Hello, folks! Today, we bring you Nick (nick), a long-time sci-fi writer on Wattpad and the author of the awesome LitRPG novel, Hollow Twilight!
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Reid is a pretty normal guy in his last year of high school. He doesn't know what to do with his life, and everything feels kind of...boring. But when his friends hear about a mobile game called Hollow Twilight, some sort of MMORPG they can all play together, he agrees to download it so they can all kill some time before college applications are due.
Except the game isn't much of a game at all, and Reid quickly finds himself exploring an exciting new world he can't quite grasp. Everyone around him is playing out fantasies they could barely imagine, and before long he's hooked, his life revolving around how soon he can get back to the game. But there's a cost to playing Hollow Twilight that nobody knows about.
And people are dying for it.
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AUTHOR BIO: Nick is an author, starting as many do by imagining his teen self publishing the next great fantasy series while young and ending up not doing any of that because it's very hard and there's a lot to learn in the world of writing. Now working at Wattpad and with many years of content experience, he writes random stories when the time is right and inspiration strikes, often based off of the manga and light novels he's most familiar with from personal indulgence.
1. Hi Nick! We're delighted to have you here today. Let's start. Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?
I'm usually a pretty high-ranking Yu-Gi-Oh player on Master Duel. I don't really talk about that.
2. When did you start writing? How has your writing journey been so far?
I started in high school writing more seriously. It was at that time a serious journey about how serious a writer I was going to be. As I went further into literary studies in university I got more and more about that serious writer mode and critique which is so stuffy and unfun. In trying to be successful I learned I needed to not do that and lean into what I knew and have fun with tropes and writing and deliver for the audience, not for other writers or art critics. Now I just kind of create what seems fun and lean all the way in.
3. How did you come up with the idea for your story? And what are your inspirations for the world you have created?
Hollow Twilight came from wanting to take apart a lot of the LitRPG and Isekai stories I was surrounded by. I wanted my main character to be very obviously powerful from the start but nobody cares. I wanted levels to be hard to get and not matter. And I wanted to give them a relationship that was just normal and not also secretly part of the game or something. And then I was just trying to think of what would be fun to do with those characters.
4. Tell us about the main character and what is special about them.
The main character is Reid. They're an introvert who mostly plays games and has a crush on their childhood friend when they discover a new mobile game that seems to suck you inside it's so real. They receive a power to summon their own shadow and begin to try and climb through the game but find it strange and esoteric.
5. If you could be a character in your story, who would it be and why?
I wrote a lot of an old version of myself into Reid intentionally to capture that particular feeling of anxiety and nerves so I guess I would be that character. I don't connect with any others in a fun way where I want to swap places.
6. What challenges did you face while writing this story?
I fell off pretty hard in the early days of writing this story and I lost the pace I had, as well as some of the original elements. Coming back to it was tough and looking at some portions of it I can tell where I stopped and then picked back up and it affects the story. It will need some editing at some point if I want to really complete it.
7. What are your favorite books? Both on and outside Wattpad?
I won't mention favourite Wattpad books because that's part of my job. Other books I have enjoyed were a bunch of things from the Warhammer 40K universe when I was younger, as well as a ton of manga. Things like Claymore, Kaiju No 8, Blue Box, Biorg Trinity, Koi To Uso.
8. If you could give any advice to your fellow writers, what would it be?
Focus more on storytelling than on writing. Good storytelling with weak writing can be edited and fixed and you learn and improve on it as you practice. I watch writers focus on superb grammar and synonyms, rich descriptions and lengthy paragraphs that aren't telling a story. Ever had someone verbally telling a story at a party who keeps droning on about little details and side tangents and you're rolling your eyes, bored and hoping they'll get to the point? That's how that feels in reading too! Stick to the point, focus on the storytelling, and have fun.
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Thank you very much for joining with us today, Nick. And all of you reading, we hope you found that inspirational! Give his stories some love!
