Chapter 14 - Dan Kenner

Not only does Dan Kenner write, he also hosts a podcast, works full-time, and runs a homestead with his wife and seven children! It may not seem possible, but his books are even more action-packed than his schedule. 

https://dankenner.com/

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Emma: It takes a lot of willpower to write, especially when it's hard to find time in a busy schedule. Dan Kenner is here to talk about writing despite the busyness of life. Dan, thank you so much for coming in today.

Dan: Thanks. I appreciate it. I'm excited to talk to you.

Emma: Of course. So first off, why do you write?

Dan: Why do I write? That's a great question. A lot of it comes down to when I was a kid, I loved to read. Reading was a huge thing that I did. I would get, like, 20 books from the library and read them in, like, three weeks. And I remember thinking stories would just come into my brain when I was a teenager. And, you know, part of me was like, "I wonder if I should write these down." But then internally, I always thought, "I don't think I can." I don't have the vocabulary. I'm not very good with writing. I don't find myself very eloquent with my speech. And so I just kind of resolved myself to never write.

But then when I was 28 years old, I was working at my first job at a college, and I was working with a woman who said she'd been working on her book for eight years. And that to me was insane. I was like, eight years. How do you work on one book for eight years? And she said, "Have you ever considered writing?" And I told her, "No, no, no. I can't write." And she told me, "Well, have you ever tried it?" And I said, "No." She said, "Just set a timer and just start writing." I remember thinking, "You can do that? You can just sit down and start writing?"

And I did. I just—I followed her advice. I sat down, played a little music, started writing, and I just got sucked in. And I haven't been able to stop since then because I've always had these stories, hundreds of stories in my brain. I've just left them there, but now I have a place to put them. So, yeah, I like having a place to write them down. It's exciting.

Emma: That is so cool. So now, how do you find the time to write?

Dan: That's a really good question and a lot of people, like myself, might feel like you don't have time to write, but if there's something that you really like doing, you can make the time to do it. So just for some context, listeners, everyone's busy. I'll say that. Everyone has a lot going on. But with my life, particularly, I have seven kids, probably more on the way eventually. We have a homestead, so we have cows that we milk and goats that we milk and chickens and all sorts of things. I work full time at a tech company and we've got religious responsibilities I'm involved with every week. And, you know, all of those things on top of each other make it difficult to find time.

But I think the most important thing to recognize that your life can work together. I like to think of it as a bunch of puzzle pieces that fit together. A lot of people think about their life as this is getting in the way of this and x is in the way of y. I look at it as, okay, my experiences in life helped me be able to be a better writer. And so what I need to look at it as is how can I leverage little bits of time to move my writing forward?

So I've been able to unpack the ability to write for five minutes to twenty minutes to an hour a day, and I just kind of wedge it in in the day when I can make the time for it. And it's really about getting into the headspace so quickly that you can take advantage of ten minutes so well. A lot of people, it takes ten to fifteen minutes to even get into the writing scene, but I can zone in so quickly. So that's why I push it forward. It's just like putting them here and there and using my life like a like a puzzle piece, slipping it in where I can.

Emma: And I thought I was busy. That's insane.

Dan: Everyone's busy. We all have a lot going on.

Emma: That's true. So how do you optimize your time? Because like you were talking about, you have to get in that head space. And after a long day of work and doing a lot of other things, sometimes it's just really hard to find the motivation to even sit down in front of a computer and write.

Dan: Well, and I think that's part of what the optimization is, right? You need to recognize in your life when is gonna be the best time for you to do something. So I'll give you an example, right? I've tried slipping my writing time in various parts of the day. I learned that if I try to slip my writing into the end of the day, I will fall asleep. Just full stop. I'm not—I will fall asleep at the keyboard.

And so I know that from x hours—for me, it's about 5AM. Eh, more like 6AM until about noon is gonna be my best time to write. I look at my day the next day and say, "Okay. I've got work. I've got all these things. When do I have a little break of time upwards to an hour?" I don't usually write for more than an hour. And then I kinda plan ahead to be like, "Okay. When I finish x thing, x meeting at work, I'm gonna take a fifteen minute break" or "I'm gonna get up at five and wake up and at six write for an hour." So I tried doing it at night and it just didn't work.

