Hey everyone,
I’m not quite sure when and at what point that shift from “I also write books” to “I’m an author” happened but I’m pretty sure it coincided with the moment when I realized that I could write not just that one novel, but two, three, ten, twenty—and indeed, would.
I’ve written almost a dozen non-fiction books now but fiction was more of a challenge for me. The first one was a hard slog, as most of you already know, and for all the right reasons: The first novel was written because I needed to heal. It took me seven years not to write the novel, but to write one particular scene, and once I crossed that barrier, once I had emotionally freed myself from both the scarring of that trauma and the doubt that I’d ever be able to put it into words, I was flying.
The second one was written in a fraction of the time and with the third one, there is no difference between the fiction and the non-fiction. They’re both fun, they’re both natural, and they’re both instinctive.
But the journey here was not easy and that first book tested me, my husband, and our relationship massively. He came to hate the writing of that book (though he loves the book) immensely because every time I worked on it, I got depressed, sometimes to scarily severe points.
The reason I persevered and made it through to the other side was simple: I knew my why.
As Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods says so eloquently:
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be—an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and support myself through my words—was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.
Like Gaiman, I too have been keeping my eye on the mountain and saying no to a host of things that move me away from it, including the many freelancing assignments that would have been so easy to take, especially since returning to India.
I spent many years of my career learning how to write fast under deadline (I once reported and wrote a breaking news story for TIME in under two hours) and this skill has now paid off massively as I write these daily newsletters, work on my fiction, write my next non-fiction book, and finish up some blog posts.
When most authors talk about fast writing, they only talk of the payoff as more books written quickly. But there is a bigger payoff to writing daily, learning to write fast, and consistently practicing the Arse on Chair I’ve been talking about this week:
You build trust in your own ability to write.
Not just one book, but five books, ten books, twenty books.
That trust takes you from “I also write books” to “I’m an author.”
It sneaks up on you that moment, and when it does?
There’s nothing sweeter.
Cheers,
Natasha