Post Title: Q &A withBrendanOlenick About a Bunch of Things That Are Maybe Slightly 

Hello, everyone. I'm BrendanOlenick and I couldn't be happier to be here. First of all, before we even begin, I really want to thank the readers of the Wattpad Block Party. Thank you for supporting all of these wonderful writers. Thank you for making us feel like our work has meaning. Additionally, thank you to all the other writers involved. You all are such sweethearts and gentle-folk; I am not ashamed to say that I adore each of you - albeit from the distance of the other side of my laptop screen. Bless you all, my dears.

So what I'm going to do here today is I've brought in my real-life friend, whom for the duration of this post I shall refer to him as Q, as he prefers to remain anonymous. (I told him it's not like anyone would even know he is, but he claims he likes to maintain an air of mystery. Whatever that means. Okay, Q. I get it. You're too cool for me. Well THAT'S JUST FINE THEN.) Anyways, I've invited my buddy Q over to conduct an interview with me. What you'll be reading is the complete transcript of our interview. All I told him is that he just needs to interview me as if he's writing a magazine article about me or doing one of those blog guest features. "I'll take it from there," he told me gladly. Great. Well, this should be fun. Let's commence.

Q: Are we ready to get on with this?

Brendan: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Might as well. I have to turn this Block Party post in pretty soon, so I better have something good to show for it.

Q: So you've resigned yourself to the fact that probably won't happen? Good. Acceptance is the first step.

B: Hey.

Q: @BrendanOlenick and the Pursuit of Mediocrity. There, I've already titled your interview for you.

B: Isn't the interviewer supposed to be non-biased?

Q: Alright, alright. Back to interviewer mode. Don't get all bent out of shape.

B: *in Donald Trump voice* You're fired.

Q: *in a better Donald Trump impression* Wrong.

B: Can't argue with that.

Q: Okay, first tell us a little bit about yourself. Wanna start with that?

B: Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Umm. Well, I'm from somewhere in the mid-west of Canada. The weather here right now is awful. As we speak, it is currently minus thirty-one degrees celsius. For those of you in other countries, that's about MINUS TWENTY-FOUR degrees fahrenheit. Do you believe this garbage?!

*takes deep breath*
Okay. Okay, let's move on. Talk about something else. Umm. I'm twenty-seven years old. Which is either pretty young or pretty old depending on how you look at it. It's that age where you're still kinda young but you're really not that young anymore, and you're getting kinda oooold but you're really not that old yet. So, like, directly in the middle of life in a way. That's how I feel.

Q: Well, you've certainly started this off in an interesting direction.

B: Sorry. Yeah.

Q: Any other interesting tidbits you might wanna include? So far you've ranted about the weather and about your age. Your readers are getting an accurate depiction of your lameness, so you're doing great, buddy.

B: Asking you to do this was a big mistake, wasn't it.

Q: Probably, yeah.

B: Where can I file a formal complaint?

Q: How about telling us how you first came to Wattpad?

B: Okay, good question. Actually, the first encouragement to try Wattpad came from my friend Tim.

Q: Real-life friend?

B: Yes, real-life friend. You know Tim.

Q: Yeah yeah, Tim. Great guy. I was just asking that for the readers.

B: Ah. So, Tim had been on Wattpad for about two years or something already at that point and he had been telling me about it and trying to convince me to post my work-in-progress on it for many, many months before I even began to take him seriously! Haha.

Tim had found a lot of online success here at Wattpad and it really peaked my interest because I know just how hard he's been working at his writing, so it really pleased me to see that my friend's hard work was beginning to pay off. He developed quite a large fan base, won a Wattys award; so I was super stoked for him. Although I wouldn't say that it was the appeal of chasing validation that won me over to trying it.

