Finn Thale

For a long time, I thought I’d stopped enjoying writing.

After decades of writing for a living, it had become something I did because someone needed a text, preferably by yesterday. There was always a brief, a deadline, another assignment. I could do the work. I just wasn’t sure I enjoyed it anymore.

I’d written for myself, too. I kept journals, and during the great blogging years, I had several blogs. Apparently, one wasn’t enough. But somehow, writing a book never entered the picture.

People who knew me well would occasionally ask why I didn’t write one.

Me? A book? What a strange suggestion. Books were written by proper writers. The big ones. I had no idea how people became those, but I assumed they knew something I didn’t.

Then, one evening, I had an idea.

It was supposed to be a short story, which seemed manageable. I could follow the idea for a little while and see where it went.

It outgrew that plan fairly quickly.

The characters began making decisions that needed consequences. Those consequences led to more questions, and answering them meant discovering more of the world. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was writing a book. By then, I wanted to know what happened too much to stop.

After all those years of writing to deadlines, I was having trouble putting the writing away.

That was probably the biggest surprise: how much I wanted to return to it. I would finish a scene and already be thinking about the next one. There were difficult passages, of course, and things I had to rethink. But I wanted to work them out. I cared about getting these people to wherever they were going, even when I hadn’t quite worked out where that was.

You might think finally writing a whole novel would settle the question of whether I was allowed to write one.

Have you ever finished something, thought you’d done it reasonably well, and then immediately started wondering whether you’d fooled yourself?

I’m familiar with that feeling.

My so-called impostor syndrome now lives behind bars, where it regularly demands to be released. Perhaps it’s just ordinary self-doubt with a more impressive name. Either way, finishing the manuscript hasn’t silenced it, and starting another book hasn’t persuaded it to retire.

Still, there are other questions I find more interesting.

The first manuscript is now with my editor, and I’ve started the second book. I keep thinking about what comes next for the characters. They’ve been changed by what happened, but they still have lives to lead and choices to make. I want to know what they’ll do with the possibilities in front of them, which mistakes they’ll repeat, and where they might surprise me.

The world keeps growing as I follow them. Places and histories that once sat somewhere in the background are becoming part of the story. There are people I want to understand better, including some whose version of events might be very different from everyone else’s.

I don’t have all the answers yet. That’s part of what makes me want to sit down and write.

I spent years thinking that writing had become a burden. Then an idea for a short story turned into a novel, and now I’m writing the next one.

I’m beginning to understand why those people kept asking.