Hello everyone, recently I had the pleasure of speaking with an up and coming new writer, Brandon W. Lawson about his soon to be released book Temporal.

If you’re interested in learning more about Brandon and keeping appraised of the status of Temporal, you can follow him his website, on twitter and facebook.

Brandon is an 18 year old San Francisco, Bay Area, native. He studies accounting at a community college, but is a passionate  writer, with many short stories and analytical movie reviews posted to his website . His short story works run the gambit of genres, encompassing  mysteries,  thrillers, crimes,  fantasies, and science fiction.

He has also written a science fiction thriller titled, Temporal, which he hopes to have released by the year’s end. Temporal tells the story of a detective looking for a criminal and an assassin looking for the man who killed his mother. Both of their lives are connected and will come together by the uses of teleportation and time traveling.

Now that your appetite is whet, let’s get to know Brandon W. Lawson a little better, shall we?

Questions:

What drew you to writing?
What really drawn me to writing was wanting to show people what was inside of my mind.  I wanted people to know what I thought, and how I viewed the world, and through writing, people can find out how I see things. When I was young, I didn’t really get the chance to tell my peers exactly what was on my mind, so all of my thoughts were held inside.  Now with I am able to release all of it, through my writing. Of course I spoke up, and told people how I felt eventually, but to go deep inside of my mind, only writing allows me to do it.
Do you have a degree in writing? Do you believe that matters? Why/Why not?
I do not have a degree in writing, and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Nevertheless, I don’t think that matters with writing. I personally feel like the only thing a one needs is the creativity to put down content on their platform. Of course you can learn so much through years of education. You can learn how to write, structures, how to put a story together, etc, but to actually have a story to which you are connected, and feel like you are inside of as you write, that is something that cannot be taught.

Do you prefer creating short stories, or novels?
I actually like doing both. I know I like writing short stories because they’re quick and convenient. If I have a thought I want to put into a story without having to have a lot of content and ways to bring it together, I can put it into a short story. They let me focus entirely on one part of the story, on one plot. They are like a tv episode, you like them, but they’re short, so when they’re over, you forget about them and move onto the next one. I also like writing novels. I know I only wrote one, but I loved writing it just as much as I did my short stories. With the novel it was more like a movie. It was something that could stick with me for a long time.Not only does it have more pages, but more content. The longer I write something the more I am connected to it, and it becomes more part of my life. The short stories are for a quick fixes, to get a little entertainment and satisfaction high, but the novel is something to be part of me for a long time. I enjoyed writing it, and I loved the experience. I hope my next novels will have that feeling to them.

What Genre do you write and why?
I write all kinds of genres. For my short stories I have written mysteries, suspense, thrillers, sci fi such as time traveling, and horrors. For my novel I wrote a sci fi book about time traveling, and I want to try to keep my novels about science fiction whether it’s time traveling again, or something else. The reason why I write in lots of genres and not just one is because all that I write is a reflection of what I see in movies and tv. I watch all kind of genres of tv and movies, so I put it into my writing. The reason why I want to stay with sci fi in novels, is because sci fi is my favorite genre in film.

What about your life influenced your drive to create?
What drove me to actually create was movies. I would watch movies, and I would love what I saw on tv or in the theaters. I would then want to have my imagination on a big screen for people to see, but I was a kid. It takes a lot to become a director, and it wasn’t like I could start on it from a child. I would have ideas about what would be a great movie, and tell my dad. He would always tell me to write about it, that everything in your mind you think of for the future, write about it so you won’t forget. He also said many movies start from books, and that’s a good way to go. At first I didn’t do anything about it, but after taking a creative writing class in the 12th grade, I decided to keep writing. Not everything I write, I want to see on the big screen, but everything I write, I imagine it in my mind on as if it was. That is how I write all of my stories, as if they were movies, because visuals to me is everything. You have to see it to believe it. The want to actually create comes from wanting people to see how I see things because I feel like I have a lot of interesting things to say, and what better way to put it out than writing. I believe what we create gives us a bridge to a more interesting world. We watch these movies, tv shows, listen to all this music, and imagine, but when we go home, life is nothing like we see on tv. I mean our lives can be fun and interesting in many ways. People travel, buy things, whatever it is, people take pride and joy in doing certain things. I on the other hand, find joy in creating because when I create I feel like I open up another world. With that, it feels like nothing is impossible. So that’s why I create and choose to write, because it allows me to discover different worlds.

What is next on your current writing agenda?
I’m looking forward to finishing the book I have right now. Once I finish editing it, I will make a press release that I will send off to many newspapers, publishers, and other media outlets. I plan on putting my book on Amazon and google books towards the near future, at the end of the year or beginning of next year; there’s no specific date yet.

What do you see as your greatest strength as a person?
I feel like my greatest strength as a person is being able to observe and study something, and then giving my analysis or opinion on it. What I mean is I don’t just jump into something. I treat a lot of things that come my way like a project or a science research project. I have to observe it, make a hypothesis on it, come up with my theories, test it out, and then form a law on it. Not literally but that’s just how strategical I am in dealing with things in my life. I try to observe more than I act, or speak. Listen and observe first, and I try not to show my hand.

Are you a positive person, negative, or realistic?
I am a positive and realistic person. I always want to shoot high and have an optimistic view, but I only get that view base on the realities around me. In other words, if I believe I will become a billionaire, and go to Mars, I would use the realities around me to get to my optimistic views such as going to college, getting a degree, and starting a business. Then I would use that money to research space programs, so that I can somehow get to Mars.

What inspires you?
What inspires and motivates me is basically life. We only have one life, and it may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. We only have one life, and people really take it for granted. I understand, we’re going to have our bad days, everyone does, but to not be happy for living and having opportunity is not right. Many people don’t appreciate what they have until they lose it, and when we die, we’re going to have regrets, but I want to make sure that I did the most I could in my life. I want to make sure I live a good life.

What’s most important in your life?
My family. Again it may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. I love to love, and I love to love my family especially my mother. We may have all of the material things around us, but everything comes back to family because that revolves around what comes from the heart, and that’s nature, it’s love.

When you were a child, what did you always want to be when you grew up?
I actually wanted to be a lot of things when I grew up. I remember in the 2nd grade we had to pick out things from a magazine that showed what we wanted to be when we grew up. I found a football player from the 49ers so I just went with being a football player on the 49ers. Then I wanted to own my own car dealership like my uncle did. In 5th grade and throughout middle school I wanted to be a rapper. In 8th grade up to 9th I wanted to be an inventor of some type of crazy new invention such as a hover car. In 10th and 11th grade I wanted to be a civil engineer. In 12th grade I decided to be an accountant, and then once I graduated, I decided I want to still be an accountant, but also be an author, so both. It’s just funny how when we dream of what we want to be as kids, even when we do it, as we get older it is not like we thought it would be. Even for the ones who end up doing it such as being a football player, rapper, or other things, we’re like “there’s actually hard parts to this job, I thought it was all fun.” Or how I wanted to be a CEO of a major business. If I end up having my book published in stores across the country, and other parts of the world, that would make me a CEO of that business, but it wouldn’t be how I pictured it. As a child I pictured me being in a suit just walking into a skyscraper with my name on it, and going into a big room with other board members as our company creates industrial products. In reality I could own a publishing company, and put out books. Same job, just different way in doing it.