Earlier this year I read a wonderful novel by M. L. Rio: If We Were Villains. I highly recommend giving it a read. The story in short is about students of a theatre academy specializing in Shakespeare. We come into the story as their last year here is about to start. The main topic is an obsession with Shakespeare and how their roles in plays are slowly merging with their roles in real life. In true Shakespeare fashion a plot-moving tragedy happens somewhere around the middle of the book (I won’t spoil anything here). I loved how the story was told. Reflective forewords before Acts, the reader in the skin of the main protagonist—not knowing more than he does, and the constant tension and mystery. All of this leads to a wonderful reading experience. It’s been some time since I sacrificed a few hours of sleep, just to read another chapter, but this book hooked me perfectly.
But all for that book. This essay is not a review or a summary of a book I’ve read. This essay is about how reading this book made me realize one crucial thing. It made me realize what I want to do in my life.
Since the time I remember, I was fascinated with language. With words. How you can use them, combine them with each other and create wonderful and meaningful sentences and from them, stories. When I’m listening to music, I’m always concentrating on the lyrics. On its metaphors, rhymes, expressions, and… stories. Even when I talk to people I once again want to look into them, find their pain points, their victories, theirs—yes—stories.
See a common theme? I’m obsessed with stories. Everywhere I go, I look for meaning, I look for a story. It may be one of the more optimistic explanations for my constantly overthinking brain. Maybe, I’m making up those weird unrealistic stories just because I generally love to do it, and what is a better inspiration for stories than my own life? My own pain points. This realization transformed the way I’m thinking about my thoughts. It made me calmer. Reassured me that, maybe, after all, I’m not that crazy. Or, maybe—in better words—I’m crazy in the right way.
So, I want to be a writer. A writer of fiction, to be precise. I want to look deep into things, study people, study myself, study the world, study langue, and then, combine all of those things into something unique, something beautiful. Into art. When I think about art, what I see is an ultimate way of communication. You’re using your brains to craft your expressions and lessons into something more than just plain words. Art for me is what makes us human. At a first glance, we have no reason to do art. It does not help us in any way. And yet, on a second glance, you realize, that everything is about art. Art is life, and life is art. They belong together.
Life imitates art. & Art imitates life.
I wonder, how my close friends and family members will react to this “coming out” of mine. I mean. I don’t plan to quit my perfectly started computer science career on a spot, of course. That would be dumb, but I will use this career and the resources I gain from it to feed my writing career. So once again, I will be that loner that spends hours in a room alone staring at a screen or a book. But guess I’m already reconciled with the fact that I will never have an immense social life and social circle. But I also never really cared about that. For a normal person, it may seem weird that a programmer is so interested in literature that he wants to create his own. But I don’t think it is weird at all. It makes perfect sense. I started doing programming because of an urge to create my own things. To have that proud moment when someone likes something I made, when something I made changed someone’s life for the better. And when you think about it, it’s completely the same with writing stories. Only instead of designing a database layer, you design a plot. Instead of writing classes, you write character arcs. Instead of files, you write chapters. It is not so different. Both are creative acts in one way or another. And that’s what I find so beautiful. It’s beautiful how in this world these two—at a first glance—such different things can have so much in common.
Also now, with slight hindsight, I’m able to reflect and explain better some of the activities I did as I was younger. I always enjoyed writing essays in school (and I was actually brutally good at that), I also enjoyed doing presentations, especially when I had a story to tell, and I loved telling poems. I loved all of this, but at that time, it was irrelevant. It was said to me that I’m that “technical type”, that I’ll go to some University, get an engineering degree, and then find a high-paying job in that field. And yes I probably will, I still see nothing wrong in a career path like this, but it’s not everything that life has in store for me. Not at all. The seed, the love for stories, was in me for my entire life, it just took some time to realize it. But now as I know about it, I shall water this seed as much as possible. And who knows? Maybe someday my stories will change so many lives that I will be able to actually make a living of that. That would be lovely.
So what is my plan? I want to wet my feet by writing some short stories. They will be inspired by my life so it will be easier to write them, and later this year I will start working on my first novel. I already have a slight idea of what I want it to be about but maybe in the next few weeks some new amazing inspiration will come that will change everything, who knows? The plan is to have the first draft done in early 2024. If you’re interested in my progress, then take in mind that I will post all my short stories in a Fiction section of this page, and a little later, I will also do progress updates on a novel itself in a Blog section. This means that this (Essays) section will stay on a more self-improvement and life optimization side of things.
And that was all I wanted to tell you today. Hope you have a wonderful day and see you soon.