Firstly, I'm a big fan of writers getting together (in real life, which is what I did before Wattpad) and believe that it's hands-down the most beneficial thing you can do as a writer. It's vital to put yourself amongst others who are at the same stage as you - just trying to get better so we can become better equipped to chase our dreams. And I had been doing a lot of this; I was in a writer's group in my city, I had a published author as a mentor for a nine-month period, and I had also taken a 6-week intensive fiction writing course from a Giller Prize long-listed author, among other things. However, I found myself wanting to interact with even more writers and I knew that I couldn't just be around these select few writers in our enclosed and safe atmosphere for forever; I knew the way to keep growing would be to expand my circle. So I was craving the kind of atmosphere I had with my writing group and my fiction writing courses, so my friend Tim showed me that Wattpad could in fact be all of those things and more.

Q: Awesome. And how has the experience been so far?

B: My experience with Wattpad thus far has proven all the things my friend Tim told me about it to be true. The amount of interaction I've had with other writers and readers has more than exceeded my expectations and the benefit that it has been to my writing has been completely out of the stratosphere. I couldn't be happier.

Q: In what ways has Wattpad influenced and impacted your writing?

B: Well, I think that the most defeating aspect of writing, for any amateur or aspiring writer, is that it routinely feels like they're writing for nobody and their work is just getting sucked down into a dark vacuumous hole of irrelevance. This is what happens when you don't have a community or when you don't know like-minded people interested in the same art as you.

Wattpad gives you a community. No matter what your interests are, I can guarantee you will find like-minded people who share similar literary loves.

For me, it was inspiring to discover literary gems on Wattpad after I did some digging around. It proves that hard work pays off. People will usually always get pulled to the literature from someone who's put in the time and the hard work. Because it's obvious. So that right there has been a big impact on me; I know that I've put a lot of time and work into my own writing over the years, long before I ever came to Wattpad.

Truth be told, I didn't come to Wattpad, or any other means of exposing my work, for a very long time because I thought I owed it to myself to not come to it fresh-faced and green, but rather as someone who has already put the years of hard work in to become a better, improved writer. I

also thought I owed it to people that might end up reading my novel that it shouldn't be something rushed out and slapped on the internet by someone young and inexperienced. I thought there was already enough of those as it was, why add yet another?

Wattpad's also been great for motivation. I came to Wattpad with an almost-but-not-quite- finished novel, and the positive responses, the reader interactions, the interactions with writers I admire, have all proven to be motivational tools for getting the rest of this project finished and out into the world, ready to move on to the next big idea. I always felt I had a bit of a knack for the kind of style I write in, and getting the type of support that I have has also been a huge confidence boost in my abilities. I can't stress enough the need for a writer to believe in themselves in order to find their voice and really use it to succeed in telling their stories in a unique way that nobody else could. When we realize that we are the only ones who could tell this story in THIS exact way, the encouragement we receive is ten-fold.

Q: There we go, now we're rollin'. So what was your initial impression of Wattpad?

B: Well, to be honest, at first I kind of felt like Wattpad was just a place with a lot of people yelling very loudly over each other into an empty, vacuous black hole for people to please oh please read their "novel" even though, much to their disillusionment, nobody is actually listening.

Haha, but thank goodness that's only a small section of it! I began to eventually see that Wattpad really can be a successful platform for fiction. And WELL-WRITTEN fiction at that! Not only is the content there, but the readership is there as well. I just love it now. The potential for great work on Wattpad is extraordinary and will only continue to blossom. Literary writers need spaces to test out their ideas and gain connections with other fellow writers and readers just as much as anyone else. The idea of joining something like Wattpad is already becoming less and less off- putting to people due to that fear of it just being a place for wannabe writer's latest wish- fulfillment fantasies or awful fanfiction, because it's plain to see that literary fiction is still well- respected here as well.

Q: So you obviously see a lot to Wattpad's potential. Even so, do you see any negatives?

