How I Finally Finished My First Book

Heads Up: I Was the Worst Student in College

Imagine being 16, hiding between library stacks while everyone else is in chemistry class, pretending to understand equations. You read a lot, but your report card is more like a horror movie body count.

At this point, you’ve already collected two official warning letters from the principal, and your parents have that genuinely debating look, whether you’re ever going to amount to anything or just become a permanent household disappointment.

Yup, that was me.

Every day while bunking classes, I was nose-deep in R.L. Stine and Stephen King paperbacks, thinking: “If these guys can do it… why the hell not me?”

Then one random Tuesday, or Thursday (who even remembers the days? Seriously, get a life if you do), I grabbed my history notebook, which was blank and still good as new by the mid of the term, and wrote Chapter#01 of what I was sure would be the scariest book ever written by the awsemost person to ever exist (who is me and myself of course)

I hate to break it to you that it wasn’t scary at all. Now that I read it, I laugh and curse myself internally. It was a dialogue dump with a narrative that didn’t have anything but jump scares and plot twists that didn’t even make sense.

But hey, I still finished a manuscript.

I know this ain’t ‘inspiring’ at all, and I don’t want to be in the list of internet gurus ya’ll be quoting one day and forgetting the next. The reason to tell this story is that you don’t need permission, a degree, or even decent grades to start or finish that damn book.

The Biggest Lie We All Believe: “I’m Not Ready Yet”

We’ve all said it.

“I’ll start when I have a perfect outline.”

“I’ll write when I’m in the right headspace.”

“I’ll publish when I’m a ‘real’ writer.”

I believed that garbage for years. I memorized writing rules like I memorized world history’s dates:

• “Show, don’t tell.”

• “Three-act structure”

• “Never use adverbs” (sorry, Stephen King uses them like confetti)

The truth no one says out loud is that the only permission slip you need is the one you write yourself— freakin’ today.

My Gloriously Dumb First Draft (and Why It Was Perfect)

I had no plot. No character arcs. No clue what the hell I was doing.

My “outline” was literally: “Girl gets nightmares → she meets her long lost twin sister→ the sister is a witch → the father is the real culprit.”

That’s literally it.

I wrote longhand in class (on the rare days I actually showed up). I named the evil sister “Medora” because I spotted that word on a powder bottle my roommate had. Peak creativity, I know. And my dialogue was 90% “What was that noise?!”

But it was perfect because I wasn’t trying to be perfect and just kept writing.

The story wrote itself. Characters did things I didn’t plan. And I didn’t even see all those plot twists coming to place.

Because of that terrible first draft, I learned that it is the only path to a great final draft. Babe, drafts are not the final manuscripts. We need to get this thing out of our heads that every chapter needs to be perfect while we write it. The truth is that it never in a million years can be.

Remember what my guy, Neil Gaiman, told us:

“The process of writing is a bit like digging for dinosaur bones. You don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve got it all out of the ground.”

The Stupid Mistakes That Almost Killed My Book (Don’t Make These)

Let me save you years of pain. Here are the dumbest things I did:

• Edited Chapter#01 for two months instead of writing Chapter#02

• Showed early pages to classmates who said “it’s kinda weird” (I cried for a week every time)

• Tried to make it “literary” because I thought horror wasn’t real writing

• Waited for motivation (when that dude’s literally a myth)

So, please, turn off your inner critic like it’s a smoke alarm during burnt toast.

How I Actually Finished

Here’s the exact system that finally worked for me… no fairy dust required.

• Just write: I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote till I reached the end. The process of writing is just writing, you ain’t got to worry about editing and all the other perfectionist stuff.

• Zero-draft everything: I wrote like a lunatic, not even caring about all the spellings and pronouns jumbled up.

That’s literally it. You just got to write to finish that damn book. There’s no other way around it.

“You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it written.” —Brandon Sanderson

The Day I Stopped Waiting for Permission (and What Happened Next)

One night at 2 a.m., I finally finished editing the book. By then, I’d graduated from boarding college and was busy applying to universities.

I sent that manuscript to every agent I could find, and got rejected from every possible direction. Of course, I was shattered; who wouldn’t be?

But somewhere between the heartbreak and the email spam, I stumbled onto self-publishing platforms… and everything changed.

Inkitt and Wattpad turned out to be the best platforms for me. And that night, I finally hit “publish.” Guess what? People actually read it. A few even left reviews. Didn’t matter if they were good or bad. I was happy that they’re reading it.

And with that very book, an editor from GoodNovel reached out, asking if I could ghostwrite a werewolf romance. I remember staring at the email like, “Romance? Me? Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

But I said yes anyway. That became my first real paid gig. And then one after another, more projects rolled in. Slowly, without even realizing it, I started building my author brand, and the rest just kept snowballing into a career I never planned but somehow mastered.

Life is weird, ain’t it?

I didn’t need:

• A creative writing degree

• An agent

• A viral TikTok

• Perfect grammar

I just needed to stop waiting for anyone’s permission.

Your Turn: Stop Waiting for Permission Today

Look, if a kid who nearly got expelled for reading Goosebumps in the bathroom can finish a book, so can you.

Close this tab. Open a blank document. Write one terrible sentence.

That’s it. That’s the permission slip.

Your book isn’t going to write itself. But it will write itself the second you start.

So, set a 15-minute timer and write the worst opening line ever, and drop your book idea (even if it’s embarrassing) in the comments. I’ll read every single one and reply.