Published 12/21/12

To open up this series of interviews, I corresponded with British playwright and literary fiction and fantasy novelist Gytha Lodge. Gytha has won a Fringe Award and a Geoffrey Whitworth Award for her plays. Her Wattpad stories can be read on her profile (@thegyth), and she's presently running a contest for a new Kindle Fire at http://www.wattpad.com/10084118-contest-win-a-kindle-fire-with-the-feature-launch.

Q: Why don’t we start off by asking a little about your books. You’ve got two up on Wattpad right now: The Fragile Tower and The Butterfly Catchers. What made you choose to put them up on the site, and why now? 

A: I got to know about Wattpad through some other writers who recommended it and once I’d had a look I was really keen to get involved. Writing has changed so much in the last few years, with opportunities to get feedback and interest online which were never possible when I started out writing. I think if it had been possible, I would have been a better writer a lot more quickly!

As for why now, I’m currently editing The Butterfly Catchers with my fab agents, and I could see that I was going to get an awful lot more input if I uploaded it onto Wattpad than if I did this all in-house. It’s also a great tester to find out how popular a concept is.

Before uploading The Butterfly Catchers, I’d decided that I’d like to do a fully online book too, which would be on Wattpad from start to finish. The Fragile Tower is the first in a series I’ve been planning out for over a year, and this seemed the perfect time to get it moving. 

Q: You’ve had amazing early success with The Fragile Tower, which cracked the Top 10 Fantasy books on Wattpad pretty quickly. The Butterfly Catchers seems to be moving at a bit of a slower burn. Is there any reason you can think of why one book might be moving a little faster than the other at the moment? 

A: It’s really interesting how differently the two have run. The Butterfly Catchers made it up to the number 4 and 5 slots about a week in or so but then has dropped off a little to more like second or third pages (and sometimes a good deal lower!)  whereas The Fragile Tower has been largely in the top 10 from a couple of days after I uploaded it, though with no updates prior to featuring it has slid a little.

I think the contrast is largely to do with the sort of readers there are on Wattpad. There are more straightforward fantasy fans than there are literary or historical fiction readers. Or even than there are mystery readers. 

There’s probably a little connection with my consistency with uploading, too, since with a big edit going on I’ve had a little break from uploading The Butterfly Catchers – but it’ll be continuing soon in its spangly new form and I’ll see how the charts go then! 

Q: The Fragile Tower goes Featured on Wattpad today. How did that come about for you? 

A: The featuring of The Fragile Tower is a really fantastic thing. It was something I approached the wonderful Maria Cooatcu about, having been sent her way by other Wattpad staff. Luckily, Maria liked it and was keen to run it as a feature serialisation, and having sorted the concept out, at that point I was able to hand over to Curtis Brown to organise how it was all going to work. I’m happy to organise things if I have to, but on the list of things I enjoy doing and am good at it’s probably eighty-seventh. Just after playing the spoons. 

Q: You’re currently being represented by Curtis Brown, a major U.K. agency with a long history of placing authors in traditional publishing deals. How did you come to put your books up on Wattpad? Was it your idea or theirs, and if it was yours, how did they react to it?

A: It was largely about wanting a new project to write whilst sorting out The Butterfly Catchers edits and then it being out on submission. I have a second lit fic book which is more in line with that one, which I’m also working on, but The Fragile Tower was more in a state of readiness. I’ve always had a helpful sort of urge to be overloaded with work, because I like to have lots and lots of projects to flit between. Then I like to moan endlessly about having too much to do. It keeps me happy. 

When a couple of other writers told me about Wattpad and I went to have a look, I knew it was the perfect forum for serialisation. I decided at that point that I wanted to make The Fragile Tower a complete Wattpad book, on there from start to finish. There’s so much benefit to be had from all the fantastic feedback, so there’s no better testing ground for ideas, I think. I told Curtis Brown about my plan, and they were immediately supportive. They knew a lot about Wattpad thanks to Margaret Atwood’s use of the site, and so they had no hesitations about getting The Fragile Tower all online.  In my experience since signing over summer, they’re a brilliant, thoroughly innovative agency which always has an eye for a great opportunity. 

In the longer run, the series may well be submitted to a traditional publisher like The Butterfly Catchers. But for now, Wattpad is the perfect forum. 

Q: Switching gears back to your books: they’re in very different genres. What’s it like jumping between the two? Are there any particular strengths to working in two genres for you? Any drawbacks? 

A: I think the two different genres are part of my general love of being busy, and it keeps things fresh to switch between genres. Plus it means I always have something I’m interested in writing, no matter what mood I’m in. I also write in a lot of different media, and usually have between 5 and 10 projects on the go at any one time. (Actually, the only one I don’t feel like writing is usually the one I really should be writing, which just goes to show that even though writing is a huge passion for me and always has been, I still think of it as homework...)

On the downside, it can be hard to drag your brain away from writing one book if you’ve got to a certain stage with it, and writing in a really different genre is a big, big change. But it does help with the problem of keeping work quite unique, as I’m never going to inadvertently write an idea from a 1920s historical mystery into a modern-day fantasy for young adults. 

Q: You’ve been on Wattpad for several months. Have you ever participated in anything like it before? And what have found most enjoyable about the site? 

