Interviews

October 2020 - interview with LailaLiliana

Dear readers, welcome to our October interview. My name is Diana and I am going to converse with LailaLiliana about her writing and more.

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Di: Hello, thank you for agreeing to spend some time with me for this interview. Would you tell our readers something about yourself, please?

Laila: My name's Laila, and I work as an editor for a website. When I'm not working, I'm usually hanging out with my fiancé and spending time with our two dogs, or I'm writing! I've been writing on Wattpad for about 3 years, mostly romance but a little bit of women's fiction and poetry as well.

Di: Sounds like you have your hands full. Why do you write? What motivated you to become an author?

Laila: It was something I was always interested in. I even took a few creative writing courses in school. I stopped for a little bit and then life dealt me some crappy cards, and that's when I decided to dabble in it again. I found writing to be really therapeutic while I worked through some of that.

I started on Wattpad with poetry, and that really helped me express myself and sort of lighten the load I felt like I was carrying. And then from there, I decided to try my hand at full novels, where I could weasel in some of my feelings, experiences, etc. Writing just felt like a way for me to talk about what happened to me and how I felt without really talking about it, if that makes sense.

Di: It does. It's like expressing your emotions entirely without having to check if the other person gets what you mean. Am I close?

Laila: Yes, exactly! And even if they would get what you mean, sometimes we're not ready to talk about those things. But with a story, you can talk about it without them realizing you're talking about it.

Di: Those hidden gems. When you said you started on Wattpad with poetry, did you mean Wattpad was your starting point? Or have you started before joining Wattpad?

Laila: I wrote poetry before I was on Wattpad. I used to be obsessed with beautiful notebooks, and I'd buy every single one that caught my eye and write like 6 poems before moving on to the next one. :joy: It was more just my thoughts in poem form back then, and once I started posting for others to see, I tried to be a little bit more serious about it.

Di: Hey, fun writing is still writing! How different is writing poetry from writing prose for you?

Laila: Honestly, I always found writing poetry to be much easier. It's just how my thoughts would come to me, which sounds crazy, I know. It was easier to get what was going on inside my head into words in poem form.

But with prose, even though it's harder for me to write something presentable enough to be in a novel, I feel like it gives me more freedom to really dive deep into some of the topics I want to discuss.

Di: It sounds like you don't like one better over the other. Or do you?

Laila: Haha it's hard to choose. I go through phases. I'd say if I had to pick one, it would be prose, because writing novels feels much more rewarding to me.

Di: Where can we read your work? Other than Wattpad of course.

Laila: I am on both Radish and Inkitt, but I'm not very active on either and don't keep my stories updated there. So Wattpad is currently the only spot for my most up-to-date work!

Di: Where is your favorite place to write, and why?

Laila: I actually have my own little office at home. It's purple, which wouldn't come as a surprise to any of my readers or friends, and it's filled with all of my favorite books. There are quite a few Wattpad friends in there as well.