We were lucky to catch up with Dylan West recently and have shared our conversation below.
Dylan, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I learned to write novels by reading books on writing craft, writing and revising drafts, getting and giving critiques in various author communities, reading the critiques of others, and acting on feedback.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have joined critique groups much sooner, given more critiques earlier on, and read the critiques of others. I had little trouble writing drafts. The sticking point has always been revising effectively. No matter how many craft books I read and how much practice I did, I needed someone else to point out my writing and storytelling weaknesses. Some think that critique groups make you spend too much time critiquing the work of others, but I often learned more by doing that than I did from the critiques I received. Something about seeing the flaws in writing I’m not emotionally invested in makes it much easier to see them in my own writing later.
My biggest obstacle was finding good critique groups. I eventually found a home at scribophile.com and at local, in-person critique groups in my area via Facebook. If I had spent more time searching for such groups earlier, I could have started publishing novels about 2 decades earlier.
Dylan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
The book Salamandastron, by Brian Jacques, turned me into a reader and writer when I was in the 8th grade. This was the first book I read purely for fun, not for a grade. That summer, I wrote a 400 page novel on wide-ruled notebook paper with a number 2 pencil. And though the book was terrible, it gave me valuable experience, which led me to write another novel I wouldn’t publish. But novel number three was Scribes’ Descent, my first published work.
Readers enjoy Scribes’ Descent and its related novella, Emolecipation, for their hard sci-fi and immersive world building. If you love sci-fi and fantasy, but want something different, give my work a try. I give free samples on my website:
My work is also Christian-based and clean for all ages. Scribes’ Descent began as a video game, which you can play a demo of here: https://dylanwestauthor.com/demo
Once I’ve published the entire 5-book Scribes Series, I plan to finish the video game and publish it on Steam, as well as various consoles. For the fans of my books, I put their names into my game as collectible objects :)
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I spent the last 12 years writing the entire 5-book Scribes Series and several related works in that universe: The Book of Books, Emolecipation, The Sewer Lord, and a 55,000 word world building guide–all before publishing the first book. I did that because I wanted to know the end from the beginning, so that the entire Scribes Series felt cohesive, not a series of bolt-ons that feel disjointed. And to get Scribes’ Descent ready to publish, I got over 550 critiques on Scribophile.com across a 4 year period. Most of these were constructive and written in kindness, but some were nasty. I had to learn how to cope with all manner of responses to my work and keep writing in spite of it. It can knock the wind out of me when a critiquer slams me for legitimate writing or story problems in my work. Like anyone else, it can make me stop and wonder if I’ve wasted the last x number of years on something I was never meant to do, which can be a much deeper pit than the one I write about in my series.
My biggest struggle was getting chapter one “just right” in Scribes’ Descent. I rewrote that chapter about 105 times over a 6 year period. I joke with people that chapter one was harder than the rest of the novel combined. There were times I wondered if I could ever get it right. As a writer, there are a million ways to mess up a work. If you fix one flaw just to create a new one, it can get discouraging fast. Luckily, something in me just wouldn’t stop fixing problems, making new ones, and fixing those too. I even wrote over 500,000 words of critique of other works as part of these writing communities. All that editorial mileage has utterly transformed my writing. My main critique partner of over 12 years tells me that my first drafts are better now than my latest drafts when I got started.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I hope my novels nudge readers closer to faith in Jesus Christ. Never in a bop-you-over-the-head way, though. I weave themes into my work which get to the substance of faith, but set in a totally new universe. Readers who don’t care about such things still enjoy the story, while those who search for truth find parallels to Christianity in much the same way as they would in the Chronicles of Narnia.
For Christians, I hope the science in my books inspires them to enjoy science and not feel intimidated by it. I want people to feel that science is a thing they can enjoy without the pressure of being an “expert” in it. Because if they enjoy science, they’ll study it more. And if they study it more, they can better defend what they believe to a world that tells them they’ve traded fact for myths. I believe people need both faith and science, and that the two are not only compatible, but necessary for a full picture of reality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dylanwestauthor.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dylanmichaelwest/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100078540828516
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DylanWestAuthor
- Other: Please subscribe to my newsletter: https://dylanwestauthor.com/ and read a free sample of Scribes’ Descent: https://dylanwestauthor.com/scribes-descent, Book 2 of the Scribes Series is out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/
B0CH2D7NXC, free sample on my website: https://dylanwestauthor.com/ scribes-aflame/