This week’s Farmer Focus is junior Kody Whitaker, an aspiring professional writer whose career is quickly ascending.

SNAPSHOTS

Dream pet: Hyena

Go-to sweet treat: Strawberry wafers

Comfort show: “Gravity Falls”

Favorite item in your room: Inflatable alligator on my ceiling

Something you wish school taught you: How to make money

ZOOMING IN

Q: When did you start writing? 

A: “I started writing in February of 2022, and it was kind of a spare at the moment thing. I had an idea about murder and I started getting into that. It just spurred me into ‘This sounds really cool. Oh my gosh it’s coming together it’s a big plot twist’ I thought I was Einstein. I’ve written about four stories but I scrapped two of them because I lost motivation, so I started focusing on the other two. I have 25 [chapters] written for the first [book] and 40 for the second one.”

Q: Tell me about your most viewed story, how many views did it get?

A: “My most viewed story is the first one I ever wrote. It started off really slow because it’s a murder mystery and I only had about five chapters posted. It’s [about] a detective working at a department and they were on a murder case and they had to solve it through files that they found online. [The victim] was being stalked online and [the murderer] turned out to be someone they worked with. I got about 277,000 views on that story.”

Q: What has been the most rewarding part of writing your stories? Why?

A: “Definitely the creativity I’ve gotten from [writing], it brightens up everything I see because I start thinking ‘Oh that would be cool to write about. More people should know about this, that’d be so fun’ because it’s real life stuff that could happen.”

Q: Where do you post your stories and what is the feedback you received?

A: “I post it on Amazon Kindle and I get a lot of comments asking me to post chapters all the time but I don’t have the time for that, [but it’s] very positive feedback. There’s also other [comments] that say ‘I don’t really like the way you worded this’ and ‘I wish you could use different words’ so [when] reading those, I take those into account like ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ I’ve started using Grammarly now because Grammarly has really good words that they can fill in for you. It’s changed a lot of stuff and people really like that.”

Q: How does school get in the way of you writing your stories?

A: “Being in band and theater, I don’t have a lot of free time. I use Sundays and Wednesdays to write after school. Whenever I started [writing], I would sit in my ELA class and I would just draw it up when we were doing intro stuff. I would draw out what the layouts [of the story] would look like.”

Q: How do you plan on continuing your writing in the future?

A: “I plan to actually publish real, physical books. The second book I wrote is almost about my life because I think it’s really important to get what happened to me out there. I want to inform people about abuse and cancer. I wanted to give people stories that are like ‘I relate to that’ because that’s what I did and it really helped me. [I want to] give them a voice.”

Q: Do you ever hit writer’s block? How do you push through it?

A: “All the time. I sit there and I’m like ‘Dang, I really do not want to write today.’ But, it’s similar to working out, you’ve got to do it because if you don’t, you’re going to get super behind. That’s how I think about it; if I don’t do it today, I know I’m not going to be able to do it tomorrow. I can get it done now and not have to worry about it in the future. That’s much more rewarding than having to cram three chapters in one day, it’s not balancing.”

Q: Who or what inspired you to write?

A: “[My favorite author] Kathleen Glasgow. I read her book ‘How to Make Friends With the Dark‘ and it really helped me [with] what I was going through and I wanted to take that and do the same thing, give people a voice [and] make people feel like they have a place while they’re reading the story.”

Q: How have your peers supported you through your writing journey?

A: “My friends. They stay up with me on the phone, read my stuff to me and give me critiques while we’re on the call. It’s really cool, it’s like live feedback so I can see it from an outside perspective. They’re very supportive and they love what I do. [When the book is published] they all want copies for free and I promised them that.”

Q: What is the message you are hoping to put out there with your writing?

A: “No matter who you are, what’s happened to you, you’re not alone. Someone out there in the world has experienced similar situations. It’s never wrong to find ways to express how you feel.”