I never wanted to be a writer. I don’t think I ever wasted a thought on it at all while growing up, so why do I want to now? I never wrote anything substantial on my free time. I just played games and studied. At college I studied political science because I was curious, so I guess I wasn’t totally avert to reading and writing…

Life pushed me to become a writer.

At the last year of my Masters program I started having trouble sleeping. I’d be up all night thinking what I’d do after graduating. I didn’t want to be a teacher or do research, so what other options did I have?

I made a list what I could possibly do and writing was one of them, at least I wanted to give it a shot. After finishing my studies I spent 6 months in Cambodia as a volunteer. I saw this as buying time and I wrote a novel on my spare time. It was so easy, it was a hero’s journey with worldbuilding and everything and I ended up with a 100 000 word manuscript. That seemed to seal the deal; that’s what I was gonna do.

But when things come easy at first you get really disappointed when things get hard, which was the case from here on out. I worked hard to understand my craft and I have a pile of unfinished novels to prove it. I was under the delusion that I could finish them when I got better, but you can’t write a novel unless you try finish one, no matter how bad it end up.

I was way to ambitious too. Writing a novel is not gonna happen when you don’t have the skill to back it up. I don’t know how I managed to write my 100 000 word manuscript when I did. I haven’t returned to it yet, maybe it’s awful but finishing is an accomplishment also. What I had to do was start smaller. Flash fiction was the key, 1k words, and it took many years before I managed to work my way up to a 5-6000 manuscript.

I wasted a lot of time trying to write those novels only to abandon them…

I am now at around 20 000 words and I’m slowly climbing my way higher, grasping the complexity that is writing a novel. I’ll get there eventually and then I can finish my pile of failures and never look back.