So you kinda need to look at your day the next day, look at all the things you need to get done, and then I say focus on the most important things, and one of those things should be writing, if that makes sense. If writing is not important to you, then it's not gonna happen. If it is important to you, then you will look at it the next day and you'll say, "Okay. I'm going to take this twenty minutes or an hour here, and I'm just gonna do it." And then you'll find the more you do that, it just gets easier to slip it in.

Emma: Just not pushing it off, but really doing it. Like you said, it's, like, different for everyone. My sister writes for hours and hours and hours, and I cannot do that. Like, I try and I just... Eventually, I get to the point where I'm like, "Well, that was great, but I'm kind of..."

Dan: I know I'm gonna need to edit that out.

Emma: Yes. Exactly. Do you have anything else you'd like to share about just scheduling or writing?

Dan: Yeah. I think the other thing that I mentioned before is really understanding your brain, how it works, and getting into the writing. I think I wanna highlight that again. I said it a little bit before. But being able to find what mechanisms and triggers get your brain into the creative space, you need to draw on those and have them prepared and saved just for that moment. This is an important principle. Right? Because your brain is habitual. It does the things that it does. It kinda follows a habit trail, if that makes sense. So if you start mixing your creative habits with the rest of your life, it's gonna confuse your brain. And so, you know, it's gonna be like, "Oh, is this writing time or is it not writing time? I don't know." And so I've kind of honed it down to specific kinds of songs, even specific songs, specific, you know, behaviors that I will implement just a few minutes before I write, and I only use it for that time. And so my brain's like, "Oh, it's time to write." Right? I'm triggered. I know that it's time to write. So just figure out what those things are. I don't mean to be promotional, sorry. But if you want some tips on how to do this, they have—it's actually a free guide, "How to Have the Most Stellar Writing Session." You can get it for free at thecasualauthor.com. So you can go get that for free. It's just some tips and tricks I've learned on how to get into the head space for writing.

Emma: It takes some training, it sounds like.

Dan: It does, yeah. It takes some training. So I've been writing since 2018 is when I first started. I published my first book in 2020. And since then, I've published nine books. I'm about to publish my tenth. So done a lot of writing. For better or for worse, I've written a lot of things.

Emma: I was looking at your website before, and I was like, "Wow, that's a lot of books"

Dan: Yeah. It's not a lot compared to some people. But for me, knowing everything that I have going on, I was like, you know, I'm proud of this. I've gotten a lot out for what I have to work with.

Emma: I noticed you also write some sci-fi, so I might take a little advantage of that to ask you some questions here because I don't think we've had a sci-fi author yet on the podcast.

Dan: Please! The funny thing is I have more sci-fi stories. I've written four technically sci-fi books. Three are for middle grade, so kind of like eight to twelve is the age, and then another one is for teenagers. I wanna break into more sci-fi. Just admittedly, I'm kinda scared too, because it requires a lot of science and research and I love sci-fi. So I've got tons of sci fi stories, but I don't know. We'll see if I get into it more.

Emma: What do you think is the biggest difference between writing fantasy and sci-fi?

Dan: The funny thing is, people like to look at that and say they're extremely different. They're very similar in a way. I think the thing that sci-fi tends to draw on more is, I don't know, is it more of almost realist? It's not quite realistic, but it's, like, grounded a little bit more in realism. And also, you bring in more issues of the day, if that makes sense. Now there's a lot of, like, political issues or government issues or even just, like, environmental health issues. There's just, like, those are more prevalent in sci-fi books. And so it's easier to connect with them, I think, for some people because they're like, "Oh, I feel this today" or "ooh, that's an existing problem that hasn't been solved." You can kind of exacerbate those things, you know, the reality of those things. So that's where it comes from for me when I was writing the books.

And interestingly enough, the sci-fi trilogy for the middle grade is unintentionally a narrative on addiction to technology. So it wasn't the purpose of it. I coauthored it with someone. But it's kind of like what would happen if everyone was forced to always have their eyes on a screen. They have audio literally connected to their brain stems through their ears and they can't take it off. So they are stuck in digital life all the time. And so it's a little bit of a narrative on that and what happens with addiction. So kind of fun and that's a reality. Right? That's a real thing of the day. So Yeah.

Emma: It kind of made me think it's like when you're writing fantasy, you're creating magic systems and stuff like that. And in sci-fi, it sounds kind of similar but with a lot more research because—

Dan: Yeah.

