Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This podcast is for anyone who loves a good story. Board now for interviews and writing samples from talented authors!
If you would like to be featured, email your work to storystation@riverbendmediagroup.com
Submission guidelines:
There is no word count, but please select a piece that can be read in ten minutes or less.
Pieces with extreme violence, language, or other explicit content will not be considered.
Thank you for your interest!
Every story is a ticket to somewhere extraordinary. No need to pack a bag, just settle in and let the words transport you. Now boarding: an insight to an author's mind. This is The Story Station.
Kaitlyn: Hi. I'm Kaitlyn King, author of YA Christian fiction and fantasy. I have two series out right now, the More Than Conquerors series and the Christmas Realm series.
Emma: So first off, why do you write?
Kaitlyn: So I kind of find it funny that I didn't know I was supposed to be a writer when I was younger. I always loved books, I loved characters, and I was one of those, you know, playing with Barbies or things like that, I was telling a story while I was doing it. But I actually didn't know I was supposed to be a writer until I was a teenager, and I got to the point where I couldn't find books that I related to anymore. And so I'd go to my school library or the public library or to bookstores, and they're like, this is what every American teenager is reading. And I'm sitting there looking at this stuff going, I'm not doing that stuff. As a Christian, I had made certain decisions and I'm like, I don't wanna read about this either and that safe space was no longer there. And so I spent several years in high school going, who am I now? I can't find myself in characters. I don't know what my future is gonna be. And I went to a Christian camp for the summer and met a man there that was selling some of his books, and he's like, "I just wanted Christian teens to have a book." And I was like, "That is wonderful, thank you." And I—it felt like coming home, finding characters that were going through what I was going through. And at some point reading that, I was like, this is what I have to do too.
Emma: Wow. That's incredible. And you're right. I feel like there's... Every time I find a book series that I like, there comes to the point where it ends—because it always has to end, right? And then I'm just always so sad because I don't have that book to read. And so that's so true. Sometimes you just get to a point where you're looking and looking and it's really hard to find any books that you can relate to. So...
Kaitlyn: Yeah. Everyone goes through a reading slump at some point.
Emma: Yes.
Kaitlyn: So it's nice when you find that thing that can bring you back out of it.
Emma: Yeah. Well, what got you inspired to write, particularly for teenagers?
Kaitlyn: I think it was just that I had felt so alone, and I didn't want anyone else to feel that way. C. S. Lewis has a quote, and I'm probably not gonna say it completely right, but it's something like, "We read to know we're not alone." And I kinda felt like I wanna write so that others feel like they're not alone.
Emma: I love that. C. S. Lewis is a great
Kaitlyn: Yes.
Emma: Great writer and a great man.
Kaitlyn: Yes. Narnia is definitely, like, my safe space that I often go back to in my mind.
Emma: My dad used to read it to me when I was a kid. With all of my siblings, we'd be going to bed, and I remember him reading us The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Kaitlyn: Mhmm.
Emma: And he would be like, "Okay. That's it. You guys gotta go to bed now." And then me and my brother and sister, we would, like, as soon as he left and put the book down, we'd all like run out of our beds and try to get to the book first so that we could keep reading because it was just so hard to stop.
Kaitlyn: Yeah. I mean, I was definitely one of those kids that read with a flashlight under my covers and got caught a couple of times for doing that.
Emma: I would do that too. And then my mom was like, "You really need to go to sleep." And so then I would wake up at, like, 4 o'clock in the morning to keep reading.
Kaitlyn: I never did that. I'm still not a morning person.
Emma: Me either. But back when I was in elementary school, man. So how do you infuse your stories with faith in a way that doesn't feel forced?
Kaitlyn: Yeah. I definitely don't like to force it. It was something I had to face, like, early on when I first started writing and I was showing my work to different people, particularly—because I was only about 16, 17 years old—showing it to adults. And they were like, "Oh, your character needs to be a role model, and so they can't do anything wrong." And I'm like, but that's just not realistic. And so there have been times where I had to ignore that. Actually, always, I ignore that advice about making it to where the characters have real flaws and real things they do.
In the last book, I had this whole situation where the kids are wanting to help people, and so they come up with this plan to go take the food from—or the money, I think—from one group of people and give it to the others, very Robinhood style. And I had a mom contact me and she's like, "You're teaching 13-year-olds to steal." And I'm like, "Robin Hood taught them to steal." I mean, this is just something that, yeah, a 13-year-old came up with this plan. And I later have them acknowledge, "Oh, this was not how we were supposed to do it." And so I like to make my characters very real.