B: Sure, as with anything. I suppose that the biggest negative that can be seen is the over- saturation of content on sites like Wattpad and the time-consuming difficulties it can be in trying to wade through it all to find the kinds of things you're looking for if your tastes are a little bit more specific than, say, vampire of werewolf fiction. Then it can be a challenge for the reader to find the type of meaningful fiction that they've went looking for, and the last thing you want is for them to get disheartened and give up before stumbling upon your work, which they could have ended up finding a genuine connection to. But it's true, Wattpad can be daunting, and if a person sees a lot of less-polished, amateur works right off the bat, they might be led to believe that this is all Wattpad is and they would give up on finding the works by authors worthy of being read, who have put in a ton of hard work and time into their craft in the hopes of Wattpad being a stepping stone for their writing careers.

And I think this is really a great spot for me to just say how much I value things like the Wattpad Block Party. It's so fantastic to have so many great writers and great books all together in one easy to find spot for readers. If it makes it easier for readers to find the authors and books they connect with, then I'm all for it. Making the readers' job easier is always a good thing.

Q: Awesome, man. So, let's get back to basics with a really basic question. Why do you write?

B: Why do I write? Well... So. I'm alone on a boat. A small boat, no bigger than a raft. It reminds me of the one Pi is stranded on in the movie Life of Pi, except there's no tiger named Richard Parker. I'm on this boat in the middle of the ocean. Nothing but water in every direction. No land in sight. Water so far into the horizon it's terrifying. Suddenly the waves get bigger. Soon it's turning into a storm, faster than any storm has ever manifested. The waves are bigger. The water is splashing over and drenching me. I have nothing on the boat with me but a table where my pen and pad of paper are. A giant wave hits my boat. My pen and paper are suddenly nowhere to be found. I look around frantically. There they are, floating in the water. I just got an idea - if only I could jot it down..

I think about swimming to my pen and paper. I stop. Is it worth drowning for? Worth risking death? The ocean sweeps away my pen and paper; too late, they're gone.
The next giant wave hits and the boat capsizes. Suddenly I'm propelled into the freezing water, paddling to stay alive. I'm an okay swimmer but I know I cannot tread water forever. I look for the boat but there are nothing but small pieces of it floating by. The boat is gone, I am stranded at sea. I look around desperately for something to hold on to. I grab something floating, use it to keep myself afloat. I notice that what I am holding is not a piece of my boat at all, but a word. There are words in the water all around me. I swim around gathering them together, placing them one on top of the other. I'm floating in a sea of words. I shout to God to thank him for all of the words as I grab as many as I can and use them to build a small island so that I can get out of the water and stand on it.

In the distance, a mile away, or something - I can't measure distance very well out here - I notice someone else, standing on an island of her own. She's waving at me. Or is she? I don't know, I can't tell. I'm over here on my little island, and she's over there on hers. I wrote myself out of the deep water. And now here I am, a little less alone, because I see her over there, and she sees me. I wrote myself out of the ocean and now I will write myself off of this lonely little island. Maybe, just maybe, if I'm lucky, I could write myself a bridge across the ocean, to that other lonely little island, to meet another person, to tell her I could write the both of us out of this place. We'll never be lonely again. We'll never again be lost at sea. I will get us home. That's why I write.

Q: I have no idea what that was I just listened to.

B: Hahah. Well, I wanted to leave with at least one memorable answer.

Q: I'm still wrapping my head around it. I'm pretty convinced it was bloody brilliant even though I have no idea what you just said.

B: Thanks.

Q: Pretty deep, man. (pauses) So where do you get your ideas from and what inspires your stories?

B: Honestly, I just write what compels me. It usually starts with a simple idea that involves a character or two and it usually expands from there. I don't know, it's a little more difficult to describe. There's a lot of me in what I write. Every major character feels like a particular piece of myself. So then in that sense, it's easy to figure out what to write. Because essentially I'm just writing about myself.

Q: Major case of self-indulgence, gotcha. Okay, so about your novels in particular. How do you plan your novels?

