Interview with Author: Tomas Pueyo Brochard

Interview with Author: Tomas Pueyo Brochard

Tomas is the author of Star Wars Rings. His book will be available for Kindle on Amazon.on 19th September 2017.

Interview Q&A

Was writing the books a fun experience for you?

It was really fun, probably because it happened organically. When the new Star Wars movie trailer for The Last Jedi appeared, I jumped on the sofa. Everything was so predictable! I immediately wrote a blog post about it, the structure in Star Wars, and how to predict the mext movie. That blog post was pretty long, yet I left a lot of things untold. Since the blog post drew a ton of attention, I decided I should write a book about it!

I know Star Wars relatively well and storytelling even more, so writing a book about it was just fun. All the research entailed reading more about what I love, so it just came naturally fast.

How was it like writing a multi genre book?

It’s a bit weird! The book explains the narrative structure of Star Wars movies, and how understanding it helps predict what happens in the next movies. But when trying to explain this to people, it didn’t fit any mental category. They were confused. “Is this Fiction or Non-Fiction? About Movies or Literature? Or about Storytelling? Or was it Movie Scriptwriting?”

Why pick star wars over other franchises?

The entire book is about the story structure of Star Wars movies. They use something called Ring Structure, which includes lots of repetitions and symmetries across movies.

There are other franchises that use Rings to structure their narrative. The most famous is the Bible, and the most popular is Harry Potter. I talk about both in my book, breaking down how they use Rings.

But those stories are complete now, so it’s easy to analyze them in retrospect. I needed a challenge. I wanted to predict what will happen in future movies, so that the structure can be proven or disproved. Since Star Wars has a movie launching in December of 2017, this was the perfect event to trigger a book!

Do you have a day job aside from writing?

Yes. I lead product and marketing for a Silicon Valley startup. My third job is to take care of my one-year-old twins!

It doesn’t leave me much time to write a book, but the key is habit. Every evening after dinner, once the kids are in bed, I spend two hours writing, no matter what. I even took a week off just to keep writing! But that is not as important as the habit of writing. If you do it every day, it starts becoming automatic, and you don’t need discipline anymore.

How confident are you in your predictions? Would you be setting up bets for it?

Oh yeah! It depends on the prediction though—and the bet! For example, I’m pretty convinced that Luke and Rey will have differences during the next movie, The Last Jedi. It makes perfect sense: Anakin and his mentor Obi-Wan had differences in the middle movie of the prequel trilogy, Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Luke and his mentor Yoda have differences in the middle movie of the middle trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back. Rey has to have differences with her mentor in the middle movie of the last trilogy! It’s not just the pattern from previous movies, it also makes sense narratively. You want conflict between them.

Conversely, would I bet that Rey will lose a limb at the end of the movie? Well, depends on what’s at stake! But I can’t say that I’m 100% sure that will happen, because it depends on the artistic choices of the movie makers. Sure, both Anakin and Luke lose theirs at the end of the middle movies of their trilogies, but that doesn’t mean the new Star Wars director thought “I’m going to respect that!” He can easily decide to break that pattern.

How will you celebrate the release of your first book?

I am throwing a Launch party on Facebook tomorrow, on September 19th! Everybody is welcome to join. I will be answering questions from the audience, sharing some unique content, and handing out some giveaways. I’m getting so many questions already that I can’t wait to share them with my readers and take more questions from them.

Join me!

What do you enjoy the most about being an author? Aside from finishing the book, of course.

Something amazing happens when you spend hundreds of hours analyzing a topic. You start meeting with all these people who know as much as you or even more. Suddenly, the quality of debates you have increases exponentially. I’ve met with such storytelling and Star Wars experts that I feel blessed. I’ve learned so much from them!

What do you hate the most when writing a book?

It’s all the little things that come with it that nobody talks about. There are so many details! For example, pagination is horribly tedious. You need to put the right page number and header for every page, then upload it for kindle and paperwork versions. Every platform interprets your files differently, so you need to check a hundred times that everything is perfect. I’m a perfectionist, so it’s important to me that everything is where it needs to be. But oh lord, isn’t it tedious!

Having read your bio, you are obviously a well-rounded person. Is the job “author” going to be a part of your resume from now on?

Thank you for your kind words! I’m not sure I’d say as much, but I appreciate.

But yes, I will absolutely add “author” to my resume! I treat my resume a bit like an impressionist painting. I love adding different brushstrokes to it, to give a better sense of who I am. That’s why I added my focus on psychology, for example.

But there’s also another reason to add “author” to my resume. In fact, it’s a career I will be exploring more. I am already half way through my next book about Automation and the impact it will have on jobs!

Do you use special writing software, or do you prefer hand-writing?

I don’t think it’s practical to hand-write anymore. Hand-writing is perfect for sketching ideas, structuring your thoughts, taking notes. But as soon as you start really writing, you need something that scales.

I know there is a lot of amazing software for authors out there, but for now Word has been good enough for me. That said, I’ve learned so much about Word while writing the book! It has so many options that I had never used before. I feel like I’m an expert now! And I thought I knew before…

Do you think people should join authors groups? Are you in one?

As a first-time writer, I’ve been exploring everything that’s necessary for an author to properly write and self-publish his books. I’ve been floored at how much there is to do. Especially on the publishing side.

At the end of the day, writing a book is just researching, writing, editing, figuring out the illustrations, and you’re good. Each task is long, but there’s not a million of them to keep track of.

Publishing is not the same. There are literally hundreds of tasks to track across dozens of initiatives, from guest blog posts to interviews, to uploading your book, fixing the price, planning offers, setting up an email list… So. Much. Work!

I haven’t gotten around to joining author groups yet, but I have created a group of readers with whom I exchange ideas all the time. But I’m curious to know if the audience thinks I should join one author club?

Thank you for your time, Tomas! Where and when can people buy your book?

It’s launching tomorrow on Amazon. Your readers can join the launch party here and buy it here.

Thanks a lot for having me, Ailyn! It’s been a pleasure!

 

Copyright © 2017 Ailyn Writes. All Rights Reserved.