Emma: Technology is kinda like the magic, but—

Dan: Exactly. Yeah. So when I say it's similar, it's more that, like, you're definitely stepping out of the realm of possibility. That's what makes it so fun. Right? You're stepping into technology that might not exist. Maybe it could exist. But that's what I mean by it's similar is because you're kind of into the fantastical, but the other one is almost grounded in realism, if that makes sense.

Emma: What do you think are some of the most key components of writing sci-fi?

Dan: Technology is always gonna be a piece of it. Let's see. Technology as well as intrigue and almost like conspiracy. I think that tends to be part of sci-fi. I don't mean conspiracy on a government level, maybe government level, but, you know, that conspiracy can exist extraterrestrially with aliens or diseases or anything that's kind of unknown. I think those are really important pieces of it. And then there's almost like a mystery aspect to it as well. But it's not strict mystery, but there's usually some major problem that needs to be solved by someone or something. And that's kind of the basis of pushing the story forward is this kind of mystery aspect of we delved into something we thought we knew about and now we're in trouble. Right? We're dealing with this technology or alien life or something, and we gotta solve it.

Emma: Big conflict.

Dan: Yeah, Exactly.

Emma: Whether it is against technology or aliens or, like you said—

Dan: Or robots or something. Yeah.

Emma: Something like that. So you mentioned that you had written a middle-grade sci-fi, and then I know some of your other books are more young adult or adult literature. What are some of the differences between writing for different ages?

Dan: That's a great question. And honestly, I accidentally wrote for different ages. So I say accidentally because I'm a pantser. I don't know if you're familiar with this term.

Emma: Mhmm.

Dan: A lot of people don't like the term—discovery writers, maybe the fancier way to say it. But I don't really plan my stories ahead. They just come out of me as I'm writing. That was a really strange experience. It's like when I'm writing, it's like I'm reading it for the first time. Anyway, the reason I say that is I have written for it's called new adult, kind of college age, and then middle grade for younger, and then YA. The differences for me are often the voice, you know, the voice that you write in. YA tends to be a little bit more first-person perspective. A lot of YA books are in there. They don't have to be, but they are. And then adult books tend to be third person, so that's one thing.

Another thing is just the types of issues they're dealing with. Right? So in YA books, there's a lot of discovering themselves. There's a lot of almost like crushes, not strict relationship. It's almost like I'm trying to understand my feelings as a teenager. I'm going through changes. And then there's just a lot of, like I said, a lot of self discovery that happens throughout the book.

With new adults or adult books, those tend to be more, you know, deeper issues grounded in conflict, abuse, these things. I don't write about abuse. Just wanna clarify that. But I think a lot of people use that as a part of adult books because they tend to be more grittier, deeper subjects that are harder to understand for younger kids, if that makes sense. They're issues that teenagers haven't had to deal with ever.

The reason why my new adult books are kind of challenging is because for some reason, my pantsing brain decided to write three different perspectives throughout the whole trilogy. One of them is a 16 year old, so kind of YA-esque. Another one is a 25 year old and another one is a 33 year old. So they're all at very different phases of their life, and so the writing is very different for all of those. It's kind of like a conglomeration of YA, new adult, and adult. It's kinda interesting, but...

Emma: Sounds like a challenge.

Dan: It was, and it's hard to market those books.

Emma: Yeah, oh.

Dan: You're like, "well, is it YA?" Kind of...

Emma: A little bit.

Dan: Parts of it are, but the other parts aren't. So, yeah, it's tricky.

Emma: Do you ever find that you sit down to write and you just don't know where to go next?

Dan: Surprisingly, no. Let me clarify that. Right? There's a caveat to that. It is dependent on how creative I'm feeling that day and how I get into the session. I've actually learned to leave myself breadcrumbs, so this is an important part of discovery writing. I will either intentionally leave off halfway through action because it's just, like, so much easier to pick up in the middle of action, or I'll leave a couple sentences to myself saying, "This is where you are gonna go." And so when I come back, I'm like, "Oh, that's right. I left a couple sentences for myself. I can pick up and keep going." But when you don't know what's gonna happen, you just learn to trust your instinct of, "I'm just gonna feel this out." Right? I'm gonna feel out the way the characters react. I'm just gonna be open to anything happening. As long as I'm open to that, then it just kinda flows when I sit down. It's great. I know it's not a hard answer, but hopefully it's helpful.