B: I think that my favorite description of the way I write and plan my books comes from Stephen King, who evidently writes the same way; he says... Excuse me while I look it up, so that I can get the quote right.
*Googles the quote*

Found it. He says, "Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible."

What my good buddy Steve here is saying is that attempting to write a novel primarily in accordance with plot and having it all perfectly plotted and mapped out, can have a deadening effect on the work. Yes, it's true, writing into the void, with little notion of direction or plot, can feel like blundering about in pitch dark. You'll get those questions in your head like "Where am I going? What if there's nothing here and the black void just goes on forever?" But I like to think there's always something to be found if we just have the patience and courage to keep on digging.

My creative process when writing starts with character and little else. That's it. In using The Book Nook as an example, I had two central characters; the narrator and the girl from the bookstore. I didn't begin writing until I saw them as fully fleshed-out people, even close friends, in my head. And then I dropped them in and began to see what they would do and where they would lead the story. I'm a big fan of having characters dictate plot.

For me, it's the characters that give me the motivation to write because I've come to be captivated by them so much and in hearing what they have to say, and so I must find out where they're going and what they're doing next! If I didn't have those kinds of characters, there's almost no way I'd get anywhere with writing. I've got to be compelled.

Q: So important, absolutely. And I guess that's a great way to keep writer's block at bay too, huh?

B: Absolutely. I don't feel like I'm ever at a loss for what to write next. I just let the characters guide the story and I'll always be led somewhere.

Q: That's so cool. So, I'm interested; what's your creative process look like? Upon writing, what are some things that you tend to do to keep yourself in the zone?

B: Well, I try to stay disciplined and write at least a small amount most days. Quite often my "real job" work day starts later in the day which affords me mornings to sit and write. However, I absolutely never have a set schedule that I get to keep, because my paying job is so all-over-the- map (I work at a local news station in my city) and so my writing time gets routinely cut and pasted to whenever I get a little bit of free space for it.

I like to think that I'm fairly disciplined and once I finally sit down, I can get right to work and jump right in to my novel(s) precisely where I left off at the last point. But I'm very picky about where I write. I can only seem to be able to write at home in my apartment and absolutely nowhere else. Unless it's someplace completely isolated. Like I spent a bit of time at my parents' place in the autumn just sitting on their backyard deck gazing at my mother's gorgeous flower garden. I guess I'm funny like that. I never at all understood how people can write in coffee shops. It freaks me out. I need complete silence, usually which I can only find in the comfort of home.

I have a nice little desk and chair situated directly beside my north-facing bedroom window, looking out at the city below from my second-story panorama. And in the summers, I take my work and my entire desk and bring it outside of my window and on to my spacious, little balcony and work from there. It's idyllic.

Q: That really does sound idyllic. So you're quite the introvert when it comes to writing or getting any writing done?

B: Absolutely. I stay as far away from people as I can during writing.

Q: Hahah. That's awesome. Whatever works! Okay, so we've touched on quite a lot of topics already, but I think at this point readers might want to hear about what kind of things you actually write about. So can you talk briefly about your works-in-progress. I know you have a few, so you wanna share a bit about each of them?

B: For sure, I'd love to. So, I have three different novels that are each works-in-progress and are each at different stages of completion.
Firstly, there's The Book Nook. It's the book I first started posting on Wattpad when I came here 10 months ago. It's above 80,000 words so far posted, so I'm really coming into the homestretch with that novel. If I had to give it the elevator pitch, I'd describe it as being about books, a bookstore, and young love - three of my absolute favorite things. Hahah. But it's really about a lot more than that, looking beyond surface level. It's about two young people who meet in a bookstore, but their relationship doesn't take any typical arc; it becomes something wholly altogether different. Sure, it's about books and bookstores. They're magical, after all. But those are just what brings these two characters together. They have a love for books, and a yearning for a story to spring to life. But these two characters end up telling a much bigger story than either of them first lets on. If I can take a snippet out of the book's synopsis for a moment - What evolves is a story of longing to break out of the mediocrity our lives can sometimes feel entrenched in; of no longer holding in that feeling that our lives could be so much more than what they currently are; of yearning for a bigger purpose to our existence; of realizing that we're all just engaged in the modest and universal struggle of trying to make sense and be significant to somebody somewhere somehow. 

