âI Want to Write a Bookâ
âFor all the other kids out there who want to pursue their dreams, follow your dreams. Truly nothing is impossible.â â Nancy Yi Fan
 I want to write a book!
I have had that thought for as far back as I can remember, but most distinctly since I was 12 years old and I read a book written by someone even younger than me. I donât even remember what the story was about, except that the characters were birds â I liked that part. What I do remember is turning to the back cover and seeing a picture of the author, eleven-year-old Nancy Yi Fan.
That someone younger than me wrote a real book and published it was absolutely amazing to 12-year-old me. That was the first time I thought I want to do that, quickly followed by If she could do it, so could I.
And the desire stayed with me, though my self-imposed deadline to do so before I became âgrown-upâ went unheeded. But hey, everything happens in its own time.
Maybe I needed to be grown up first.
So I grew up and my story went unwritten, though my love of both reading and writing didnât dim. I was known all through high school for being the girl with a book, always reading; people would borrow books from me rather than the library. And while I have always had an interest in writing, it was never something I actively pursued.
That carried into university where I lived with a nagging uncertainty that resulted in the persistent feeling that the people around me must know more than I do. Yet when doing group assignments through University, I would volunteer to do the final editing â to have all the group members send their part of the assignment to me to be put together. I had seen so many examples of work that may have been well researched, but so poorly put together that the group would have lost the grade for grammar alone. I would take the disconnected pieces of the project read through and edit so that it sounded not only like coherent English, but as though it had been written by one person.
I could write. I had a grasp of the written language and could get thoughts across on paper in a way that would be easily understood (far better than Iâm able to with spoken words).
I have had people tell me before, when I shared little written anecdotes of things that happened to me, that I should write a book. In university, I began writing fan fiction stories about my favourite TV show from the perspective of my own original characters and honestly I amazed myself with the array of distinct characters I was able to come up with. I fell in love with them. My fan fiction received good reviews, some saying that they felt they were there in the story with the characters. But still, this was just a fun hobby.
Until around my last birthday when I showed her a few of my reviews, my sister said to me âWhy donât you take any of these things youâre writing and publish them?â
And that was it, right there.
That was the nudge I needed to revive that feeling I had at age 12, to say âI am going to be an authorâ and mean it. I made the decision that I was going to write a book, my own original story, and I was going to do it before my next birthday.
So October 7, 2019 is now the deadline for the first draft of my book.
