I’ve been writing a novel for the last four years…and for someone who is used to doing everything well, this experience is kicking my butt but in the most fulfilling way!
My earliest memory of writing was when I was maybe seven years old? The homework that week was to do a book report and I chose Cinderella. I waited until the night before. And I didn’t write a book report. I didn’t know what to do so I just copied the entire text and handed it in.
I wasn’t trying to steal, I swear, but I was lost, English wasn’t my first language, I wasn’t a believer of school, and I really had no concept of what a book report was. Over the years, I kept wondering why I was never caught by the book police!
During my teenage years or even in my twenties, I wasn’t really a writer then either. Reading fiction was a bit of an escape back then when I allowed myself the time to relax and let my mind to sink into others’ worlds. I wrote other stuff, for sure, like business plans and contracts. Were they creative works? If one counted the imaginations of how my businesses would succeed within a certain number of years, then yes, I was very creative indeed, ha. 🙂
Once I started my online businesses, I got into blogging and discovered I had a lot to say about creativity and entrepreneurship. I gave away a lot of great advice. As I went about healing myself over the years though, the words and the impulses to spread knowledge faded away. I had fewer things to say. I turned inward.
When I turned inward, I found my true self, and now I’m turning my true self into the heroine of a fictional series. Books, television, and films. Eeeeeeeeeeek!!!! 😀
In the beginning, I was really lost! I must have written maybe 750,000 words, maybe even a million by now if I counted all the notebooks and loose pages I have everywhere. Though I was lost, I kept wading through the desert, and at the right times, I met teachers that turned on the lights for me. The downloads from my higher self came, too, sometimes sparsely, sometimes in a rush.
After four years of wandering in the unknown, I had thought I was supposed to find a readily formed path for me to walk. Looking back, I realized there was no pre–paved path. I had to build the road one brick at a time and it only appears like a road if I looked behind me.
And that is precisely the romance I feel with writing. Of turning nothing in something…lots of somethings! There is no map. There are only beautiful messes and explosions.
The writing process is curiously fascinating to me. Like, how do authors do it? How do they exercise their genius so brilliantly? Writing is not something I do well yet but I’m having so much fun playing with my abilities and imagination.
Before, writing was a means for me to communicate and to do business. But now, it is a romance I have with myself.
What is so intriguing to me is the emotional ups and downs of this novel–writing process. Aside from learning actual writing techniques and the components of a novel, what I find thrilling is nurturing the seed of the story that I always had within me.
If I water it a little every day and tend to the soil of this creative garden, I find that my work starts to have a life of its own. Books can write themselves if we allow it.
Writers will admit they spend a lot of time crying over their characters as they write and it’s no different for me. It’s taken so many years to write my novel because I spent most of the time crying about my own character development. It was like I had to go through and heal those exact things before I could authentically talk about it in my book, even if it was fictional. For me, writing this book and healing myself was linked and I couldn’t address one without the other.
A few years ago, when I used to get spirit guide readings, I remember the reader told me that my guides said I didn’t have the storyteller archetype within me. They (well, through her) also said I didn’t have the lover archetype either. That reading really struck (and plagued) me for years because essentially the universe told me I had no born destiny in these areas.
Even with their (well, again, her) words echoing through my inner chambers, my heart kept returning time and again to this blissful love I was cultivating inside. My heart also kept prompting me to take action on making me come alive through this fictional character. I must birth myself. Those messages couldn’t stop me and my inner promptings showed me that that advice was incorrect. I wonder if I was fed certain intuitive guidance so that I could reveal my secrets my way and in my own timing.
My heart is just drunk with this creative love affair and there’s never been a more magical time for me and for all of us to make our dreams come true. And that is a kind of heaven that I want to share with you.
La la la!
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