My next one that I've started posting not too long ago, which I've hacked away at least 50,000 words of so far - so I still have much more to post before I've caught up to where I am in the writing.
This one's interesting. I called it "Sad Robot: an autobiography of my unfortunate existence"
It's written memoir-style from an artificial intelligence robot who is essentially a consumer-level house robot that you can simply purchase off the market. He's an older model, far from looking top-of-the-line, so he routinely gets treated as disposable. However, what's different about Hiram the robot is that his owner kind

of just lets him do what he feels like, so Hiram ends up spending a lot of his days surfing the internet or making his way through the city on little excursions, and in turn Hiram has acquired a wider breadth of knowledge than most household robots. Because robots learn from doing, seeing, and interacting. So since he's done far more observing than most robots would, all this observing has caused him to somehow develop a far more unique personality than most. That's why he contains such a capacity for humor, and he really loves deadpan and self-deprecating humor, which is always such a blast to write. And what's interesting about Hiram, is that he's taken a massive curiosity into the life of Milo, the guy who owns him. Milo is an unhappy young man troubled by the downward spiraling trend of his life. But Hiram, almost more than anything, just wants to help Milo fill the voids in his life.

Thirdly, I have a new book I'm working on that I haven't begun posting yet to Wattpad. But what I've done today is I'm debuting the cover and synopsis of this newest book, entitled The Voyage. (So take a gander over to my profile to see the brand new cover and read the synopsis!) The Voyage is unlike either of the two other books I'm working on. In fact, all three are vastly distinct from one another. The Voyage is intended to be a spiritual epic journey tale. It's about two people who in every sense are destined to be together. Throughout their young lives, dating back to when they were sixteen years old, they have crossed each other's paths multiple times throughout a period of about ten years or so. When they finally reach a point in time when they

look back and see the pieces of their entwined puzzle, they believe that it's divine intervention that has set their paths to cross each other all of those times. This book is somewhat hard to describe. It's about feeling out messages from God. It's about the concept of spiritual warfare and how we battle things not of flesh and blood but of those things in the heavenly realms. And it even delves heavily into the concepts of Heaven and Hell.

Haha, sorry, I've kept a lot of the details of this really quite vague, but I just don't feel like giving too much away at this time. Sorry! Hahah.

Q: Don't worry, I won't hold you to any details, my friend. You aren't under any obligation to spoil anything you don't wish to!

B: Whew, thank goodness.

Q: The Voyage sounds epic and it sounds like you've put a ton of thought and passion behind it. Same as with the other two books; they all sound really unique and you gave some really compelling comments about them. If I based looking into your books just off of what you just said, then trust me, I'm sold!

B: Hahah, thanks, man.

Q: Okay, I really want you to delve deeper into some other things, but I really, really have to ask you this question first. In your book Sad Robot, your main protagonist Hiram the robot is so incredibly unique. What inspired that unique perspective?

B: Haha, that's a great question. What I love most about using a perspective like Hiram's is that he is so unbiased. He is, essentially, the most neutral outlook on life you could really find. Everything is so fresh to him because he's constantly learning about human beings, about how they live their lives, and everything about how society works. He's just so captivated by humans, really. So he really gives absolutely infinite potential to social commentary and interpretations on human nature that really couldn't be given by anyone else.

I think my most favorite thing about Hiram is his utter fascination with the concept of God. It completely baffles him how there are some humans who have such unwavering faith in an ultimate creator and that there are also some atheistic humans who persist that none of religion is true. To him, it's perplexing that there can be two so completely contradictory views on something like that. To him, in his logical way of thinking, one must be true and one must be false. So, to me, the funnest and most intellectually stimulating sub-plot of the whole novel is Hiram's search for ultimate Truth to settle this matter.