A: I do indeed have past online history. I’ve been a member of Movellas for some months (which I know is really for younger people, but I think it’s brilliant and lets me connect with a lot of readers I just wouldn’t be able to link up with in any other way) and having become a little addicted to it, it was a no-brainer to assume that I’d like Wattpad.

What do I like about it? Pretty much everything. I love giving and receiving feedback, I love reading new writers before other people have discovered them, I love being really drawn in by a synopsis or a title or a cover, and I love being able to test out ideas in a forum which feels safe and supportive. In fact, I’ve gone from a small Movellas addiction to a slightly frightening, enormous great Wattpad one instead.  But I think I’m probably in good company. 

Q: According to your Wattpad profile, you started writing when you were seven years old. At what point did you decide to make a serious go of it? Was there a moment when you just jumped in, or was it more of a slow slide? 

A: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write, though when I was really small I was always going to be a vicar (which didn’t quite happen) and then a lawyer (possibly the other end of a scale somewhere). From fourteen, novel-writing was a serious ambition, which means I’ve spent half my life plotting to get to this point and beyond.

I suppose there was a bit of a change when I hit 25, had been working for three years in a marketing and publications role whilst doing way too much theatrical writing and directing the rest of the time, and then I won a national award. It kicked me into realising that I felt like the job was a waste of my time, and by that point I was pretty miserable in it. It suddenly struck me as absurd that I was under-performing relative to everyone else in a small office because it didn’t suit me, when I’d just proved that I could write as well some of the best people in the country. So I quit the job, took a show on tour, picked up another award and had the most fantastic time. (I still miss it a little bit). 

Q: In your Wattpad profile, you describe yourself as a novelist, playwright, and satirist. On your Curtis Brown profile, there’s a lot said about your success in theater after university. Are there elements of writing for theater you find particularly germane to writing fiction? 

A: I think theatrical writing has been a huge help in my prose writing. For starters, where books of mine were only read by friends and family back then, my plays were being read by actors, some directors, and then being seen by audiences and critics, all of whom were ready to give feedback whenever they wanted to. I learned pretty quickly that actors are pretty ready to criticise a script when they feel it isn’t working. I also started to learn the difference between a script that wasn’t working and an actor who was being fussy, deliberately obstructive or just incompetent. In fact, I’d recommend theatrical writing hugely to anyone who wants to write for a career, because one of the most useful skills is learning when comments people have made are useful or just a strange quirk of their minds. (And acknowledging that most people have a point is probably the single hardest thing to learn.) 

Added to that, writing theatre makes you, of necessity, pick up a good ear for dialogue. It was fairly predictable that when I started showing prose work to people in the publishing industry, they commented on the realism of the dialogue. From there, I just had to fine-tune the prose style in between. I’m still doing that... 

Q: There’s also no mention of a day job in either of your profiles. Have you ever had to work outside of the arts? 

A: Yes, I’ve had a number of day jobs. I did some truly soul-destroying formatting and editing work on scientific articles, then whilst still paying off student debts set up a company with a partner with an independent income. A word of advice – don’t do this. Whilst your partner is financially fine, you will be a stressed-out mess. Despite loving the work, I took the first good job that came along after that, which is what got me into the marketing and publications field, along with some intellectual property wrangles which interested me a lot as an author, in spite of the general awfulness of trying to do a job which really didn’t suit me.

Then after a full-time few years’ writing, I set up a wedding stationery company when my small boy, Rufus, was 4 months old. Don’t do this either. It’s a whole lot of no sleep and admin which, if you’re me, is neither something I like nor something I do well. I wound the company down and am now in the process of selling it. And it feels sooooo good to be back to full-time writing.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s possible to write and have a day job. Most of my thirteen plays have been written that way, and I wrote a lot of (mostly bad) novels whilst learning my craft and also earning a wage. I think most of the experience of any writer is an attempt to fit it in around work, and that’s as it should be. You only go at it full-time once you know you really have something to offer. So if I’m allowed to give some advice, take every opportunity to do it when you can and to learn what you can. If you find you “don’t have time” when you’re doing a normal job, then writing probably isn’t for you. 

Q: In your Wattpad profile, you mention a “through the looking glass” sort of story you wrote when you were a child. Do you know what happened to it? I think my first fantasy story is gathering dust on a shelf in my parents’ house somewhere… 

A: That is a great question, and I have absolutely no idea! I have a feeling it’s been binned somewhere amongst a load of house moves. And, let’s face it, it was probably pretty atrocious. But then it might be nice to look back at my seven-year-old writing self and think “Ha! I’m better than you.” I take my victories where I can.

Q: Thanks so much for your time, Gytha. Before I let you go, is there anything else you’d like to say? 

A: Ah, are you really offering an over-communicative writer their chance to say anything they feel like?! Actually, it’s all right, because I can’t think of much to say other than:

Thanks for some really thought-provoking questions. And for anyone reading this who despairs of ever making their writing career take off, just keep going at it, and keep learning and doing new stuff. I may not have hit the big-time yet, but writing has been my career for a while and I love it. Without any question or pause for thought.

Big thanks to Gytha for kicking off these interviews. Outside of her Wattpad profile, you can find information on her on Curtis Brown's website (http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/gytha-lodge/) and scope out her Movellas profile at (http://109.238.50.43/people/profile/201210171007530854).