Episode 12: How We Started Writing
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Danikka: Hey there, welcome to the Snailed It podcast with Danikka and Erin, brought to you by Authors Own Publishing.
Erin: Hi everyone, welcome back to the Snailed It podcast with Danikka and Erin. Today we are talking about… how we started writing, how things, yeah, how we got our start. Here, yeah.
Danikka: And what embarrassing things we were writing to get started.
Erin: Oh lord, I feel like anyone who started writing, no one starts writing something that is not embarrassing. Like the first thing that you have written, if it's not embarrassing, I feel like you're missing out a little bit. You need that slightly embarrassing, this can never be shown to anyone ever feeling. But because it also ignites that, well, but now I want to write something better that I do want to show to people.
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: You know?
Danikka: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Erin: Yeah, so I, as we just had a little chat prior to hitting record, I started writing comparatively quite a bit later than you did. I didn't really start, like I wrote a little bit in high school, but it was like because I had to, not because I wanted to. Yeah, so I didn't start until I was like mid-twenties, I reckon.
Danikka: Yeah, yeah, whereas I started writing in primary school.
Erin: Yeah, which is amazing.
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: And what were you writing in primary school? In primary school
Danikka: It was like a little bit of just like rehashing my favourite books, like rewriting them, but like with a self-insert character.
Erin: uh-huh. Obviously.
Danikka: Yeah, yeah. And then as I got into like middle high school, I was writing one of my own things of my own creation, but also quite a bit of Star Wars fan fiction.
Erin: Star Wars? So why Star Wars? Because I feel like when that, what was that kind of era? Like what else was out around then? Like Harry Potter would have been out when you were in middle high school.
Danikka: Well, I didn't read Harry Potter until I was older, because this is where like the way I grew up kind of comes into things, because I was raised in a cult. So like technically we shouldn't have been allowed to watch Star Wars either, but it was kind of funny, the parents of like my generation, of like the kids that I was growing up with in the cult, they kind of all grew up with Star Wars before things got quite strict. Like the rules around things kind of changed a little bit when you got into the 90s, which is when we were born. So things got a bit stricter from when I was born, whereas before that it was a little bit more loose.
Erin: Yeah, gotcha.
Danikka: So like they kind of turned a blind eye when it came to the Star Wars things, because it was nostalgic to them. So my brother and I got really into Star Wars because my dad loved it. And so all the prequels were coming out when we were kids as well. So we were both big prequel babies, like we loved the prequels.
Erin: Yeah, okay.
Danikka: So I was writing prequels fan fiction.
Erin: Aha, excellent.
Danikka: I think The Phantom Menace came out in 1998, which is when my brother was one. And then I think I remember seeing The Clone Wars, is it called The Clone Wars? Or Attack of the Clones? Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. We saw both of them in cinema.
Erin: Oh, okay.
Danikka: So like, yeah, that's kind of where that came from.
Erin: Yeah, okay.
Danikka: I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. I wasn't supposed to read Twilight, but I did.
Erin: A nice segue into, my fan fiction starting was Twilight.
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: Yeah, which quickly morphed into just sort of taking, like I think I attempted like actual fan fiction, like with all of their names. And then I kind of was like, uh-huh. And would just kind of use the basis of their characters and change their names and just write something else. Yeah. Yeah, none of which got finished. I also read so much Twilight fan fiction. So much. And some of them I loved. I'm like, you could just make it, like this could have been an actual book. Like why just put different names on it? You know?
Danikka: Yeah, yeah.
Erin: But it's that comfort of knowing there's existing like friendships and things, I suppose.
Danikka: I think so, yeah. And it's funny because I was writing fan fiction, but I didn't actually know that that's what it was. Because we didn't have internet. I was writing Star Wars fan fiction, but I didn't know that that was a thing. I've never really read fan fiction. I didn't discover AO3 until Rhi and I got together.
Erin: That's like, I've never- What is AO3? Am I so old?
Danikka: It's a big fan fiction kind of database. So you've got Wattpad, which is like a big kind of no man's land. It's just like crazy town.
Erin: I was reading it pre-wattpad
Danikka: And then AO3 is like a big fan fiction database with like pretty much anything you can think of.
Erin: I think when I was reading it, it was just fanfiction.net was where I read all of my fan fiction. Yeah. And it was, yeah, it was a bit, it was a wild world. Like you had to be very specific in your searches to be able to find something that you wanted.
Yeah.
Danikka: Kind of like Literotica. I feel like if you're trying to read on literotica.com, it's like-
Erin: I have never attempted. Very specific searches.
Danikka: Yeah. You got to like find the tag that you want. Otherwise, it's like a whole world of stuff.
Erin: Where am I?
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: I feel like most people would start with a fan fiction-esque writing, right? Because you're inspired by stuff you read and that makes you want to write it.