Emma: Yeah. Definitely. Because then you're not just leaving yourself to just start point blank again. You're giving yourself something to work with.

Dan: Right. Yeah.

Emma: While your brain's already in that writing state.

Dan: Yep. It works.

Emma: That is awesome.

Dan: Are you a discovery writer yourself?

Emma: I'm still trying to figure that out. That's what I'm trying to discover. I've tried planning a little bit. I've tried discovering a little bit, and I'm still... I'm at the point where... yeah. Experimenting.

Dan: Straddling the line.

Emma: Yeah. Exactly.

Dan: I think most people are in the middle, right? I tend to be more of an extreme discovery writer, but I think most people fall in the middle, which is great.

Emma: Just a little bit with either one, yeah. So we talked a little bit earlier about writing for different genres and different audiences. And I wanna ask, do you find writing with different tenses—because you were talking about the voices,

Dan: Mhmm.

Emma: And how, you know, using first person and third person, then also using, like, past tense or present tense... Do you have anything to say on that subject?

Dan: The only thing I will say is you just need to make sure you understand the style and the genre you're going for. So I actually had a little bit of a... a snafu, I'll say. I was writing Dragon Blooded, which is the first book of my Hidden Heritage series we'll be reading today, at the same time as the middle-grade trilogy. And the middle-grade trilogy was first-person past tense, and Dragon Blooded is first-person present tense. And so when I had to switch between the two, I had to do a bunch of editing because I kept mixing them up. It just happens.

But I think, for me, when you're thinking about what tense you should use, you really need to think about what feelings you wanna exude in the person reading, right? Because first-person tense, like, you're in their head. It's very personal, whether it's past or present. Present is even more personal. It's like you're reading the journal of the person. So I think that's really good for some stories. That's why I chose it for the Hidden Heritage series because we're talking about, like, really challenging things that these teenagers are having to go through, being half human, half something else. In this case, he's half dragon. And so I wanted it to feel very personal. That's why I chose first-person present.

For the middle grade, we chose first-person past because it's still very personal. Right? You're with these kids. You're kind of experiencing alongside them, but the past tense gives it almost like a literature feel, right? It's like you're reading the story. Still kind of journal-esque, but not so much personal in that way. And then when it comes to third person, it just gives you more ability to do different things with that. It opens up the ability to write from almost like a divine perspective. It's a weird way to say it, but... So it really just comes down to you. What do you want to do? I don't read a lot of epic fantasies that are first person. It just doesn't really fit with those. But YA books and kind of more personal ones would be first person, if that makes sense.

Emma: Yeah. Knowing the genre and then also experimenting and what you want your character to sound like and characterizing them through their voice. Because I feel like even in third person, you can still have the voice of the character.

Dan: You can. Yeah. Well, and some people do that. Some people don't. I tend to have thoughts inside the third person just because I think it brings the reader into the story a little bit more. But, yeah, I say try different things. I know that sounds kind of funny, but if you're not sure, write the same maybe few paragraphs with each different voice and just see like, oh, which one feels right? You'll know, I think, instinctually. I think that's the one thing that writers need to lean on more is their instinct. If you read a lot, if you watch a lot of movies, if you consume a lot of story, then you're gonna know. Just trust your feeling. Don't be afraid of what other people say. Just be like, yeah, this feels right, and then go with it.

Emma: This is gonna seem kind of like a tangent, but it all applies. I promise. I was living in France, and we were teaching English lessons to French speakers. And, you know, we'd be teaching them different verb tenses and things like that. And they'd be like, "Well, why is it that way?" And I'm like, "I don't know!" And honestly, I think it was harder for me. The other teacher, Spanish was her first language. And so she was like, "Oh, you can be in charge of teaching English because you are a native English speaker." But I was like, "No, I don't know how I learned to speak English. I just do." And I think it's the same for writing. Sometimes you don't know why things work exactly, and sometimes you do. Like, you know, there's so many books about writing. But sometimes you just have to kinda, like you said, follow your instincts and be like, I don't know why this works, but it does.

