How I came up with my first novel

I switched my career every year, invested a lot of borrowed money in stupid things, got married, lived a penny-less life together with my wife, and came out with a full-length fiction. And now I just realized that my real challenge is yet to begin. This is my story so far as an aspiring writer who thinks that his creation is worth reading like any other writer.

There are many regrets in life, especially when you invest your precious time (money is nothing if compared) for something that is ultimately designed to fail. There was a time in my life when I used to think I was always right without even realizing that I could ever be wrong until my decisions, on a wholesale, kicked my balls so hard that I realized I had failed. So I had to settle to find a boss to work with after losing all the money and trust that I had borrowed from different people, including my mom. Trust me! Working for someone in a developing country is more challenging than being unemployed, especially when you know a thing or two about rights, freedom, exploitation, and politics. You get exploited here no matter what, and if you can’t handle it, someone else will get exploited in that place. There are many unemployed smart people here ready to exchange their freedom for a sum of money, only enough to fulfill their basic needs. Life went on as I was switching to different jobs every year, and one day, I thought I needed to focus more on writing for myself than focusing on how to escape the exploitation at work.

Things, however, were not like this in the beginning. I belong to a comfortable family that financed my study in the UK. I never thought about settling there because I never had to look after anyone with my earnings, unlike most people from my place. Instead, I opted to come back and invest in a few things that I thought would work. And the story that far happened.

Let’s get to the main event now. I have been writing short stories, lyrics, essays, and articles for a long time, and I was always dead afraid to publish them or show them to anyone except for a few people who always supported me (my wife comes at the top in that case). It gives me a laugh now whenever I read my past creations from a decade back, and when I talk about those with my wife, I get more surprised to see her ‘I know’ gesture. But this is how you develop yourself – You first start with a very laughable story. 

I still don’t know if my best work is not laughable because I know a few people like Tommy Wiseau, who do not give up at any cost, though they worth a shit. A good writer is a good reader, but I collected my ideas from films worldwide. I watched many good films and many bad films to know what to do and what not to do. And I read a lot of books too. I kept writing and kept avoiding other pressures – from a full-time job and from life itself. Finally, I came up with a non-linear Guy Ritchie-style short story that I liked more than all the other stories (of whom, most are incomplete). Writing for myself was neither making me famous nor rewarding me anything, but I kept writing. And one day, I decided to make a novel out of one of my favorite stories.

The concept was fine, but a lot of things needed a fix and a lot of research. When you do not like poorly researched concepts and the concepts that make no sense, you don’t have a discount to create a similar thing. So I did what a great writer once told “Writing is not a difficult task. All you need to do is to sit in front of a typewriter and bleed.” I sat in front of my laptop and bled for a year to develop a three thousand words long story with only five characters to a full-length novel with more than a hundred characters. I took financial problems, career worries, and other problems, compiled them together, and put them in one box. I put my passion in the other box where I poured my experiences of different times and places through different characters. It took months and several repeated reads to come up with a manuscript finally. I designed the cover myself and edited the whole story because I could never afford one.

“WOW,” my wife looked at me and shouted after she finished reading my first ever full-length fiction. But I still doubt if that expression was similar to the one that had come from a decade ago. I would only know about it if my creation would reach a lot of readers. And attracting a lot of readers is even a bigger deal. My book is available on Amazon, and I have named it ‘One Thousand Blatant Dreams.’

If you want to know more, you can click the picture below and surf a few pages. It is not the smartest compilation of words as I know, but I believe; the story and characters will touch the reader for sure.