I Published My First Book. Does Anybody Care? I Do!

I have just published my first book, The Ant Who Chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Now, before you think this is another post from someone trying to sell you a book, relax. I’m not here to convince you to buy it. I want to talk about something else: the experience of actually writing one, because, to my surprise, I discovered how much fun it can be.

I’m used to writing research papers, and my goodness, what a straitjacket that is! Everything has to follow a structure, every statement needs to be supported, and you have to choose your words carefully to fit the conventions of academic writing. Which is fine, of course, research has its purpose, but creative writing is a completely different world. Suddenly, I could invent characters, situations and conversations, and let my imagination go wherever it wanted.

What I particularly enjoyed was creating the dialogues. I would sit down with an idea of what two characters might say to each other, and somehow the conversation would develop in directions I hadn’t planned. One character would say something, another would respond, and before I knew it, I was following a conversation that seemed to have a life of its own. Sometimes I would even laugh at something one of them said, which is rather ridiculous when you think about it. I was laughing at a joke I had invented myself! Is that normal? I have no idea, but I loved it.

And then something even stranger happened. A friend who had read the book started talking to me about one of the characters. He had opinions about him, about his personality, what he said and how he behaved. And I remember thinking, hang on a minute, a few months ago this character didn’t exist! He was literally inside my head. Nobody knew him, he had no voice, no personality, no history, and now here was a real person discussing him with me as though we both knew him. Isn’t that extraordinary? You create something out of nothing, and suddenly it becomes part of somebody else’s imagination.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun. There were moments when I was sick of reading the same pages, when I changed a sentence only to decide the following day that the original was better, and when I wondered whether I would ever finish. Writing, editing, correcting and rewriting can become exhausting, especially when you start noticing mistakes in passages you’ve already read twenty times. But then a dialogue would work, a character would surprise me, or I would suddenly find exactly the right words for something, and all the frustration would disappear. I would remember why I had started in the first place.

When I finally finished, I found myself thinking about what it actually means to succeed at something like this. We are so used to measuring success in terms of money, recognition or other people’s approval that we sometimes forget to ask a much simpler question: did I enjoy doing it? Of course, I would love thousands of people to read my book. I’d be delighted if they laughed at some of the conversations, liked the characters or found something meaningful in the story. But even if only a handful of people read it, I would still be happy that I wrote it. I created something that didn’t exist before, learned something new, challenged myself and, perhaps most importantly, finished something I had started. For me, that already feels like a success.

I think we sometimes forget that investing in ourselves doesn’t always mean improving our professional skills or doing something that will eventually increase our income. Sometimes it simply means allowing ourselves to explore something we’re curious about. Writing a book, learning an instrument, painting, gardening, whatever catches our imagination. Not because we expect to become famous or particularly good at it, and certainly not because everything we do needs to become another source of income. Sometimes doing something simply because we enjoy it is reason enough.

Now comes the funny part. After all those hours of writing, rewriting, editing, correcting and occasionally questioning my own sanity, guess what? I already want to write another book! Seriously, I’ve barely finished the first one and I’m already thinking about the next. How is that possible?

But you know something? I’ve realised that I don’t need to write another book to experience that joy again. And if there’s one thing I’d like to share with you from this whole experience, it’s this: the joy wasn’t really in writing the book. It was in being completely involved in what I was doing.