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Wicked Dead author Thomas Pendleton ... in his own words.

When I’m meeting fans, at conventions or bookstore signings, I hear from a lot of people who want to write, but they fear they just aren’t good enough to pull it off.  Others are curious about what makes a writer write. (The answer is simple enough: We want to rule the world.  Ha.)  There is, however, a connection between these two things.

At a recent convention where I was a guest author I mentioned to a fan that before being published, writing novels was my hobby.  This made absolutely zero sense to the young woman.  Huh? Why write something if no one is going to read it?  Why write something if you don’t want to sell it?  But that’s the secret, you see.  You write because you love putting words together, creating characters and worlds.  As a writer, you can make up friends and enemies and hang out with them for as long as you want, and you can do wonderful things (and nasty things) to them every step of the way.  You can go to any place you’ve ever imagined, whether it’s a real city or a fantasy realm, and you are in control of what happens to those people in those places until you step away from the keyboard.

Whether you’re good at it or not, particularly when you’re just starting out, is irrelevant.  Like anything else, writing well requires time and effort.  You don’t expect a singer to open her mouth for the first time and sound brilliant.  It takes practice and study.  But thousands of people, who are not professional singers, croon tunes in the shower or in their cars on the way to work.  Some are awful. Some are wonderful.  They sing because they enjoy singing, not because they expect to headline an arena tour by the end of the month.  Writing should be the same way.

When my co-writer, Stefan Petrucha, and I wrote the first Wicked Dead book, we didn’t have a publisher.  Stefan and I belonged to a writing group in New York and he’d given me a lift home after the meetings.  For weeks, we talked about this idea of having four ghost girls telling each other stories, thinking it would make a really cool series of books.  One day he called me up and said, “Let’s write one,” and that’s what we did.  The idea was so appealing and the characters were so much fun it was a blast spending every day with them, hearing their conversations in our heads before jotting them down.  When it was done, I was eager to start another one, but other writing obligations meant it would have to wait.

Then HarperCollins bought the book (plus five more), and I was ecstatic – not just because the book would be read by thousands of people and not just because I was getting paid, but because it meant I got to hang out with these characters for another few years.

Despite having a bunch of novels published and who knows how many short stories, I am always my first audience.  I write the stories for me. Sure I want people to like the books and enjoy the stories I’m telling, but it would be impossible for me to write something I didn’t dig.  I’ve been asked to do it before, and it just never works.  I have to love the characters and be amazed by their adventures just as much – if not more – than my fans. If they don’t amaze me, I couldn’t spend months with them writing their stories down. 

So here’s a bit of unsolicited advice.  If you enjoy writing or want to try it, then just do it.  Don’t think about the people who might read it.  Don’t worry that someone is going to mock a clunky sentence or a passionate passage.  Sit down and write like no one in the world will ever see it.  Maybe they will.  Maybe they won’t.  Who cares?  What you put on a page or your computer’s hard drive is yours.  Tell your stories the way you want to tell them.  If you decide you want to approach writing as a profession, you’ll probably have to take some classes or do some intense study of the craft on your own to make sure that what’s in your head translates effectively to an audience.  But that’s another topic for another day. 

Take a few minutes and sit down and tell yourself a story. It’s fun.  It’s free.  And you get to rule the world for a while.