit or pleasure, then you don't care about being popular anyways, in which case, you do you.

6) Why did you decide to be a writer/story-teller?

I struggled to find books that appealed to me so I figured I would just write them so I had something to read.

7) If you were alone is an island and were allowed to choose three users from Wattpad to stay with you. Who would it be and why?

samantha, dani, alessandra. That's probably cheating since they're all my co-workers here anyways.

8) Do you have any pet peeves?

Pet peeves about writing? Or pet peeves in general? I like being relatively neat and organized, so if things are a mess it will get to me. People asking for help and then rejecting what you give them is also frustrating and raises questions about whether you want the actual help and solution or just want to complain. And I don't like hypocrisy.

In writing. Prologues. They're the worst. I ask everyone currently writing one to not and to remove it from your story. They serve no purpose and should be easy to remove. And if you say they are critical and actually necessary for the story, that's Chapter 1 material, not optional sidebar material. Besides which they almost all look identical currently. I don't enjoy reading about memories, feudal lords surveying battlefields, or ancient rituals sealing away a demon at a gathering of the seven ancient gods.

Otherwise, any story that opens to an alarm clock. Any Fantasy story that starts with a knock on the door. Any story that opens and isn't opening on the story itself. Taking a pause early on to give a bunch of filler and descriptions and background info is not a useful or good opening, and this often feeds the first point where people throw a random action or intrigue prologue in front of this boring opening to hide it or lure people into a plot that is actually slow and will dump info. Dumping information in general is pretty awful. I hold a belief that when writing, your characters are real people living in a real world. And how often do you have the kinds of conversations characters have in books in reality? Probably never because they often repeat information to someone that would obviously know that information. Even when you tell a verbal story to a friend or co-worker or classmate about something funny that happened to you on the way to the store, you don't give them nearly as much background info and everything is totally fine. They can pick up the rest. Also, if the Galactic War six centuries ago caused the split into two nations, that information isn't relevant at the start of the story. What the character is up to is relevant. That info can come up later when it matters.

9) And lastly, do you prefer sweet or salty?

Salty. I do poorly with sweet. I have a low tolerance for sweet before it burns my throat and makes me feel sickly.

Cover:

Blurb:

Years have passed since the Jahari passed through the Breach. Project Ethos and the Alpha Explosion have left the world scarred and scattered. Sigmeund reigns over the Unified Front, picking up the pieces of the countries that once dominated the world in an effort to bring lasting peace to the people.

But peace through submission isn't something Porter is interested in. Separated from their allies, Porter and Sigma set out to reunite with those they once knew, wherever it might take them, in an effort to survive in the face of a brand new world.

Except...will those he finds still want to fight alongside him?

This is the continuation of Sigma/Star! You will most likely want to read the original to be caught up, but it's not required if you want to jump in at this point. Chapters will continue from Volume 10, 141 onwards.