Dan: Well, and I think that's more important even than the writing books. So I will say, read writing books. I'm not gonna dissuade you from reading those. I have read some and they've been great, but I don't treat them as, like, scripture. I don't... They're just like, oh, that was helpful information. If it was important, it's now part of my instinct. Right? If I internalize it, if it becomes part of my instinct, then I'll use it. But, well, your story was perfect, right? I happen to be a linguist. I know—it sounds like you majored in English. I majored in linguistics. And, you know, the main difference between linguistics and English and grammar and whatnot is prescriptivism versus descriptivism. I don't know if you've ever heard this before.

Emma: A little bit.

Dan: So prescriptivism kind of outlines the way it should be. That's what writing books are. This is the way you should write. This is the structure of writing. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just different from descriptivism, which is we're just describing what's happening. Like you said, how do you know how to speak English? I don't know. I just do. Right? We're describing what's happening, the behaviors behind something, why some people pronounce words differently than others. That's intuition. Right? You're not prescribing the way you write. You're just letting it happen and then later describing, well, I don't know how it happened, but this is kind of how it happened. So, yeah, I think it's a very perfect description of it.

Emma: That's fascinating, because language is always changing, and then writing is always changing, too. Like, if you read something that was written in the 1800s, it's gonna be very different than something that was written now.

Dan: I actually did that recently. I read something and I was like, "Oh. I didn't love that." It wasn't bad. It was just like, I prefer writing from this time period, right, not so much the eighteen hundreds.

Emma: Yeah. At the time, they were bestsellers, but now we're just...

Dan: It's just, yeah, it's just different. That's all.

Emma: Mhmm. So Dragon Blooded, that's the book you brought today. Right?

Dan: It is. Yes.

Emma: Is this one of your more recent series?

Dan: It is. Yeah. So I published this first one in September of last year. It's gonna be a six book series. The second one comes out next month. I had to look at the date. So, yes, next month.

Emma: Oh, that's so exciting.

Dan: And so the history of this series is... I remember I was driving somewhere and I thought, what would it be like if you were a teenager in high school and you weren't entirely human? Right? And, like, we've heard this before. I was like, what if you were half dragon? Like, what would your life look like in high school as a half dragon, or as a half demon, or say a half siren. Right? And so I came up with this idea of having six different kids who have half human blood, half something else. And so the six book series, each book is gonna be from the different perspective of one of the six kids. So the first one is for the half dragon and then the next one that comes out next month is the half demon girl. She's awesome. Everyone has loved it so far. But, yeah, that's kind of the premise of the story.

"Hey, Davy!" a boy shouts to me from down the hall. It's my fellow teammate. He imitates throwing me a ball, and I pretend to catch it. He laughs, then shouts, "Looking forward to you bringing it home tonight!"

"If you can keep your throws straight!" I shout back.

Chuck is the quarterback for our team. I'm the wide receiver, and I'm dang good at it. Is it because I have mystical blood running through my veins? Most likely. But that's not something I can tell someone. I'm sure I'd get put in a mental institution for saying it out loud. I stop at a drinking fountain close by and press the button with my thumb. It resists a bit too much, so I press harder, my fingertip aching from the pressure.

As I begin to drink, a wave of electric energy washes over me, and I freeze, the cold water dripping from my lips. My hand falls to my side and my fingers rub together. Then heat explodes across my fingertips. I level my breathing looking around. A set of hardened blue-green eyes lock onto mine.

There's a girl standing twenty feet down the hall. She wears an enormous hoodie. When I say enormous, I mean it has to be at least 5XL. Her hair, crimson to a ridiculous degree, runs over her shoulders wildly. Her brows are painted thickly with black makeup.

I've never seen this girl before. She isn't pretty, at least not in a beautiful, popular kind of way, but she isn't unfortunate looking. Her eyes bore holes in my chest as she stares me down. I watch her warily, then her gaze flickers to my hand—the one I am working up a flame with. Movement next to her draws my attention to another teen standing there. It's a boy, blond hair buzzed close to his head. He's huge. Not the fat kind of huge, but the naturally-massive-from-genes kind of huge.

I stare back at them, blink, and they're gone.

What was that about?

"Fire! David's on fire!" a student shouts.

I snap back to reality, and then I smell it. Smoke curls in the air around me and I feel heat in my arm. When I look down, I notice my jacket sleeve has caught on fire. Cursing, I smack it until it goes out. A few of the teens around me stare, their mouths agape.

"Drinking fountain is acting up. The electrical pieces must have malfunctioned, and it lit me on fire," I say, feeling awkward at my dumb explanation. "It's just the universe knowing that I'm going to be flaming tonight on the field."