The other thing is early on, I did feel like I was trying to force it a lot more and it sounded preachy. And that was the complaint I heard about any Christian fiction was that it sounded preachy. And I was like, I don't wanna do that. And so I stopped trying to infuse faith into my stories, but because it's in me, it came out in my stories. And so that's kind of the advice I give to anyone is whatever is in you is going to come out in your stories. Even to the point of your emotions. If you're happy, if you're sad, if you're not writing a scene like that, you might wanna wait because it will come out in what you are writing.
Emma: That reminds me—what you were saying about realizing that they were in the wrong and having those flaws can really be very good for people to read about. It made me think about in Les Misérables, then when Jean Valjean, he steals the bread at the beginning, obviously, to feed his sister and his sister's starving kids. But later he realizes—he has this moment where he's like, I could have done something else. I shouldn't have stolen. I could have found another way. And so I really like that. Having, like you said, not having the perfect character, but having them have these flaws that can really lead to an even greater understanding of right and wrong.
Kaitlyn: And that goes back to, you know, me saying that I always found myself in characters because if your characters are real, you'll relate to them in different ways.
Emma: I wanna talk a little bit more too about what you were saying with not being too preachy, because that is so hard because sometimes you're like, "Okay. I want my writing to be meaningful." But just like you said, if you try to force it, it just does not work.
Kaitlyn: Yeah. You definitely don't want to do something where you have someone, like, get up and preach a whole sermon, and that's how your character realizes the lesson they were supposed to learn. And that's kind of, I think, where we felt like a lot of it was preachy or when you have even an older character that's, like, teaching a lesson and stuff. If you look back at, like, early cartoons for children, the children are solving the problems. And so it teaches children how to solve problems. They don't always... just the parents don't always have the answer. And so that's kind of what we do with reading, too, is the characters have to have the answer eventually and discover it without it always being they're told the answer.
Emma: Okay, so it's like through their actions and the consequences of their actions.
Kaitlyn: Exactly. They're learning different things and then we learn through that.
Emma: What are some of the challenges that you have faced in writing?
Kaitlyn: I think the biggest challenge was being told "no" so many times. Right after that camp that I told you about, I came back and I was like, this is what I'm going to do. And I had different people in my life that were like, "But you're still going to this college you committed to going to. Right?" I'm like, "Well, they don't have a writing degree." "Okay. Well, you can't make a living off of that anyway, so you need to get a different degree," and stuff. And for the longest time, I'm like, these are the people that I'm supposed to be getting advice from. I'm going to do what they say. And so I went and got a teaching degree, and I got to the end of my senior year and all my friends were going, "Where are you gonna go teach? I'm going here. I'm going there." And I was like, that was never the goal. Like, the goal was always to be a writer. And so at that point, I went and discussed it with my education supervisor about maybe doing a master's program, and we created this custom master's program. Since it was such a small school, they could do that. And so it took a little bit of correspondence courses and whatever, but I got my master's degree in writing. And then even when I finished that, there was still this, "Okay, but now you need to have a job. Writing isn't gonna bring in money." And I'm like, "Okay." So I have a job. I'm teaching. I'm doing what I'm supposed to while I'm kind of writing on the side and trying to start querying and do the traditional publishing route. And then I was getting "no's" back from them saying, "We don't know what Christian teenagers wanna read, so we don't know if this would work." And I'm like, okay. I've been hearing "no" for so long, and I started hearing about what indie publishing was. And I was like, "You know what? I'm tired of hearing no. I'm just gonna do it."
Emma: That's empowering. Because it's true, I've heard the publishing world can be a very rough place.
Kaitlyn: It's daunting. And, honestly, it's one of those, like, choose your hard situation. And I was talking about this at the writing conference I went to last week with a couple other writers, who some of them have been hearing no, like, one guy said he had 150 rejections. And I was like, yeah, and even when you get an acceptance, it could still be two to four years before your book comes out. Now, they'll do everything for you. They'll do the editing. They'll do the cover design. They'll do the formatting. They'll do all the marketing, but you have absolutely no control at that point. They could change the version of the Bible you're using to what is more popular. They could say, "Hey, we want you to add in this theme because that's what's selling right now" and change the whole meaning of your story. And you have no control because you sold your story to them. So that's hard. Or you can try to do it all yourself and that's hard too. Trying to learn how to format, learn how to cover design, who to hire, not get scammed by people, that's hard too. So it's just which hard do you wanna deal with?
Emma: That is true. It's a challenging trail either way.
Kaitlyn: Yes.
Emma: Where do you draw inspiration for the worlds that you create?
Kaitlyn: So it kinda depends. The More than Conquerors idea came from I was sitting in church and it was a brand new year and they had just revealed the theme and it said "More than Conquerors," and it was across a shield, like a medieval shield. And I went, what if there was a world where they only valued being a conqueror and the next generation wanted to be more than that? So I flipped over the bulletin, and by the time the offering was taken, I had book one, they will do this. Book two, they will do this, all the way through book seven.
