I’ve always loved creating, and imagining worlds and writing stories was an important part of my childhood. I’ve also always loved reading, and I think that often comes first. When I was little, I’d spend almost every Saturday morning with Dad and my brother at the beach, then in Manly library, trying not to drip wet hair all over the precious books. But it wasn’t until August of 2011 that I properly made a decision to write a novel. According to my journal (turns out those things come in handy sometimes!), there seemed to be a few major things that influenced this decision.
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My environment. At the time, I was doing an internship at Random House, in Auckland, New Zealand. I was working with marketing and publicity, and each day I was exposed to more and more of the publishing process. This helped me see writing as a possible career.
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Beautiful writing. I had just read Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way and it was written beautifully and in a way I aspired to write. I compared it to one of my other all-time favourite books, The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster. This kind of writing was my ‘aspirational, long-term goal’.
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Good storytelling. While working at Random House I had the pleasure of meeting Lauren Kate and her husband, and helping to promote Passion, her latest novel at the time. While I liked the storyline of Passion, and it’s exactly the kind of book I loved reading in my teenage years, the most inspiring thing about it, for me, was that it was ‘achievable’ writing. I thought that I would be able to write something to that same standard, or hopefully better. This kind of writing was my ‘realistic, attainable goal’.
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Practical advice. I was reading Stephen King’s On Writing, a book that has such excellent advice that I have two copies! I’m also dedicated a blog post to it, which will be up in the next few days. He’s the kind of writer that has realistic expectations, because he really did come from nowhere, and rejection letter after rejection letter, to become one of the most prolific writers in the market. Also, I love character building but am terrible at plotting, and somewhere in all of his advice, he says that you don’t need a plot; you can just let your characters play out your story. This was the permission I needed to decide to write a novel.
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Passion. I did very well in school. So much so, that I could have picked almost any course I wanted to when it came to university. I picked Creative Arts, because the major was Creative Writing. This is something I remind myself of frequently – I could have done ‘anything’, and I chose writing. Since high school, it’s been my passion. It’s been the thing that I would wake up at 5am to do, that I would, every year, promise myself I would do more of because it made me happy. Anything that you love that much, is definitely worthy of making a career out of, I think.
It would be another year before I began working seriously on my novel (you can read about what inspired me to start writing Children of the Solstice here), but I think it’s a bit of a relief to find that a period in my life during which I often felt a little bit lost and drifting, while everyone around me seemed to be getting full-time jobs and earning all the money (don’t we all feel like that, all the time?), was actually the period in my life where I made a decision that lead me to where I am today, following my dreams and all that gooey stuff. My younger, journalling self offers some wise words as well, which I think any ‘aspiring author’ could do to remember: “no matter how few copies I sell, or how little money I get, I’ll be elated [if I publish a novel]. It will be one of my biggest achievements, ever. This thought makes me excited.”
Samantha Todd 