Q: Whoa, that's a bit deep for just a story about a robot, isn't it.

B: Hahah, yeah I guess so!

Q: So now you've got me incredibly curious. What certain topics, themes, symbols, etcetera do you find yourself writing about often? Do these three books have any common elements to them?

B: I find myself being mostly motivated by certain topics and themes that really resonate with me. As I stated earlier, my stories start with character, but there's still something about those characters that needs to be present if I'm going to feel moved and affected enough to want to write about them. I'm really finicky and critical of the subject matter I write about and tend to float towards bigger issues rather than just what might be 'a cool story'.

A lot of my characters in my fiction revolve around certain recurring themes. Take 'The Book Nook' for example, where we have two characters who are essentially both, in their own unique ways that they outrightly show it, two very lonely people. But they've got a lot of humor in their outlooks, which is a huge advantage for them in being able to overcome these deep-seated insecurities. But deep down there's this unsatisfied longing for something that their lives can't currently provide them. You see these two characters, who are almost world-weary in a way but they've become self-aware in that their lives have become this circular motion where things seem like they're spinning in place. I think that's something a lot of us can connect with, that relatable fear that we're headed nowhere in particular and it only makes the future even more scarier and uncertain. So there's these two characters who have this longing for just wanting to know that there's more to their lives and to their destinies than what the world has to show them at face value. I think this is something that also is universal, and I think that, spiritual or non- spiritual, we all as human beings long for something greater than ourselves, to know our lives have worth and a purpose. I think this really is a spiritual thing and a spiritual longing of our soul rather than something that could be satisfied by any mere worldly thing. I find I like putting my characters on this journey of discovery, of realizing there's this longing deep inside of them and that what they're seeking is greater than anything the world could give them.

I touch on this same sort of thing but in a very different way in The Voyage. The two characters in that one are really quite different from the two in The Book Nook; while the two from The Book Nook could be described as two wandering souls searching for meaning, the two from The Voyage are really quite spiritual people. They come at it with an entirely different perspective and are, I guess, much more open to things.

Relationships tend to be a big theme as well. I think a lot of times people can be scared of relationships because of their own insecurities and the fear that it could always end at any moment; so that can even be crippling to a lot of people, but it's also a true fact of life - sometimes things don't work out the way we want them to. That's a topic I like to talk about. But also the positives of relationships; of the getting to know another human being on an innermost level, of letting another human being into your life and into your world and all of the excitement and unpredictability that comes with that. There's always so much more to the knowing of a person than we could ever hope.

Lastly, a huge theme in my writing, as is largely evident in 'The Book Nook' and in the other two to a lesser extent, are books and stories. I'm in love with the idea that every author desperately wants to communicate something very specific to someone willing to open their book. I'm a firm believer that as authors we must bleed out on to the page and our stories must

be the most vulnerable we've ever chosen to be. Because someone will pick up our book and see it, and really see us the writer as a person, like a long lost friend almost, and this can have a profound effect on that reader. I've been there; I grew up reading voraciously since the second grade and books have had a larger impact on my personal growth and character than anything, or anyone, else.

Q: Dang, I didn't know you could talk this much.

B: Well, I can force it out when I have to.

Q: I'm bloody glad you did, my friend. I think this thing's gonna turn out great. Think we've talked for long enough?

B: Probably infinitely longer than we should have.

Q: Perfect! So I guess I'll do the sign off then. That's it, that's all, folks! Thanks for listening to my little interview with my friend and author Brendan Olenick. We hope you found it interesting and insightful. Brendan, where can people contact you?

B: I'm willing to answer any more questions on here if anyone has any. Just ask them on this Wattpad Block Party post and I should see them. Tag me in the questions if you can. I'll be sure to get to each one.

Q: And follow him on Wattpad!

B: If it strikes your fancy.

Q: Peace out!

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