Of Deciding To Write Instead of Doing Something Else

Dear world

I used to think I was born good at writing. In reality, I was simply better than most of the other kids in school, of which most of them had the unfair disadvantage of simply not caring, and it would be a long time before someone corrected the misunderstanding. 

It would be more accurate to say that I was born good at language. I was decent at the practical application of language, but far from good enough to sell books. If I could send one message to my younger self, it would be to teach him that his impatience and need to see results would ironically put those results farther back than if he would just put in the legwork.

My younger self would have snorted and gone back to just writing what he enjoyed.

I grew up in a household with a mother kind enough to read books to me and my sister before bedtime. I remember His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and various Danish fantasy works that I doubt many have heard of. I remember reading ahead in the books and correcting my mother when she missed a line of dialogue at a page change.

I felt like these worlds were laden with importance. Surely, this was where the meaning of everything converged: in a place where the strange and unlikely was artfully woven into sense and reason.

I must have been seventeen years old when I read The Name of the Wind. I was blown away. I never took myself for a romantic, but I suddenly learned that my personal greatest good was to feel the sensation of falling in love through lines on a piece of paper. More importantly I thought: I could do this. I could sit down, type out words until a story appeared, and then I could myself be responsible for others falling in love.

I have always felt compelled to make my own addition to whatever discipline was my passion of the month. I wanted to feel responsible. I have floundered between many such disciplines, each time insisting that I were to have some spotlight (though literal spotlight was the bane of my existence). I have programmed dumb games in Gamemaker, I have cut board games from cardboard, and I made my own ruleset for Monopoly. Once more mature, I happened to turn into both a half-decent singer-songwriter and a visual artist. Those I credit with drawing in the woman who would later become my wife. 

Of all these disciplines, writing struck me as the most whole. I could feasibly be both a musician and an artist in conjunction, resulting in something ultimate. A product of which I was in complete control, fulfilling every standard of quality I could imagine throwing at it. And I started writing.

In hindsight, my takeaway should have been that I would have made an excellent data engineer, a career path that would have left little up to chance.

But for reasons seeming arcane to me now--likely partly a wish to please my father--I started studying biochemistry at the university. All the while, I kept writing my story, hoping deep down that it would one day become a career.

My mistake is obvious to anyone who has succeeded in writing something good: Do not start out writing the big story that does everything you've ever dreamed of. It might turn out okay, but I promise you, it could be so much better. Instead, write small, inconsequential things, so that the big story reaches the heights it deserves once you get to it. Practice until you know how to tie the beginning of a story to its end, so it's not just a massive aggregation of many things you liked to write.

The first manuscript I completed had a lot of qualities, I think. It had winged poetry in the dynamics of its scenes, it had lofty points to make, and it aimed to tuck at seldom explored emotions. It also had little idea how to tie these things into the whole that was the raison d'être of the work. It meandered, struggling to find its pace, and while there was a sound logic to the moving of characters from one scene to the next, I forgot to make the progress and conclusions narratively satisfying. Maybe I am too hard on myself, but looking at it now, it does feel like it was more an aggregation of many things, than a working story.

I was blind to all this back then. I tried to get it published, without much luck. I kept improving the prose, never daring to attack the more difficult problems in the overall narrative.

Then, my father died of cancer at a far too young age. For better or worse, it made me lose faith in biochemistry (which I would likely never have had the focus for in the long run), switching to Comparative Literature, thinking that might be a defensible way to train myself into being a professional writer (it isn't).

I am not entirely sure when and why I gathered the courage to scrap the manuscript, admitting that it was only wasted effort if I didn't learn anything. I started over. I bit down my pride and started compiling advice from authors I respected. I condensed it into an approachable list of things that my manuscript needed to do. I kept all the good ideas, killed my darlings, and then wrote each new word with a strict voice in my ear, telling me that the product I ultimately wanted was more difficult to make than what my juvenile instincts gravitated towards.

I got far, all the while working a soul-draining job as a customer service representative.

Then my wife got a very rare variety of cancer and lost her job, not too many months apart. As she was receiving chemo therapy, and I was keeping our household together, walking the dog, and commuting to a job that kept getting worse, I was suddenly sick and tired of working on my big story.

I needed to do something snappy. Something gritty and dirty that radiated with the rage of someone stuck, in hopes that it would deflate some of my frustration.

The result was The God Anima, a dynamic romp that I churned out at a record pace. It didn't aim to be difficult, simply to get to the point. My wife was fortunately cured, albeit with some unfortunate complications.

So, The God Anima isn't the big story, though its certainly going to have sequels, provided it sees enough support. The big story will come later.

All in all, I am quite happy that I didn't decide to become a data engineer. I love writing. I love doing it so much that I am willing to sacrifice common sense for it. So while I should have done something else, there is no world in which I would have.

I will write more stories, however difficult it turns out to be.

If you want to help make it easier, please support the release of The God Anima. 

The e-book is now available on Amazon, and through various other platforms.

GET IT ON AMAZON: mybook.to/thegodanima

GET IT EVERYWHERE ELSE: books2read.com/thegodanima

Please spread the word and leave a review!

Paperback and hardback editions will follow soon. 

Thank you all for your attention; it is our time's most scarce commodity.

Much love

John