I still remember sitting at my kitchen table at 5 a.m. I stared at a blinking cursor on a blank screen. My coffee was getting cold, and my cat was judging me. I had a burning idea for a novel, but I didn’t know where to start. That was six years ago. Since then, I’ve […]
Three years ago, I was in a small apartment in southern Chile. I had just left a job in investment banking. I didn’t have a plan or a writing degree. But I felt a strong urge to write. Outside my window, the Andes mountains were hidden in thick clouds. I was teaching English to kids […]
I sat at my kitchen table in early 2019 with a cup of cold coffee. I had just read Brené Brown’s “Dare to Lead.” A wild dream hit me: I could write a book like this. I had the knowledge and stories. But, it turned out to be much harder than I thought. My dream […]
I sat at my kitchen table at 5 a.m. one Tuesday, staring at a blank Word document. My coffee was getting cold. My cursor blinked like a tiny heartbeat, waiting for me to do something brave. I had read Stephen King’s “On Writing” three times. I had notebooks full of scribbled ideas. But the gap […]
Three years ago, I was stuck in a dim office on Wall Street. I stared at spreadsheets that looked like rain on a windshield. I was making good money but felt empty inside. One night, I opened my laptop and typed a sentence about my childhood in India. That sentence led to a paragraph, then […]
I was nine years old in Mrs. Orr’s fourth-grade class. She gave me a task that changed my life. We were going on a two-week trip to Florida. She asked me to write every day in a diary. I wrote in that notebook everywhere we went. On the beach, in the car, and at rest […]
I spent three years on my first novel. I never finished it. The story was stuck in a folder, 47,000 words long, going nowhere. I blamed writer’s block and my schedule, but the real issue was I had no plan. Then I found James Thayer’s writing podcast. He showed how to write with before-and-after examples. […]
I stood in front of thirty high school students one Tuesday morning. They looked at me. I looked back. A kid in the third row asked, “Have you ever written a real book?” The room fell silent. I hadn’t, not yet. That question stayed with me for years. My journey to writing books was not […]
I once sat at my desk for three hours, staring at a cursor. Not a word was written. D.H. Lawrence said the pain of not writing was worse than writing itself. That night, I felt the same way. The blank screen was like a wall, and my ideas were on the other side. The next […]
I remember Jerry B. Jenkins saying he wrote over 200 books in 50 years. He’s famous for the Left Behind series. He told an interviewer that every book started with a simple plan. This kept him from feeling lost. If you dream of writing a book, you’re not alone. Millions have stories they want to […]
