Becoming an Author

When I began telling family and life-long friends that I was writing a book, most of them were not surprised. Apparently, it fit neatly into their perception of who I was.

After all, my mother pointed out, I do have a degree in English Literature. I have strong writing skills, as evidenced in my essays in school and the work I produced in the corporate world. I am passionate about stories. Obsessive, even. I spent my teenage years lost in the worlds of Harry Potter and Twilight and whatever fantasy book I could get my hands on.

Why wouldn’t I consider writing my own book?

Until recently, I truly didn’t think it was possible. Sure, I wrote, but the kind of writing I did was different. It was descriptive and analytical, but it wasn’t creative.

I had, at some point in my own mind, separated the common writers from the real authors, and firmly established that while I could write, I could never be an author. Authoring a work of fiction required real creativity. Authors were interesting in ways I could never be. They were true artists: inspired, full of genius, and capable of original ideas. I might technically have the skill to write well and the drive to work hard, but it didn’t matter.

Real authors were made of magic. I was not.

This was how, long ago, I justified giving up without even trying. I recently began to understand the real reason: I was afraid.

I was afraid of putting myself out there. I was afraid of my ideas being silly or stupid or weird. I was afraid of sharing work that would reveal my own desires and hopes and fears, because I was afraid of what people would think when they saw them. I was afraid of being vulnerable, of being judged as uninteresting, or uninspired, or unworthy.

What if I attempted to tap into the magic of true artistry, and everyone saw me fail? What if I bared my soul, and my soul wasn’t good enough?

I protected myself from disappointment and failure by not allowing myself to ever make the attempt. By not allowing myself to dream of what I could be. Of what I might want. Because I could not fail to achieve a dream that didn’t exist.

I hid that wisp of a dream behind carefully constructed walls. It was so small, so underdeveloped, that it was easy to forget. And forget I did.

Then the pandemic happened, and I quit my job of nine years and took a break to re-calibrate and recharge. Within a few weeks, I had reignited my forgotten passion for reading, and something changed. Perhaps it was the confidence earned through years of success in a challenging work environment. Maybe it was because I was in a transition period, and my mind was open to new possibilities and attuned to parts of myself I had neglected or forgotten. Perhaps it was simply a result of maturity.

Whatever the reason, during that time, something in my foundation shifted. A crack formed in those protective walls, and a drop of that unacknowledged dream seeped into the stream of my consciousness.

The voice of that dream whispered to me: You could do this, you know. You could be an author. For the first time in my life, I decided to listen. And each time I did, more of the dream escaped its hiding place.

At first, I kept it contained within myself. I mulled over the possibility. I considered how I might get started, if I ever decided to try. But as the weeks passed, the dream swelled until my mind was brimming with it, and then it began to spill out of me. I found myself whispering the words out loud to a real person: Maybe I could write a book.

One person became two. Two became three. Instead of laughing, they offered encouragement and support. And each time I let the voice of the dream speak for me, it grew louder, until it became overwhelming. Nagging. Inescapable.

Until the only way to quiet it was to accept that it wasn’t the dream’s voice I was hearing, but my own.

I did not decide to become an author. I became an author when I accepted that I had been one all along. And somehow, that acceptance transformed the fear of creating something bad into a challenge to create something I love.

So here I am, doing my very best to meet that challenge. The fear is still there, but it has been joined by giddy excitement and sheer determination and the deep understanding that I am doing what I am meant to do.

A year and a half ago, I committed to writing a book. I’m revising the third draft of that book now. I have zero doubts that I will finish it, publish it, and sometime soon, it will be in the hands of those people who believed I was an author. The people who saw the magic in me long before I saw it in myself.

And I can’t wait to show them they were right.