By B. Fox
~ I will write a story when I have something to say. ~
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been in love with stories—stories and characters. I don’t remember everything, but according to my parents, I knew entire children’s books by heart. I was also obsessed with movies. I am one of those people who can watch the same movie over and over again, and never grow tired of it. I knew the dialogues of so many movies, and I can still remember most of them now.
At a certain age, every kid dreams about Hollywood. I was no exception. Most people see actors as the stars of the show, and so that’s what they want to be when they grow up. But I thought that the ones behind the stories were the real big shots. And for a while, I dreamed of becoming one of those. A filmmaker! What an amazing thing that would be, I thought.
As I grew up, that dream started to fade away. We outgrow our childhood dreams so quickly. During my teenage years, I kept enjoying books and movies, but I never considered being a writer myself. By then, I honestly thought it was a loser’s job. “Go where the money is,” is what everybody tells you. So I did what I thought I wanted to do. I studied Economics and tried to go in that direction. I graduated and worked in that field for a very short while. It didn’t feel right though. That wasn’t me. And yet, I didn’t know what my thing was.
I was utterly lost during my twenties, and one of the ways to cope was fiction. I stumbled across my favorite book at age 23: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. That book made me fall in love with literature in a completely different way. When I finished the last page, there were so many questions in my head. I wanted to know how the story continued, and what happened to the characters I had become so invested in. And that’s when I discovered the world of fanfiction. Yes, it’s okay, you can laugh at that. Apparently, there were quite a few people out there who, just like me, were eager to know what happened after the end. I read all the fanfics written for The Book Thief, but none of the storylines I found there really satisfied me. So I thought, if no one is writing the ending I want to read, I’ll have to write it myself. And that’s when it happened. I fell in love with writing. It was so beautiful, and it came so easily. I wondered if I could ever write something of my own. I felt an itch at that moment. I wanted to write, but I had no original ideas, not even a clue. And so I promised myself that I would write a story when I had something to say.
In the meantime, I got busy doing the next best thing. During the course of the following years, I wrote seven different pieces of fanfiction for different books/movies. They were such a great escape from reality. I got so invested in that, I even wrote stories while I was supposed to be working at my office. My last piece became viral. I had amazing feedback. People were all over me, asking me to post the next chapter and the next. It filled me with a sense of power and satisfaction I have never felt before. My words could create worlds and make other people feel the same way I felt when I read my favorite books and watched my favorite movies. And I wondered for the second time in my life, if I had what it takes to write a book of my own.
Only later did I realize that all those years that I had always thought of as inproductive were actually the one thing that put me on my writing path, because they gave me something to write about. I was 30 when Paper Castles took shape in my mind. The scenes came together, and suddenly, I had my first original storyline. And that’s when I knew I could pull it off. I started writing the first chapter shortly before the pandemic broke out. It proved to be an excellent time. Being locked at home with nothing else to do, I finally had the chance to put my everything into this story that seemed to have come to me out of the blue.
Two years later, here I am. Paper Castles has had more success than I could ever have dreamed of. Now I’m almost halfway into my second book, and if there’s one thing I’ve finally realized, it’s this: I know I don’t want to do anything else with my time. I want to spend my days dreaming, breathing life into characters, and creating stories people can fall in love with. I want to be busy writing your next favorite book.
