What I learned from my first novel.
Writing is a career that I have been told is not promising and convinced out of many times before. I am not ashamed to admit that society made me feel like there were no opportunities for me in the writing world, that I had pursued something that would offer me money, success and a grounded career path. The problem is, is that no matter how many times I tried to pursue this life, it never sat right. I was either miserable and pushed everyone away or I completely shut down and pushed myself away. This life that everyone was wanting me to live was not the life for me. I understood that having a solid job with a predictable income was important to financially survive in the money world that we are living in today, but I could not justify risking my happiness for a consistent paycheck.
So… I wrote my first novel.
This novel was not planned out. I did not take a writer’s workbook and sketch out what I wanted to happen or what the characters were going to be like. I had the premise in my mind and I just wrote, creating the story, finding new answers, every time I sat down and opened the Word document. I had an idea of how I wanted the story to end, and by the time I got there it had completely changed. However, at that moment, it didn’t matter, because I was writing. I didn’t tell anyone that I was writing a novel, I just wrote. I woke up earlier each morning and would type away for thirty minutes in the morning’s darkness. Before the sun rose, before the house bustled into its daily routine, I wrote. I could say that it was the best thirty minutes of my day, but that isn’t giving the time justice. It was the happiest thirty minutes of my day. I was finally feeling like myself again like this is where I belonged. It was. It is.
When I was twelve years old, I decided I was going to write a children’s story, I still have it somewhere in my pile of unfinished projects. I looked up how to publish a book, how to send it to a publishing house, what solicited and unsolicited meant, and how to write a cover letter. I was twelve years old; I didn’t see that as a sign of what I was supposed to do with my life until twelve years later. What twelve-year-old learns the ins and outs of publishing a manuscript? Not many. My manuscript was declined, repeatedly, but I didn’t stop trying for a solid year. I continued to write and felt liberated when I was putting words to a piece of paper. I saved up my hard-earned babysitting money, bought myself my own computer, just so I could write my stories in my own space, with my own piece of equipment. HELLO! HOW COULD I NOT SEE THIS AS A SIGN? I digress.
By the time high school came to an end, the computer was used less and less for writing and more for social interactions. I was starting to see how unrealistic my dreams were, as teachers were showing me all the different career paths that were promising in my future, that would offer a solid groundwork and financial stability. I was unconsciously being convinced that my dreams were unrealistic and that my goals of becoming a writer were out the window because that was no way to make a living. And for almost a decade, I never wrote. I never created a story or thought of a great plotline. That young twelve-year-old girl who had the dream of holding her own published book in her hands was buried under social pressures and obligations. That’s when I started to become uneasy when I was miserable, and I didn’t feel like myself until the day that I started writing my first published novel.
I won’t take all the credit for my self-development, although I learned a lot of stuff on my own, there was a decent amount of therapy involved in the whole ordeal, of finding myself again and what I really wanted to get out of life. But … I published my first novel. I held it in my hands for the first time in January 2020, that little twelve-year-old girl, whose dreams I had buried was starting to shine through the cracks.
So … what did I learn from my first novel?
I learned that we cannot hold ourselves back from our true potential. That our dreams in life, are not just dreams but can become a reality. That there is more to life than paying bills, that true happiness surpasses any form of riches.
I also learned that for the second novel there will be more of a plan, a sketch for how the novel will take place because I don’t have to find myself anymore when I open the Word document and start typing, I’m here, I’m awake and I’m alive.
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