I say it with exaggeration and pop both thumbs up. The kids closest to me shake their heads. One laughs at my cheesy joke. And though I know they won't forget about what they saw, I think I've defused the situation for now.

If my dad finds out about this, he's going to kill me. I'm not supposed to use my abilities away from home. For the most part, I've been good about that. Unfortunately, I'm a sixteen-year-old boy and have wild emotions. It sometimes does me good on the field, but anywhere else, let's just say, I've had more than one close call. This has been my worst so far.

Fiddling with the charred edges of the bottom of my shirt, I wonder if I should tuck away the blackened pieces, but that would make me look like a goon. Not today, Captain.

I sigh and walk to my next classroom as quickly as possible, hoping that Amir will be there when I arrive. Part of the reason he's my best friend is that he's coolheaded. He can stay calm in the most strenuous of situations, unless it's a pop quiz about something he's only spent four hours studying for instead of his standard fifteen.

My math classroom isn't far from where the incident happened. Still, most of the witnesses have parted ways with me. Either these kids didn't see my flaming outburst or they forgot about it. I bite my lip. No kid will ever forget that: star wide receiver with his hand and shirt aflame.

I'm distracted when I push the door open and I almost walk straight into the teacher. Ms. Connolly gasps and steps back, her hand on her chest.

"David, please watch where you're walking. Not all of us are as light on our feet as you are." Her brow furrows and she folds her arms, but the twinkle in her eyes tells me she's not actually mad. No one gets mad at the star player.

"Sorry, Ms. Connolly, had a problem with the drinking fountain, and—" I trail off, fingering the seam of my blackened shirt again.

Her expression melts into something confused, and one of her brows raises in a silent question. It's one of her dominant gestures. If you get the look from Ms. Connolly, you best be prepared to answer the question. I can slack off in history. Math? Not so much.

"Never mind, I'm fine," I reply even though my mind is still spinning from that girl's creepy stare.

She breathes out, "Just get your act together before the game tonight. It would be bad timing on your part to choke." She moves to the side and opens her hand in a wide gesture.

I grin then head to my desk. Amir sits next to me and his eyes immediately flicked down to my shirt. He notices everything. There have been times I've tried to surprise him for his birthday or even scare him from around the corner. He never really gets surprised. Amir tells me he's not an extraordinary person, but I know he's like a teenage Sherlock Holmes.

"What did you do? Pick up smoking and use the lighter on your clothes instead?" He snickers at his own joke.

I scowl at him. "Hilarious. No, the drinking fountain had an electrical short and caught my shirt on fire. I'm good though."

He narrows his eyes. "An electrical short? That sounds very possible." The sarcasm in his voice tells me he doesn't believe it. I ignore him and turn forward prepared for the lesson. I can feel his eyes boring into the side of my head, but he won't pry once class starts. With any luck, he'll forget about it.

"You can tell me the truth, you kno—"

Amir stops mid-sentence. His eyes are wide and his mouth hangs open, and a loose strand of black hair has fallen out of his styled do, hanging down the middle of his forehead like a thick spider web. The fact that he doesn't fix it right away is the first evidence that something is wrong. The second is that he's shrinking back in his seat.

"What?" I ask. He shakes his head then nods to the other side of the room. I turn that way and my body grows cold.

Blue eyes, veiled by black brows. Red hair just like the flames I'd accidentally called up in the hallway.

The strange girl is in my math class.

Emma: Thank you so much for reading. David—he's, like, such an interesting character, because I think often in young adult literature, the main character is usually not the popular kid or not the cool kid. So that was kind of interesting to me.

Dan: Yeah. It was very different. And the kind of interesting thing is all the six different characters are, like, significantly different from each other, and yeah, he's the popular, he's the star football player. So it makes it very interesting when everybody knows him, and he's supposed to be, like, hiding under the radar.

Emma: That's pretty challenging.

Dan: Right!

Emma: Conflict there, starting already.

Dan: Exactly. Yeah.

Emma: So planning that out, you have these six different characters that you want to feature in all the books, and then you just chose, "Okay, we're gonna start with David and then go from there."