Emma: Wow.
Kaitlyn: And I feel like the world is very much inspired by, like, King Arthur and Robin Hood and that sort of a thing. And so it's just very medieval-inspired. Whereas the Christmas Realm one—originally, the idea came from watching a Food Network show. And it was during 2020, so they only did one season and it was this Candyland-at-Christmas-time-inspired challenge. And Kristen Chenoweth was the one as the host, and each week they did a different challenge in a different sweets land area. And I kind of wanted at first to do a story set in that, but the more I kind of, like, thought about it and thought about it, the more it reminded me of dancing in The Nutcracker as a kid. And I used to have Nutcrackers—I still do, actually—but I collected them as a kid and I would play with them. And so I had this whole imaginary kingdom set up in my imagination already. And so it was kind of combining those ideas. It's also very Narnia-inspired where it's allegorical portal fantasy where they start in our world, go through the portal, and now they're in the Christmas realm. And all of that was just inspired by all of the sweets, the land of sweets, and all of that concept.
Emma: I love that. King Arthur, he's also a very Christian figure.
Kaitlyn: Yes. Yeah. Depending on, I think, the version you read because—
Emma: That's true. There are a lot of versions.
Kaitlyn: There's a couple of different versions, but, yeah, I think he's supposed to be more of a Christian hero for us.
Emma: I love just... drawing inspiration from everywhere, from your youth and from just things that you see and hear and all the things around you.
Kaitlyn: Yeah. I have a hard time when someone asks me where my ideas come from because I was like, most of the time, it is something so random
Emma: Mhmm.
Kaitlyn: that I will just be like, "What if this?" and there it is.
Emma: So how about ideas for your characters? What would you say are some of the things that influence your characters the most?
Kaitlyn: Lately, I've actually been turning to characters that I loved in movies growing up. Originally, a lot of the More than Conquerors characters was just me going through Pinterest, finding an image and going, "That's that person." And so there's kind of a little bit of that where I'll see an image and I'm like, "That's that person," and I kinda create a life around that. And then lately with some newer ideas, I'm like, this person kinda reminds me of this character from this show and this character from this show. I'm gonna combine them and now they're their own character.
Emma: Mhmm.
Kaitlyn: So that's kind of what I've been doing lately with that.
Emma: I once heard the best artists are thieves. Not in a way of, like, stealing things, but...
Kaitlyn: Yeah.
Emma: you know, finding inspiration from everywhere. And if there's a character that really works that you really are intrigued by, find out why that character works and then implementing it in your own writing.
Kaitlyn: Well, and that's the thing is that, you know, there's the whole, like, "there's no new ideas" and stuff. There's even a quote I read recently where it was, like, "Tell me the same story but different." People kind of want the things they're familiar with. If you learn how to steal without it being stealing,
Emma: Yes.
Kaitlyn: Then it works pretty well.
Emma: So you said for your More than Conquerors series, it's going to be seven books?
Kaitlyn: Yes.
Emma: Wow.
Kaitlyn: And actually, recently... So, if you sign up for my newsletter, I will be doing a giveaway of a short story, kind of. In the first book, there's a scene where one of the girls is walking through this old abandoned library, and she finds the diary of the origin story of their kingdom and of the original prince that kind of found their kingdom and turned it into what it was. And I've decided to tell that story through his diary. So I'll be giving that away as well as having it on Amazon soon. So that's kind of like a sub story.
And then I got asked to be in a collection recently, and I was like, oh, if I'm gonna do a collection, I kinda want it to point back to one of my series. And I was like, I could tell this story. So now there's kind of some sub stories that are shorter and stuff. So eventually, I'm hoping to kind of release like "The Lost Stories of Endor" in the process. So originally, there are seven novels that will be telling the story and then some sub stories depending on how much you wanna go into the world.
Emma: Like we were talking about earlier, it's so sad when you find a good series you like, and then it ends. So it's always good to create more.
Kaitlyn: Yeah. I mean, and there's so many series that have done that recently where they'll tell all of the stories and then they're like, "Oh, wait, there's more!" You can go further in the past or further in the future and stuff. So that might happen. I don't know.
Emma: That's super exciting.
Kaitlyn: Yeah.
Emma: And is More than Conquerors the book that you brought to read today?
Kaitlyn: Yes. The first book in the series is "The Forgotten Prince," and it's about the youngest son of the evil king that is now in charge of Endor. And when he was little, his mom was killed, and so they're like, well, he's not safe. Let's move him somewhere else. So he's been raised in a monastery. And so now he's 12 years old out on the monastery is kind of the passage I'm about to read.
Emma: Wow. What a start.
Kaitlyn: Yeah.
Emma: That's very climactic.
