How I Spent Four Years Writing a Book

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when I actually had a few free hours a day. And not the kind that tick on a clock, but the kind where I could do whatever I wanted. Yeah, yeah — I don’t believe it myself anymore.

With such a priceless resource in hand, I decided: it’s time to write. The first few thousand words flew by like bytes through fiber optics. And then…

Then I decided I wanted to write better — smoother, prettier, with a little sparkle, a “raisin of creativity,” so to speak. But instead of a raisin, I kept ending up with a shriveled grape covered in mold.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that every time I reread what I’d written, I got upset. The text wasn’t what I had in my head. Or rather, what I had in my head weren’t words at all — they were images, like videos from BrainTube.

My desire to write evaporated faster than my paycheck. After a week of creative frenzy came a cold February. The frost was both outside and in my head — words stuck like a tongue to the metal swing of the plot. Dialogues stuttered, speaking with the accent of an inexperienced writer. “I don’t believe it!” screamed my pocket Stanislavski.

And so I slid not into drinking, but into the phase of endless improvement. Every — literally every — time I sat down to write, I began (and ended) by rewriting what was already there. But it never got better: the words went stale, the lines went hollow, the dialogues fell silent. As famos russion signer — Viktor Tsoi said, “Nothing’s right, and everything’s wrong.”

Then came the modern Chip and Dale — YouTube. That’s where I learned how to write. Or, to be more precise, I thought I learned. And that made things even worse. Now I could clearly see that everything I’d considered “not good enough text” was, in fact, “solidly depressing text.”

Years went by. I’d write for a while, then quit, but the ideas sat so tightly in my head that I couldn’t fully give up on writing. And in the end — four years of “playing the writer,” and I finally finished my first novel, Wings Forsaken. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad either. I personally think it’s pretty good. And believe me, my self-criticism level is off the charts — ten out of five.

Would you spend four years writing one book?