Meet Kendall Stark

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kendall Stark. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Kendall with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

My work ethic comes from a pure love of what I do. I’m a writer, and I’m known in my circles as someone who can finish novels quickly. The way I’m able to do that is an obsession with writing that is on the level of Joe Goldberg’s obsession with Beck. Everything I do feeds back into my writing. I read sci fi and fantasy to study the genre. I draw to better visualize my characters. Even something as small as the music I listen to is used to give me inspiration.

I wasn’t always like this. When I was just starting out, I couldn’t finish any project I started. It wasn’t until 2020 that I finished my first novel. Now I have five under my belt and am getting ready to release a serial on Ream. Originally, writing was merely a hobby. It wasn’t until I decided I wanted to do it for a living was when I started making progress in my career.

Before I was a writer, I was in STEM. For my entire high school career, I wanted to be an engineer. I learned computer programming, fiddled around with computer chips, made little robots out of popsicle sticks and DC motors. But that wasn’t my real love. Whenever I had free time, I would write sci fi stories. Though I didn’t finish any of the novels I tried to write, it was the only thing that made me happy in my lonely life. I didn’t have friends, my family situation wasn’t very good, all I had was writing little novels.

The first novel I ever finished was in 2020, during NaNoWriMo. As soon as I was able to prove to myself that I can actually do it, I could do it again and again. All you have to do is do it once. Once and you know it’s possible. Once and you know you’re capable. Once and it doesn’t seem that hard anymore.

All it took was one finished novel to become an addict of productivity. Now, I make schedules, to-do lists, and deadlines for myself in order to finish novels fast and efficient. How do I keep my work ethic? I simply love what I do, and the rush I get when I accomplish my goal. Start out small and work your way up.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’ve been writing sci fi for most of my life. It started with a love for Doctor Who and bloomed into an obsession with Octavia Butler and all things science fiction. When I write, I look at it as if I’m studying humanity from an outside perspective. I’ve always been fascinated by humans, studying them in the current context like one would study the daily lives of people from a different century. Studying their gestures, the way they interact with the world. I put all of that into my writing. Building up systems and worlds that don’t exist but could very well based on how humanity acts in real life.

I am the author of the upcoming serial “Silent Soldiers,” which will be available on Ream on Thanksgiving 2024. It is about a not so distant America where a combination of the troubled teen epidemic and a lack of young people joining the military has spawned the Waylon Academy for the Obedient and Enlightened. A school made to kidnap delinquent children, at the behest of their parents, and train them in an elite super soldier program. A place where they break students down in order to build them up into killing machines. There is no escape, only service. Graduate or die.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

When I was a kid, I was intrenched in the STEM field. I longed to be an engineer, so I studied robotics and computer programming. To this day, I design author websites for my writer friends. I learned a lot of skills in my time there, but the one thing I learned that makes me successful in writing is the simple art of passion. You have to decide that you want to do something and then put all your chips on the table. Of course, the house always wins, but there are things you can do to rig the game in your favor. To do that, you have to learn. I didn’t go to a fancy college to learn how to write. I didn’t even have an actual teacher to teach me things like how to use a comma properly. Everything I know is completely self taught. I started out small. I watched videos on YouTube about different writing techniques. Then I moved on to reading books on the subject. Slowly, I built up my knowledge from hours of simply Googling different things to help learn the craft.

Whenever I get asked on how I learned how to write code, I’ll always say, “I actually don’t know how to code. I just know how to Google coding tutorials and stitch together various lines until I got something that did what I wanted it to. I Frankensteined scripts, stitching them together. There was no originality involved and the copy/paste commands a lot.

Every field is like this in some capacity. With writing, you grab inspiration from several different spaces, but you also use tools from all over as well. I have at least five different softwares I use to write my novels and draw from several different structures to outline and plot. It took a lot of research, but I came out of it with a method that has allowed me to write 5 novels and a serial that’s ready to be published in four years. So what’s my advice? Google it. Google everything.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The books that have changed my life have all been fiction. I’m not going to offer up some insightful non fiction that actually has something to relate to the world. What I am going to show you is a book series called “The Path of Ascension.” It’s a Lit RPG about a guy running dungeons to fight magical monsters. It’s pretty surface level when you first read it, but the reason I bring it up is because it taught me something very valuable. In the book there are these things called, concepts. Essentially they are a word or phrase paired with an image and when you invoke it, something magical happens. I read this and thought, what if we did that in real life. Obviously I can’t do anything magical, but the way I use it makes a difference in my life. I like to think about it as an extreme form of manifesting.

The concept I made allows me to better enter a flow state with my writing, which causes me to be able to enter a state of inspiration much easier when I write. I found the right word for what I wanted, “flow,” and built up the image in my mind. It’s us words in a Times New Roman font appearing on a page in a string. I don’t want to get all spiritual on you, but it does work at putting my mind in the zone quickly and efficiently.

It might be a small thing that I got from this book that’s about slaying goblins, but it really helped my work and even my mental health. I was in a pit when I read that book, searching for anything to make me happy. I, of course, turned to my favorite thing, books. When I read the idea of concepts, it gave me hope that there was something that I could do to make myself feel better. I can take action. It’s what helped me get through a hard time in my life, so it was the first book that came to mind.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kendallcstark.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kendallcstark/