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: So what was the first thing you finished writing? If it wasn't fan fiction?
Danikka: So the first thing I finished writing was I wanted to call it Jasmine because the main character's name was Jasmine. I don't know why or I don't know what it was. I was just obsessed with her name being Jasmine. I think I pictured her name in like font and so that's what I wasn't. I think I ended up calling it because I shared it with my English teacher and then she motivated me to finish it because she wanted to submit it to a writing competition for me.
Erin: Ah, ok
Danikka: So this was in grade eight or nine, I think. It must've been grade nine, actually, because we didn't have that English teacher in grade eight. So it was in grade nine. And so she prompted me to finish it and she was like, if you finish it, I'll read it, we can kind of go over it and then I'll submit it to this writing competition for you. And I was like, okay, cool. And so I think we ended up calling it Return to Ethelbaria or something like that, which was the name of the place. I was like, didn't know how to name a country. So I just thought up a weird word.
Erin: Thought up a weird word, yeah.
Danikka: And I was obsessed. I can't remember, I think I was obsessed with Narnia and I'd read something recently with elves in it, but I can't remember what it was because I wasn't supposed to read magical stuff. So like a lot of stuff I kind of read either in the library at school.
Erin: On the sly
Danikka: And so it was probably some obscure book from our school library that doesn't even have a following. But so anyway, it had elves in it. And so it was this girl who got transported into this world of the elves. She had a single mum and went to sleep and there was a storm and she fell through, she fell through the portal and then had to go and find her way around. And so then she ends up with, she meets this elf called Hector and the elves all speak in Shakespearean English.
Erin: So specific.
Danikka: I was a bit of a Shakespearean. Actually, that was probably where the elves came from, was Midsummer Night's Dream. That's probably where the elves came from. I loved Midsummer Night's Dream, the movie with Christian Bale and Michelle Pfeiffer and all of those, like I loved that movie. So that was probably where it came from. So yeah, then she like was stuck in this and I did lots of descriptions of like the food and the dresses and it was very escapism-esque and she had to learn how to speak Shakespearean English and explain what modern words meant.
Erin: Oh yep yep
Danikka: And then it turned out that it was her dad who was the big bad magician. And so she had to like defeat him and yeah, save the prince who was like mean and horrible. And yeah, I think if I was writing it today, it probably would have ended up a why choose between Hector and the prince, because I loved Hector and I think I wanted her to end up with Hector.
Erin: Yeah, but I like the element of her, like no one's saving her. She's the one saving the prince. I like that.
Danikka: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I remember I cracked up my English teacher because I got to like, she had to get into the army camp to do something. Oh, the camp of the enemy. And like, I'm 13, 14 at the time and I had her disguise herself as a prostitute to get into the army.
Erin: Which is like, um...
Danikka: She was just like, what?
Erin: What? Can we not disguise ourselves as a guard instead.
Danikka: Yeah, yeah.
Erin: I mean, it was probably a legit disguise and she got in there, no worries.
Danikka: And this is why I always crack up at like, Bible bashers getting so upset about the sexualization of the media and stuff like that. It's like, where do you think I'd heard about prostitutes? From the freaking Bible. So yeah, it was just, it was really funny. But yeah, she submitted it to the writing competition and it got shortlisted. I didn't win, but yeah, I got back like feedback from the panel and all that stuff. It's probably still in the email that I'm using. So I haven't had that email since I was a kid. I should probably go back and look and see if I can find it. You need to find it.
Erin: You need to find it. You need to find it.
Danikka: But what was the first thing you finished?
Erin: So I finished something like when I was 25 that was like a weird... I think it was supposed to be a romance, but it was very strange. But I don't really even remember it. So the first thing that I kind of tell myself that I finished, because I pretend that other thing didn't happen, was a sci-fi fantasy murder mystery romance. It's the slowest of the slow burn romance because I think the couple kissed on like literally the last page of the book. Yeah. And I kind of finished it and then I was like, oh, I can actually, I can write a full length thing. And I got the inspiration because I watched that Dirk Gently, I can't remember what the full title is, Dirk Gently. It's got Elijah Wood in it and it's a weird sci-fi show. It was on Netflix at the time. It might still be on there. And I was like, what if the two main characters were female instead of male? And they were like traveling through dimensions and hijinks and whatever. And so that was kind of where the idea came from. So there was two main characters who were women. And then I worked in it, now that I think about it, I worked in a romance trope because it was like best friend's brother, kind of like what the love interest was the other girl's brother. And it was very strange. And I ended up on a massive cliffhanger and then had zero steam to write book two. And still, and because when I was like, okay, so if you need, you really need to do something about that because it was shocking. And then when I went to kind of planning it, I was like, my villain character has very little reason for why he's a villain. Like there was a lot of holes, I would have said. And so yeah, then I was like, no, I don't want to do this. The thought of planning out potentially rewrite a lot of it was too much for my brain at that point.