Dan: Pretty much, yeah. It's hard to describe. I knew that I wanted to have three girls and three boys, but I knew very little about them. Now I'm writing the fourth book, now I'm almost done with it. So now all of the six characters have been introduced, but the last and sixth one was just introduced in the middle of the sixth one—or fourth book, rather. So at the time, I was like, "I don't—I don't really know where I'm gonna go with this." And it's been interesting.

So one of them happens to be a foster kid. She grew up in the foster system, doesn't have a family, so that's her story. And then two of the kids were kind of brother and sister. They're not brother and sister, but they were raised that way. So, yeah, it's just... the dynamics are very different for each of the kids. So one of them comes from a family with six other kids. He's got six younger siblings, so that's just more dynamics to think about. They're not his full-blood siblings. They're half siblings of his. So I don't know. It's just kinda fun, right? I like to let it happen as I'm writing it and then deal with the consequences later.

Emma: That is discovery, and that's brave because after publishing a book and then just working on the whole series to the finish, that... that's very brave.

Dan: Yeah. I mean, brave or stupid. Think about it as you'd like. For me, it's worked out okay. I'm kind of impatient. That's part of it. I didn't wanna wait until I'd written the six books, because I guess I just trust myself. After my first experience writing the first trilogy, I will just tell you this. No spoilers. If you wanna read, it's called The Lightbearer Chronicles. There was something that happened. Keep in mind, I don't plan anything. There was something that happened at the beginning of the first book, and I remember thinking, "What does that mean? I don't know. I'll figure it out later." Right? Just kinda wrote it off the side, forgot about it. And I often start my books not knowing how they're gonna end. I started the third book of that series knowing it was gonna end, not knowing how it was gonna end. I remember getting to the end of the third book and that thing that I had written at the beginning of the first book suddenly came back and I was like, "Oh my goodness." I had no idea, like, no idea. And so after that crazy experience, everyone was just like, "There's no way you didn't plan that because that was absolutely perfect, like, sad, tragic, crazy perfect." Like, I didn't plan it. My brain somehow organized everything. And so because that happened, I've just kinda learned to trust myself. Like, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, but it'll come back. And it always does somehow. So it's pretty crazy. I think it's that intuition just because I've read so many books.

Emma: No way. That's a perfect hook. Now I wanna read the Lightbearer Chronicles.

Dan: You should. I've—there—I have mixed feelings about the end of the third one. A lot of people like it. A lot of people don't.

Emma: Yeah.

Dan: Like I said, it's kinda tragic, you know? But, you know, it is what it is. I didn't plan it. So I remember actually being so shocked. I just set my keyboard aside for a second to just, like, internalize. I was like, "What just happened? I did not know that was gonna happen."

Emma: Wow.

Dan: And then it did.

Emma: So it's a surprise to you, too!

Dan: It was 100% a surprise to me, and it just tied it all up perfectly at the end. Crazy. But you can do it too.

Emma: There you go.

Dan: Everybody can write that way. You just... just give it a try.

Emma: That does sound fun.

Dan: You should try it. You should try discovery writing, like, straight discovery writing.

Emma: There you go. I'll just go, I'll just go home and just—I have two stories I've been working on. I'll just put those on hold and just...

Dan: I would recommend it. Even if discovery writing isn't your thing, having a taste of it, I think, is a good thing.

Emma: I think you're right.

Dan: Then you can know for sure, this isn't for me, or it is for me.

Emma: And that might help me because I don't even know... like I said, trying to discover how I plan. I've tried all these different things. I've put sticky notes all over my wall. I've tried, like, doing all these different things, and I still, like, it doesn't quite mesh yet for me yet. So still, you know, this maybe that's my discovering: discovering in planning.

Dan: Yeah.

Emma: Who knows?

Dan: You have to figure out yourself. And I know it's kinda funny, but you gotta understand what works for you. Just so you know, people listening, I have tried planning, and that usually doesn't go well for me because I get bored. I know it sounds funny, but when I plan out the story, it's already written.

Emma: Yeah.

Dan: Like, "Oh, there's... there's nothing exciting." I know what's gonna happen. I have already written the story. So then I just don't write the story. So I have a few plots that I will never write.

Emma: There you go.

Dan: Because I already know what's gonna happen, so there's no point in writing the story.

Emma: The journey is...

Dan: Yeah. It's the journey for me.

Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop: your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it! Email us at [e-mail]. Submission guidelines are not shy; they can be found in the podcast description. The Story Station, hosted by Emma, is a production of Riverbend Media Group.