I needed 28 years to write a book
By: Pedro Dalmolin
Tags: Creative Writing, Writing Tips, Daily Blog, Médium, Writers Life

What do you mean it takes a person 28 years to write a book? It seems like a long time, but some writers took 40, 50, 60 years to write their first book. We need to accumulate experience before writing anything. Of course, the action to get the book out of project mode and into material form is something else, it took me a month and a half to dry my head with everything I wanted to mark the paper.

I revisited my past to understand where the idea of writing a book came from it.

Among books

It didn’t happen overnight. Let’s say that the starting point, day one, was when I first opened the book ‘Nicolau had an idea.’ I don’t remember how old I was exactly, but less than ten.

This book has nothing exceptional, just a simple 40-page story that revolves in turn of people who had ideas kept for themselves but did not share. It was at that moment that Nicolas had his great idea, to start listening to other’s ideas. For a child, it’s an amusing story.

What is the connection between Nicolas’ book and writing a book 18 years later? It was my involvement with that book in my childhood that triggered me to want to open other books to hear other people’s ideas. We don’t stop to think about how our past influences how we can act. No one could have guessed that I would write a book “out of nowhere.” This random event wasn’t that random.

After Nicolas had an idea, I won and bought books of all kinds and sizes. I’ll leave it on record that I didn’t always love to read, especially when I started from an obligation, as the list of boring books that the school passed. Machado de Assis is excellent, but not for a child.

While I was in class, I read what interested me. Before I finished high school, I had already read the Lord of the Rings book and Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather. I got myself involved with dozens of stories at the time of the vestibular (=SAT) that ran away from the list of books that passed. But I always kept reading. I used to go into a bookstore or second-hand bookstores and leave with at least one piece.

I heard a phrase one day that said that not every reader is a writer, although every writer is a reader. It makes perfect sense.

One of my pillars to start my book was reading. It leads me to enter another sphere to understand my desire to write a book.

Around the world

Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash

I had an atlas as a child for geography classes and always knew where the countries were. I opened it and was amazed at the size of Europe and what it would be like to see what the movies showed us.

The internet was not yet our most common means of searching, the atlas was my Google Maps, and I spent the day observing it. Going to another country was such a distant idea that if you asked me what was easier: go to China or go to Mars, I wouldn’t know the difference. If the Americans already went to the moon, why not Mars? My ingenuity.

I always saw this desire to go to another country as something distant. My first time abroad was in my 26 years old and where I spent the most enjoyable moments I could wish to have.

Having the desire to go to a different country that wasn’t my own has crossed my mind several times, and I got it. A friend reminded me of a passage from our childhood, where I told him that my dream was to cross South America with my father’s motorbike. I did not remember that. When he reminded me about it, my head rescued this memory, and it seemed that it had happened so recently.

I did not make this trip by motorcycle, not yet.

The pillar of wanting to know a different world was present with me since I opened the book of Nicolau and the atlas to experience what came after the seas. The desire began to take shape when these two experiences I had come together: the books and the notion of the world.

These two pillars were created in 28 years.

A pinch of audacity

This third pillar appeared after my 20s, While books and stories and love for the world appeared in my childhood. The audacity took its first steps at the right time when I began to question the existence of other possibilities in the world.

I was almost finishing my degree in business and asked myself, “how’s the life out of my bubble?”

In the environment in which I lived, the normal was to meet lawyers, entrepreneurs, accountants, economists, and engineers. I didn’t have, for example, surrounding me at the same place. Not even a relative.

I always read books and started to wonder how to build one. “Do these people live off it?” “is it possible to get paid and still write, sing, paint, be a mountaineer?”. I found out that many of these souls I read the books made that weird dream their primary source of income.

That’s when I had a hint of audacity and talked to myself: “if they do this as a job, why not me? That’s how I first sat in front of my PC and wrote a story for my first girlfriend. Nothing exceptional and exaggerated. Just a narrative of that moment when I was picking her up at the bus station when she came to visit me.

That was my first moment of daring to face the world and get into the same wave as writers.

Somehow they started. It was with this premise that I went after the biography and learned more about Ernest Hemingway, Paulo Coelho, Stephen King, JK Rowling. What did they do when they were young? What was the first book written by each one, and how did they take their first steps?

No story had glamour. If I put myself on the same side of the coin as the finest writers, I might be very audacious. Writing my first book didn’t happen in a few months. It took years for a whole chain of thoughts and accomplishments to come together so that Between Atlas and Oceans came out.

I don’t consider myself an exceptional writer, but I didn’t let the idea of impossibility hold me back any longer. I have my crises, and the impostor syndrome takes me by surprise every time I drop my guard.

What to expect from here on?

I will continue writing other titles. Ideas are what is not missing in my head. Nicolau left his mark on my life and taught me to listen to other people’s ideas. That’s how my book was crafted, from my interaction with other travelers around the world.

Between Atlas and Oceans took 28 years to get ready, after all the pillars of my life came together in one and gave me the gift of writing. If what I write is decent I don’t know, but I can’t even imagine what my craft will be like in 50 years. I’ll have tons of experience to draft on the paper!

Some believe the best moments have already passed. I see what the future has to reveal to me and how much I have to create.