Do you count as a real writer if you don’t write every day?
Redefining what it means to own your writer identity.
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I started writing my first proper novel in Spring 2020.
(I say “proper” because I’d made a fair old stab at writing books before in my teenage years, but like so many things Teen Dave started, they were never completed).
The pandemic had just kicked off in earnest. Everything was shut. We could only leave the house once a day for a quick walk around the village with the dogs.
It all feels like a fever dream now.
I had very little to do at the time, so naturally, I tried to fill my days with new projects.
Most were deliberate time-wasters. Some were more useful.
One of those projects was born from a question I posed to my wife one evening while we were watching a movie: “Do you think I could write a fantasy novel?”
She said yes (though she probably just wanted me to stop talking).
So, teeming with optimism, I dove headlong into my first full-length book. It was to be a fantasy story for teenagers in the vein of Narnia or Harry Potter, inspired by the landscape and mythology of Northern Ireland where my wife and I live.
Magic. Monsters. Sword fights. Giant armies battling through burning cities.
Young heroes taking on shadowy villains.
It was all on the cards.
I tore through the first few chapters with ease, showing up every day, driving the story forward. I hadn’t written fiction in years and I’d never written it as a full-blown adult, so the experience was thrilling in the early days.
Then, I missed a day of writing.
And another.
And a few more.
Soon, my writing process became a fitful mish-mash of energised creative bursts and apathetic, half-hearted spells at my keyboard.
I might’ve spent a week hammering out thousands of words, and then spend the next week barely looking at my manuscript.
I did manage to finish my first draft in the end, but it took over a year to complete. For context, that’s about four times as long as it takes me now.
Why?
Because I had no rhythm. No process. No consistency baked into my approach.
I showed up on the days I felt like showing up and just didn’t bother opening the document when I wasn’t “feeling it”.
The story has a happy ending, of course, because that scatterbrained manuscript eventually became my debut novel, The Soulburn Talisman, after years of redrafting and publication pathway exploration.
But writing the first version of the story almost derailed my entire career as an author, right then and there.
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