Avant-Pop Literary Magazine

Author Interview: @NicholasNicoBrown

To end this inaugural edition of our magazine, we have a very special guest. His story 'Heartbeat' is the winner of the 2019 edition of the Wattys Awards in the 'Literary Fiction' category, and a winner in a lot of Wattpadders' hearts. This is a story that truly speaks to you, the way not many others can. NicholasNicoBrown for Avant-Pop!

How long have you been writing?

I've always loved writing; trying to put thoughts that seemed too tangled to be deciphered into something that made sense has always been akin to therapy to me. I'm a grad student, so I often write within academia, but that, to me, is completely different than writing fiction. Writing an essay on self to self translucency is not exactly the same as telling a story. Heartbeat happened completely by chance. I had just graduated and was waiting for grad school to start, and I began forming this idea in my head that simply refused to let me go—at least until I started putting it to paper, so to speak. Once I did, I found that, unlike essays and articles, fiction demanded something different, something more. And it came to me in different ways as well. So I sat down one day and wrote three chapters—the first two and the last. I thought that'd be it; I'd do it and get that out of my system and just move on from it. Except, I didn't. The next day I woke up and I had the fourth chapter perfectly outlined in my head, and the same happened with every chapter that came after it. Before I knew it, I'd written twenty chapters of a book I had no intention of ever publishing, let alone finish.

Who are your biggest influences? What inspires you to write?

Biggest influences? Oh, they're too many to count. I have my favorites, but I don't think they affect my writing. What I mean is I don't see, nor do I dare compare myself to any of them. But here goes. I love Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Bulgakov and Sartre. Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Haddon, Sabrina Bernaim, Rainer Marie Wilke, Göethe, Bukowski. Clarice Lispector, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Richard Sennet, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo Neruda, Hemingway. The list goes on. Being a philosopher, I do have someone I aspire to someday write at least a tenth as perfectly as he did: Henri Bergson—highly underrated, this Nobel winner has thankfully become more well known in the last few years. The way he wrote was simply breathtaking, and I'd love to someday master writing in the same way.

What's your biggest challenge/struggle as a writer?

Balancing fact and fiction. I've discovered, as soon as I set out to write fiction, that I can only do it—really do it—by approaching it from experience. And there's a level of honesty that comes with it that I oftentimes can't filter out, no matter how much I think I should. The results are basically stories like Heartbeat, which blend fact and fiction and inevitably bring with them memories I don't always wish to revisit. It's part of the reason why I had to take a break after the story was finished, and why I will never be a writer who can produce tons of material in short periods of time. I need to recover from (some of) the things I write.

What do you like to read outside of Wattpad?

I'm a book person, so I read everyday. Lately I haven't been able to do a lot of reading for pleasure, since I'm working on my dissertation, so I'm basically reading a lot of material related to that, to my research. That means Nietzsche, Bergson, Descartes, Adorno, Galileo, as well as Dietet Lüst, Isaac Asimov, Murakami. But on my nightstand I do always keep a copy of a book I read before bed, every night. Right now it's a copy of a Brazilian philosopher called Marcia Tiburi that's called How To Speak to a Fascist—quite fitting nowadays, if you ask me.

Your work 'Heartbeat' won the Wattys in the 'Literary Fiction' category. Do you consider your work to be literary?

I've a problem with characterizing my own work, selecting a single genre and saying "this is it". I think Heartbeat doesn't fit the YA category all that much, even though it is about a seventeen-year-old; nor is it a Romance, though romance permeates the story. I think it's closer to Literary Fiction than anything else, except the very fact that it's an inclusive story makes it first and foremost LGBTQIA+ to most people—and I'm cool with that. I just write the way I talk and think really, and apparently that's more on the lines of LitFic. Also, I like genre bending stories, and I think more and more these days it's tricky to allot a book to a single category. I'm personally drawn to those that don't stick to just the one.

Prior to winning the Wattys, did you have trouble finding readers?

I never tried finding readers; joining Wattpad and publishing Heartbeat had nothing to do with me trying to gather a following or earning votes/reads. It had to do with this need I felt to have the story told, even if it meant getting lost in the confines of the internet. The readers, the votes, the Wattys...those were all incidentall. And I still haven't gotten used to it.

Who do you think your readers are?

Well, if you go by the demographics that Wattpad gives you, my readers are mostly female, ages 17-28, and are spread out all over the globe—mainly in the US, Canada, Britain and India.

Have you considered traditional publishing/self-publishing? If you tried, how did that go?

I did consider traditional publishing. After the story was done, and after I won the Wattys I thought "Hey, maybe there's something there. Something worth following through". So I started trying to find an agent who accepted stories like mine, mainly because the idea of having it become an actual, physical book was a bit of a dream I allowed myself to have. In the process I found two things: if your story is LGBTQIA+, there's a very (very) limited number of agents out there; and, though winning the Wattys and having the story become somewhat popular was absolutely awesome, it did not equate sparking anyone's interest in the industry. So I have a lot of rejection forms and a couple of nice passes that I've collected as a result, which basically mean that my initial thought, that perhaps I could have, as a writer, some kind of future, was just that: a lovely dream, one that I've since given up on. I have three books 'in the works (Another Life, which is almost finished; a second one I plan on publishing at once, in the next few months; and, I've also been toying with a sequel to Heartbeat that may or may not become my last one), and then that's it for me, I'm afraid. I don't know if I'll ever self-publish; I don't think I'd be terribly successful at it if I did.

Do you have any advice for Literary Fiction writers trying to find their place here on Wattpad?

If you think there's a story worth telling, go for it. As long as it's honest and something you're truly passionate about, that alone makes it all worth it. All the rest will follow, trust me. I know it sounds clichè, but it's true. Do it for you, first and foremost. And don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise or make you stop.

Give us three books you love from the real world and three books you love from Wattpad.

Real world: Sartre's The Wall; Master and Margarita by Bulgakov; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Wattpad: Reminding Logan by @forworded; He, by @street_lights_on_fire; Exchange of Life in Poetic Verse, by @Pietri0x; and Malamente—and basically anything by @ENAMORAMOS.

Thank you so much.

Thank you to Nicholas Brown for this interview. Check out 'Heartbeat' currently featured in our 'Holden - Bildungsroman' reading list!

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That's a wrap for this month's issue of our magazine. Thank you to all the great authors who took part in this one, and thank you all for reading and supporting us. If you have any feedback whatsoever, leave it in the comments. If you liked this, make sure you add it to your private library so you won't miss the next issue. We would very much appreciate it if you could vote, as well. Thank you again, until next time!