So I didn't even know. And then I think I was reading another romance because I've always read romance and it was fake dating, which is one of my favorite tropes. And I was like, okay, if you were just going to give yourself unconditional permission to write a romance and it was fake dating, what would it be? And then I finished my first romance, first draft in like just over a month because it literally poured out of me. Yeah.
Danikka: Which is funny because now I know we've taken elements of that manuscript and worked it into some of your other manuscripts as well.
Erin: That very first one, we haven't yet.
Danikka: We haven't? It wasn't that one?
Erin: No. So there's characters in there that have been, so Darcy, who everyone meets in The Wedding Planners and all of my books, Darcy was the main character of that first romance that I wrote. And then I wrote the wedding planners and sort of other ones.
Yeah. But there was just something about that, like the storyline didn't quite work. And now having met Darcy in three subsequent books, I'm like the character that I wrote her in that first one, it wasn't actually her. So that whole storyline and fake dating is being repurposed into another book that I'm already, I know where it's going, but it's a number of books down the line from where I am now. But just kind of going, and then as soon as I'd written it, I'm like, oh, obviously I'm a, why was I fighting the fact that I was a romance writer? But it was all that, you know. Yeah.
Danikka: Well, like you said, I think it was in the first episode that we just re-recorded. Romance gets ragged on so much in like literary circles. So it was a bit of shame.
Erin: There was a bit of shame at the time. And there was just always that thing of when you tell people you're a writer or an author or whatever, and they say, what do you write? If you say you write romance, there's always that moment. I had someone once when I said that I wrote romance, and this was after I had published The Wedding Planners, and they were a fantasy writer. And she said, not directed at me, but just in conversation shortly after I said I wrote romance, she was like, I hate the romance elements of any book. I don't put them in any of mine. And I was like, oh, okay, cool.
Danikka: Wow.
Erin: What do you want me to say? Yeah. It was just really strange. And I'm like, that's fine if that's not your bag. But it just felt, I felt attacked.
Danikka: Yeah
Erin: Yeah. So anyway, so there was, yeah. But once I said, no, you're a romance writer, now here I am. Yeah.
Danikka: And it's interesting because I always find it so funny like when I'm talking to authors, because being an editor, I guess I'm not in a lot of author specific circles. Like I'm in more like bookish circles in general or like editing circles. So like that, it's always really interesting to me when I'm talking to authors and they like, they hear so many things that I don't hear. So it's like, I've like, I knew that romance kind of got like a bad rap, but I think I thought it was more because of like the whole Mills and Boone thing. It's like people just, you know, kind of write it off.
Erin: Yeah. I think that's definitely part of it. Yeah.
Danikka: Yeah. But like, I don't know if it's just like algorithms and the way they curate. But like lately, all I've been seeing is people who are like, I only watched The Witcher for Yennefer and Geralt. And like, so I wanted to write more of that. And like, or I only watch, there was another one, I can't remember what it was. Or I wanted Aragorn and, is it Eowyn? Is that how you say her name? I wanted them to end up together instead of with the elf lady.
Erin: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danikka: Rewriting things like that. And so most of it is like people wanting more romance, not less. Like, and then you see the ones who come up and they're like, oh, the no spice movement or like people wanting it to be clean, even though we're not using clean anymore.
Erin: Don’t get me started on that word
Danikka: Because it's a real ick to me. I don't know what it is, but ever since we first started talking about that and you sent me the post where she was breaking it down about why we shouldn't use it. I can't remember who posted it. Do you remember who posted it? No, me either.
Erin: It'll be in our chat. It'll be in our messages.
Danikka: But yeah, ever since you sent me that, I don't know what it is, but Reels have been showing me more people who were like, do you want clean romance or do you want clean fantasy? And I'm like, no, go away. Stop showing me this.
Erin: But it's just like, if you if you do want that, that's totally fine. Like everyone is entitled to their own rating opinion. But can we just not call it clean? Like then having smut is dirty. Like that's the problem. It's the terminology, not the subgenre.
Danikka: Not that, yeah. You're allowed to like as much or as little spice as you want. But let's just call it no spice or spice. It doesn't need to be clean.
Erin: Or closed door and open door. Yeah, exactly. Or just it doesn't have a romance. But then it can still be romance without the spice. So I see why people use it because it's a single word that communicates a lot, but it also communicates a lot more than you think it's communicating.
Danikka: Yeah.
Erin: But anyway, it just that's maybe a conversation. We could go on about this one. We could really could. Yes, there is a lot of that. And I think it is part of it is that it's historically a genre that was written by women for women. So there's a lot of loaded bullshit.
