Ten Years of Beginning the Writing Journey

2020 is just around the corner. With it comes the inundation of posts about the past decade, the journeys people have been on, and the excitement of things to come. Since deciding to restart my blog coincided happily with the New Year, I figured I might as well hop onto that metaphorical train as well, and look back at the last ten years in my writing life.

This journey, for me, has always been one of beginnings. Of starts, stops and re-starting again.

At the top of the decade, I was halfway through secondary school, and at the height of my first serious bout of writing fervour. I was what would become the framework for my first novel when I should have been paying attention in class. It was all I could think about, and I always seemed to have a book in my hands. It may be the nostalgia colouring my memories, but I believe it was one of the most inspired points in my life. Perhaps that is just the blessings of a naive young mind that has yet to be hardened by the mundanity of adult life.

Reading and writing were the perfect distractions from school, and the pressures of teenage life - after all, who needed friends and a social circle when I had all the friends I needed in the characters on the pages in front of me?

Those years ended - they always do. After high school, I moved away and writing took a bit of a backseat to my first years of university. This life was new, it got busy, and I was just trying to keep my head above water. That year, I wrote the most music I ever had in my life - and not just for school. My novel may have been collecting dust, but my lyric book and my piano pieces were piling up.

Another city meant another pause in my writing life. After a pretty rough (dare I say disastrous) year in which my harddrive failed - writers, take this as a reminder to back up your work or use the cloud! - I felt stranded and more than a little hopeless at ever continuing my writing prospects. I sat on what I had left, mostly paper copies with hand-written edits that were nothing like the ones I had lost, for ages.

The winds of time tend to carry us forward to where we need to go, however, and another province later, I had begun anew. With a sudden increase in my free time, I dusted off the old papers and began what I've come to realize was the best possible process I could: rewriting.

Forget editing, it was time to take this framework, this idea, that I'd been building since I was thirteen and completely reforge it, as I had reforged myself. Of course, the advice had been said before - I had seen it on some corner of the internet or the other - that one should rewrite instead of edit. I couldn't understand why, until I started doing it. Rewriting also requires a level of rereading which allows you to catch mistakes you wouldn't have otherwise found - plot holes, continuity issues - while also enabling you to find the little connections you created subconsciously within your work and expand on them.

At this point, I had been staring at this veritable wall of writers' blocks for over a year, cemented together with the discouragement I felt at losing years of work. All of that began to melt away, brick by brick, as I took up the pen and began the story again. It breathed new life into me, and I, in turn, breathed that life into my characters, into my world and into my story. It gave it room to grow as I had grown, to flourish into something new that was a better reflection of this more mature, worldly self that I had become.

The journey never ends, but it has led me home - to where I am now. 2019 was by far the most successful year I've had in terms of my writing progress and my personal growth. I found inspiration, and motivation, which led me to new realms of possibility. I overcame doubts to open up about myself, my experiences, and what I hoped for in the future.

With this past year being the culmination of the decade, I think it's important to see how everything has come together. The foundation I laid in my teens never really washed away, leading to the beginning of a work that I'm happy and proud to be working on. The inspiration and motivation I found among excellent friends have turned into a new business venture that is our big project for next year. The trials that I faced made me stronger - each more so than the last - and a better writer. I thought, for a long time that I was just constantly beginning things, never finishing them, but if this decade has taught me anything, it's that all of those beginnings are just stops along the way to the final destination - one that I may not be able to see, but that I'll reach eventually. Though I suspect that when I reach it, I'll find it is just another start to another epic adventure.

Of course, this time of year is one of renewal, and though I'm not one for resolutions this piece would ring a little hollow if I didn't mention at least some goals for the next stages of this great journey I have put myself on. In the end, I think they're the same goals I've always had, but now I have a broader scope of projects to apply them to.

The first is always to grow. To become better than I was, and to develop new skills. This year I began running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for some friends. It's a new application of my writing and storytelling skills, one that I fell in love with almost instantly.

The second is to create. Between the podcasts I work on, the TTRPG content I've begun to create, and that same manuscript that has been reborn multiple times over ten years, this is going to be the year I begin completing things. My business partner (and one of my best friends) AJ and I have a lot in the works, and we can't wait to share it with the world.

This leads to the final goal: to inspire others. The whole reason I started this blog again, started putting myself and my ideas out there, is the hope that whatever platform I've built may be used to pay it forward. In a time where so much seeks to divide us, I hope that creativity and the road we all walk while making any form of art might remind us that we have the power to do good in the world.

You may feel like your journey is a constant state of beginnings that never bear fruit. Just remember that each new beginning is a new step down a winding, and ever-changing path. Look forward and press on - you never know who or what you'll encounter along the way.