For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.

Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.

After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:

1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.

2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

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So… What’s next?
Next is coming up with an idea for a ‘story worth telling’.
How is that done?
Unfortunately, that’s a tough question. Books on authoring get rather abstract at this point. In fact, things don’t really get back to what I would call … a ‘step-by-step’ approach again until they finally start talking about finding an agent. That’s well after your transcript is already 100% finished.

So, take a deep breath. Here is where we step into the scary unknown.

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Okay…
After most of my personal inner struggles were out of the way and all the dust seemed to settle, I was left with the lucid fact I wanted to write high fantasy. My goal had become ‘to complete a book I could enjoy writing and be proud of – publishers be damned!’ So I pressed onward.

Books on authoring typically claimed the next step for the aspiring writer was the tired old cliche: “Read, read, read”. Read fiction. Non-fiction. The phone book. The backs of cereal boxes. Everything.
Fair enough.

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I guess the first step is to declare that you do. “I want to be a writer.” There. Easy. Well … not so easy. The first thing the authors of most books about ‘becoming a professional writer’ try to do is scare you away from the very idea of becoming reclusive monsters like them, complete with horror stories of broken families, heartbreak, total ruin, nervous breakdowns, paltry incomes where they had to eat ramen every day for a month, and other frustrating situations. And if that fails to deter you, they still leave you faced with a tough, life-altering decision.

I actually decided I wanted to be a writer one day when I was mindlessly flipping through TV channels at my wife’s parent’s house. (For the record, I almost never watch TV.) But anyway, there was this interview with J.K. Rowling on. It was the day before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was going to hit the shelves. A large chunk of the world was trembling in drooly anticipation for their copies. I remember there being a … let’s call it a ‘suspicious modesty’ … about her as she bounced from question to question. But the interviewer was incredibly savvy at slipping in difficult questions making them seem like innocent follow-ups using the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique, and, before she knew it, Rowling was transported back to her past. She found herself talking about her beginnings; writing the first Harry Potter book on a typewriter in an upstairs apartment, weeks away from being evicted. About how she came up with the idea for the book randomly on a train ride one day, with just a name at the tip of her tongue: “Harry”, and a vague idea that he would attend some kind of magic school. About how the rest of the story came with a lot of hard work and conviction. It was amazing. Then, I found myself wondering how many times I had dismissed my own ‘Harry’ ideas. And, most importantly, I remember thinking, “If she can do it, why can’t I?”.

But then a Deathly follow-up question creeped up on me. And it was: “What do -I- have to offer to the world of literature?”

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When I was little, I used to read and write. Not in the sense of “I could read and I could write”, but more along the lines of “I did read books on a regular basis and wrote original stories, too”. I remember reading serial detective novels all the time, and trying to tackle The Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes when I was eight (but found it was too complicated). I remember getting lots of free pizza through the Book-It! program. I remember actually thumbing though the dictionary and thesaurus during breaks in second grade. I remember being able to type quickly without looking at the keyboard by the middle of third grade, and typing rather complicated multi-page stories by the time I was ten years old on Word Perfect in DOS 3.1. I remember the first time I got a return of zero mistakes on a spell check. I remember researching Greek and Roman mythology in dusty old encyclopedias with tannish-brown stains all over them. I even managed to get a poem into a minor publication for young authors by fourth grade, and the town newspaper also printed it.

But, somewhere along the line, I decided video games, anime, music, comic books, and movies were better ways to spend my time. I became convinced that books were plagued with long-winded explanations that never seemed to get to the point.
Maybe it was hormonal.

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I am currently in the middle of writing a book. Or ‘middling’ – as it is sometimes called in the writing world. This is the point of the book writing process where you see a nightmarish landscape of jagged, foreboding mountains laid out before you during a swirling storm, and you must traverse all of it if you ever wish to see, somewhere on the horizon, the fabled, glimmering, heavenly, yet taunting, End of the Book. This is the point where you realise you will indeed pay with your sweat, blood, and tears – just like all of those authors whose advice you read forewarned – before finally making it to the end of the story, only to be greeted by an unforgiving ‘final editing process ogre’ holding his stopwatch and tapping his massive foot, demanding even more of your time and patience.

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