Danikka: Sexism
Erin: Yes. There, mind you, then when people discuss it now about the fact that it is only written by women for women, it is then being very non-inclusive and erasing a massive part of it because it's not. Well, one, it's not only written by women and two, so many people consume it because it's that assumption that if it's written by women for men and women, it's always a male, female, hetero couple. And it's not.
Danikka: Exactly.
Erin: It's not. Yeah.
Danikka: Yeah. And some guys love romance. Totally. Yeah. And masc people. And yeah, but yeah, I've always been a romance sucker. That was what, like, I think everything I've ever written, even if I've, whether I finished it or not, has had some sort of romantic element. And most things that I read, like if I read stuff that doesn't have romance, it's really hard to keep me engaged. So I'm like.
Erin: Yeah. So I try it occasionally when it's recommended to me by someone else. Yeah, we've gone on a large tangent from what you first wrote, but that's OK. That's what happens.
Danikka: But yeah, like it just goes to show that you don't have to have lots of experience to be a writer, though, too, because like you're an author three times published with heaps of works in progress and you only started writing in your mid-twenties. Like really.
Erin: And I didn't study writing or English or anything. Yeah. I've studied numerous things. And dropped them all. And not one of them. There was a brief stint in professional writing and editing, which I quit when I went on a holiday to America. I have tried a lot of things and was always like looking for that thing that I wanted to do because everyone talks about their career and I never knew what that was. And now I've stumbled into it accidentally by writing a weird fantasy sci-fi murder mystery. And here I am.
Danikka: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I kind of did the opposite. I found what I wanted to do really young, but was told that I couldn't do it. Like,
Erin: which is shit.
Danikka: Because it was like, that's a childish dream. You'll never be a writer. There's no jobs. Like, so then I tried everything else until I came back to this and being an editor.
Erin: Exactly.
Danikka: And now I’m an editor. Yeah, exactly. So it just goes to show just like you don't necessarily know. And if you do know, just follow your gut.
Erin: Just do it.
Danikka: Yeah. But it's OK not to know because you'll find it eventually. Yeah, yeah. But no, this was fun. It's always interesting to me to hear how people got started with writing.
Erin: Yeah.
Danikka: And like, good to take inspiration like from the things around you too. Like with fan fiction and things like that. Like so many good writers started out writing fan fiction because you're honing your craft.
Erin: Yeah, and you're not having to think of like friendship dynamics and all of that. Like you have a very set thing that you can play in and still work on it and think of story ideas and all of that without having that extra character thing. Which I think is super helpful when you're starting.
Danikka: Yeah, yeah. It's like, like training wheels.
Erin: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Danikka: So yes, highly recommend writing fan fiction even if like me, you didn't know what it was if you've already been doing it and didn't know it was a thing.
Erin: Yeah. Or like immediately change the people's names because you didn't want to keep thinking of them as Bella and Alice and et cetera.
Danikka: Yeah. I think that's this episode. Like that was really fun. We went on a bit of a tangent. But you've also learned a lot more about early writing careers than maybe you needed to know. But definitely let us know if you started writing simile, if you've ever finished first draft or not finished first draft, tell us what you've been writing, what you enjoy writing and what was your obscure fan fiction that you started in? Although I don't think, I don't think Twilight and Star Wars are necessarily obscure, but like...
Erin: They're not obscure. Yeah
Danikka: I definitely, because I didn't read Harry Potter until I was an adult and I've, I'm definitely, I love Dra-mione fan fiction. I don't know what it is, it's just something about Draco and Hermione. I'm like, yes.
Erin: There's something...
Danikka: But I love Draco and Harry Potter too.
Erin: We got, oh yeah. Because both have that enemies to lovers thing that we, is like catnip for pretty much everyone in Romancelandia.
Danikka: Romancelandia. I love it. We need to do like a, we need to do like a themed party and Romancelandia.
Erin: Romancelandia.
Danikka: That would be cool. Yes. I love it. Yeah. Anyway. This was a fun episode and if there's anything you would like us to do an episode, yeah,
Erin: we'll see you in the next one.
Danikka: Yeah. Bye.
Danikka: Thank you for listening to the Snailed It Podcast with Danikka and Erin, brought to you by Authors Own Publishing, the home of indie publishing. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow us on Instagram at Author's Own Publishing. Music brought to you by Mikel with more details in the show notes.
Episode Description
From fan fiction to cringey Shakespearean grammar, join Danikka and Erin on this week’s episode of the Snailed It Podcast to hear more about the first novels they ever wrote and their influences.
Brought to you by: Authors Own Publishing, Danikka Taylor, and Erin Thomson.
Danikka’s Details:
Website: www.authorsownpublishing.com
Instagram: @danikkataylor or @authorsownpublishing
Erin’s Details:
Website: www.erinthomsonauthor.com
Instagram: @authorerinthomson
Intro & Outro Music by Mikel & GameChops. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of Authors Own Publishing. Thanks for Listening!
