Don't Hold Your Breath for It, Breathe It into Life.

So many people will say that you can’t before you even begin. It’s too hard, too unlikely. The odds are against you. They don’t say to give up on your dreams, just put them to the side. They told me I could be a writer, but it might have to only be on the weekends. It was more important to find a job that pays the bills.

Pessimism is like a strong cloud that blocks the rays of youthful optimism, and I gave up on finding a writing job before I had even tried to find one. I took a job on the other side of the world instead. Fresh out of college, traveling seemed like the greatest opportunity, second only to becoming an author. I landed in South Korea with hopes, dreams, and a teaching contract, but it felt like something was missing. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I want to preface with the fact that any opportunity has rewards and challenges.

Initially, although writing became my dream, I was lost in the splendor of exploring a new country. It was 2023, and I was 22 and so far removed from anything that had ever worried me. The world was at my fingertips, and although moving across the world may have seemed like great inspiration, I didn’t write a word. I didn’t think I had anything to say. I kept the words of the doubters close to me. They were my excuse for not trying.

There was so much noise in the US, preventing me from thinking straight. Alone, in Korea, I could think. I could breathe for a moment. I was content with that for a while, feeling calm and relaxed, exploring new lands. But slowly that quiet began to feel loud. Teaching had begun to feel like a performance, like I was constantly onstage. I began to feel the emptiness of my life there. Despite it being an English academy, none of the teachers spoke fluent English (save for one who the other teachers forced out, but that’s a different story). So I called my family constantly not only because I missed them terribly, but because it was only through phone calls home that I could use the full extent of my vocabulary and express all of my feelings properly. The English language, which I studied in school and always claimed to cherish through stories and words, felt suddenly far away from me.

That isn’t to say that living abroad wasn’t a great opportunity, or that I expected everyone to speak perfect English in a homogenous country. But these conditions are what drove me two years ago to find what is driving me now once again.

Having studied English literature in university, I had fallen into a pretty massive reading slump upon graduating. For just over a year, I had been unable to read anything, the hobby too reminiscent of a chore or schoolwork. It happened rather randomly. I found a woman on Instagram who was talking about a book she was writing. It had pirates and dragons and warlocks and vampires, and I felt thrust back into fantasy worlds that I had once loved just through her teasers. But as her book wasn’t out yet, there was a hole where that interest was. So I downloaded a popular fantasy book, one whose love interest was being raved about online, in the hopes that I would finally be able to finish a book I started. And then it was done. I fell back into the madness of reading.

It felt very abrupt, suddenly going from reading nothing at all for a year to reading forty books in five months, but I couldn’t stop. Worlds were opened to me. My imagination was flourishing. I was suddenly so full of images and ideas. I wrote for the first time in years something that wasn’t an analytical essay, something I had never written before: fanfiction. It was something that I had always read (even during my slump), but never thought to try to write. I wrote three fanfics, two based on the same series, and I didn’t think that much would come of them. In fact, it was my intention for them to be only three or four chapters in length. But what poured out of me was three novel-length pieces, each upwards of 50,000 words.

To my complete surprise (which I’m aware sounds modest in a lame way), people enjoyed my writing. I received unbelievable sweet messages and feedback, and many people waited for each next chapter, feeding my confidence (and my ego). The skill I had thought I had lost was regained, and I became unlimited. It didn’t seem like as much of a leap to write something of my own. I had an idea of a novel when I was in high school, and the story still lived inside me. So I picked up a batch of sticky notes and outlined the old novel idea on my wall.

Unlike the fanfictions, writing a fantasy novel was exceedingly difficult and terrifying, though thrilling at the same time. To put it simply, I had no idea what to do. With fanfiction, the characters were already there for me to use. I could be clever and draw parallels and focus on maintaining their characterizations, but there was nothing for me to create, not really. For much of 2024, I struggled to toil through scene after scene with nothing feeling like it was coming together. I wrote short stories in the meantime, each one feeling easy to write, like slipping into sleep. But my novel felt the opposite. Earnest Hemingway said that “[t]here is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I think he was wrong. I don’t think writing feels like bleeding at all. I think it feels like screaming. Cathartic and wild. Terrifying and exhilarating. To write what one truly wants is as freeing as finally getting to scream.

Philosophy aside, my novel wouldn’t come to me. It had lost itself in the mazes of my mind. In October of 2024, I decided to change tactics. I started earlier on my timeline, creating a prequel book to what I had been trying to write before. I wanted to allow my characters to grow before they were introduced, to let them breathe. The prequel for them was a lot like my trip abroad. I have always maintained that the characters felt alive to me, that they would often stubbornly disobey me and act not how I wanted them to. In the prequel, they had room to grow into the plot. I thought it would be a novella, but as with most things I write, it became exceedingly long. On December 1st, at the very end of NaNoWriMo, I finished that novel. I wanted to feel overjoyed, and I thought it would feel glorious, but I was on a redeye from Seoul back to the US, and it was a miserable 15 hour flight. Instead, it felt a little anticlimactic, and I was certain that the story would need a lot of editing, but it was done. Still, I can’t believe that it’s done. A first draft. Something I wasn’t sure I could do. It had been my resolution for 2024 to write a first draft even though it happened for a completely different book.

My resolution for 2025 is to finish the first draft of the main story, the one that has been swimming around in my head for over ten years. It’s scary to be within grasp of what you’ve always wanted to do. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can almost see it. The book deal. The ability to just do this forever. To do what I love for a job instead of trying to find time to write. But there’s obstacles to that vision. I am about to move back to the US. Moving across the world aside, I have to find a whole new job and living situation. I had wanted to complete my draft before I moved back, but I worry I’m running out of time.

My goal, my resolution, was to finish the draft so that I can start editing both stories at the same time. Then my 2025 would become about editing my story and getting it ready for publication. That’s what I thought my resolution would be. I realize as I write this now that I should be enjoying this more. There is so much doubt to writing, so many things I think I could never compare to. I have been scared to read other stories on Vocal Media for fear that I will realize I will never be able to measure up to the quality and depth of the writing. Afterall, wouldn’t the worst fear be finding out that you’re not good at your dream? My best writing has come when I felt relaxed, and when I simply wanted to let the story create itself. I’ve tried too hard to turn writing into a formula, an equation for me to solve. But I am no mathematician. I am a storyteller.

Perhaps my story must breathe. I am not sure in what way I would make that happen. I let the characters breathe in a prequel so that they could develop. Perhaps I need to rid myself of my rigid timeline so that the story can find its own arch.

There’s so much writing to be done and too little time in the day to let myself be stressed by it. I wish to write poetry and short stories. I wish to enter every writing challenge so that I may write in genres and about topics I would have never considered. I want to write about everything I love and everything that makes me cry. I want to write every second I’m alive. There’s so much to be said and too much doubt in the way.

My resolution and my goal remain. I hope you all get to meet Nova and Alexander one day. It would make it all worth it. I wish to complete my book and work on editing in 2025. But I need to allow myself to relax in order to do so. How can a story breathe within a clenched fist?

Maybe it all is unattainable. Maybe my family is right. It’s too hard. Almost no one makes it. But what if I did? Isn’t that the only question that matters?