Kaitlyn:
The sun was just peeking over the steeple of the Lazarus Monastery. Prince Tridan hurried to get his chores done before morning prayers—the hardest of which was to move the bull and sheep from the front pasture to the paddock where they would be fed their breakfast. Moving the sheep was the easy part; they just followed the bull wherever he went; it was getting him to lead them that was difficult. Fortunately, Tridan was practiced in manipulating him. He grabbed the rope with a hoop tied on either end, and swung it slowly in circles as he approached Big Red from downwind.
At first, Big Red was unaware of his presence and happily munched on the morning dew-covered grass. Tridan swung the rope faster, then cringed when he accidently stepped on a twig. Big Red’s head popped up when he heard the snap.
Before he could dart away, Tridan let the rope fly and it encircled the bull’s head.
Big Red held still for a blink of an eye then tore off across the field, pulling Tridan through the dirt behind him. He let the rope slip through his fingers and spat out the blades of grass that had lodged themselves between his teeth.
He looked up and his deep-blue eyes widened. The bull was pawing the ground and aiming his razor-sharp horns at Tridan.
It was time for the second part of his plan. He jumped off the ground and made a beeline for the paddock gate.
Big Red was hot on his heels as he passed through the opening and knocked down the rake leaning on the fence nearby. As he had hoped, the circle tied to the free end of the rope snagged one of the rake spikes. The rake now clattered behind Big Red as he chased Tridan around the paddock.
“Come on, grab onto something!” he huffed as he dashed around feed bags and pallets.
Finally, the rake lodged itself between the legs of a large manger.
“Yes!” Tridan whooped then led Big Red in circles around the tall pole in the center. By the third turn, the bull was completely stuck, and the sheep had all followed them inside the paddock. Tridan poured out the feed bags into the mangers and smiled.
“As always, you have been a worthy opponent,” he said while bowing to Big Red.
The bull snorted and scraped the ground with his hoof, though now he seemed more interested in reaching the food.
Tridan picked up the rake and used the handle to slip the rope from around Big Red’s neck. The bull barely looked at him as he trudged to the closest manger. Satisfied that his job was done, Tridan stashed his tools and locked the paddock gate.
Now, back in the pasture, he sighed as he spotted the drag marks in the grass. He wiped the dirt from the front of his tunic with his suntanned hands. His latest royal-blue tunic had long since wore out and been replaced by the brown tunics the disciples of the monastery wore. The fabric of his pants and cloak were still holding up, but they were severely faded from the amount of time Tridan spent outside in the sunshine. When not being tutored by Brother Paul, he played games with the monastery’s animals: fetch with the hound, hide-n-seek with the cat, and tag with the ram.
The ram!
Tridan spun around and noticed for the first time that the ram had not followed the others into the paddock. He was still in the pasture and he was charging straight at him!
Tridan took off across the field, his long strides eating up the distance between him and the far fence. Reaching it in the nick of time, he flipped over the top and landed on his rear with a hard thud. The ram slammed into the post behind him. Tridan couldn’t stop the grin growing on his face.
He was this close to becoming “it” for a very long time.
He looked up and noticed where he was: the edge of the monastery’s land. When he had first arrived here, he had been too afraid to go anywhere near here. Each year he had grown bolder. Now, he eased himself off the ground and took eight measured steps. One for each year he had been here. After the eighth step, he stopped and looked down the road that led away from the monastery. He often wondered about life in Endor castle. Would he feel more at home if he went back there? Aside from the yearly supply of clothes, he had had no contact from the capital city. There could still be a threat to his life. The memory of the night his mother died swam before him and tears threatened to fill his eyes. He rubbed them away and took a step back toward the safety of his adoptive home.
Emma: Tridan just seems like such a fun, adventurous character.
Kaitlyn: He's definitely a different character for me. He's like he can be brave, but most of the time, he's like satisfied to let others lead, let others do things until he feels like, no, this is wrong, and then he'll take a stand.
Emma: He did seem like a good mixture of bold and cautious.
Kaitlyn: Yes.
Emma: Because there he is, like, running from a bull.
Kaitlyn: Mhmm.
Emma: And then taking eight measured steps towards the unknown, you know?
Kaitlyn: Yeah. He's definitely that half and half, and he grows throughout the series as he learns more about himself. And sometimes he regresses where he's like, you know what? I don't wanna be in charge. I don't wanna be bold. And other times, he's like, we have to do something. If no one else is gonna do it, I will.
Emma: So he grows like a normal person.
Kaitlyn: Exactly.
Emma: Is he the main character throughout the whole series?
Kaitlyn: He is. Yes. He does make three other friends once he gets back to Endor, and those three are beloved characters by everyone and will be with him throughout the whole series as well.
Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop: your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it! Email us at storystation@riverbendmediagroup.com. 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.