All Successful Writers Have This One Thing In Common.
And it’s not what you think.
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If you’re dedicated to becoming an author, nothing I can say here will stop you. But if you’re not, nothing I can say will make you one. — Chuck Palahniuk
At age nine, I was told to write an essay about my summer, as a first assignment after the three-month vacations away from school.
But at nine years old, either nothing exciting really happens or everything feels like a magical adventure and as far as Italian holidays go, in my life nothing worth writing about really happened — there wasn’t a Timothèe Chalamet to romanticise my bike rides or those family dinners outside under the shadow of a lemon tree, in mosquitoes’ territory.
So I faked it.
And I hated every minute of it.
So obviously, I became a writer.
Every year, a whole new adventure took form in those pages: first, it was a lost treehouse in the middle of the woods, then sandcastles so tall you could have actually lived in them. Horse ridings and boat trip on the Mediterranean sea, with dolphins swimming so close you could touch them or ride on them, which I obviously did.
Every story unlocked a part of my brain that was certainly demanding attention, but it also made me excited to write those stories that never happened but made me aware of my potential and that got better and better with time and perseverance.
Because if at first I hated sitting down and rummaging inside my brain for fun adventures that would make me look cool and different, I ended up loving it in the end.
Fast forward to today — and a few breaks here and there — and I’m still writing those stories, except now I’m doing it for a wider audience that somehow wants to hear about whatever I have to say and relate to it, on a deeper level.
How did I end up here? Well, thanks for asking. This is the whole point, so listen carefully.
I don’t enjoy writing every day. Sometimes I have to step back from it, take a holiday from staring at words on the stark white screen, put a bit of distance between the real me and the fictional me before I can take the next step.
