I Wrote A 100K Word Novel. Here’s All I Learned About Writing, Myself, And Autofiction

It’s everything I never knew or felt before…

Photo by Shelby Miller on Unsplash

Every decade or so, I find myself taking on a new challenge. In my 20s I decided to become a software engineer, and in 2019 in my 30s, nudged by circumstances and a healthy dose of curiosity, decided to take a serious crack at writing. Not just articles or blogs, but a novel.

Roughly a year later, in the spring of 2020, I finished the first draft, and will forever consider it my “pandemic success story”. While half the world was stockpiling bog-rolls, I was piling pages upon pages, which incidentally may or may not eventually become bog-rolls themselves, but that is entirely beside the point. Success, while some might argue, is primarily personal, and writing this book, this novel, for me, was a personal endeavour. The prospect of it becoming a New York Times bestseller, a straight to Amazon mediocrity, or an obscure limited edition of something that only my friends and that one weird person ever bought, was mostly (but not entirely) irrelevant, and three years later, it still is.

What was infinitely less irrelevant though, was my journey as a person, writer, and character throughout the writing process. Reflecting upon it all, over the last couple of years, I realised there…