I’m Writing a Book. Yup.
I have years of experience with writing. Even so, this undertaking feels like I’m starting all over again.
Below is a rough draft to the intro of my book. I’m putting this here to:
Pad my blog with content.
Keep a record to my future self — the one who will have finished this book — of how far I’ve come.
Anyway, without further ado…
This book is an attempt, no, a promise, to myself that this part of myself that I call a writer is worth listening to, and even moreso, worth celebrating. I am forty-three as I write this. Maybe in the epilogue to this book, I will be a different age. Regardless, I have spent the better part of my adult life being hard on myself. I would stop projects after only one or two sentences because those beginning steps weren’t up to my grand ambitions. I would then grow frustrated with myself because of that frustrating, telling myself that this is how writing should be, painful and slow and awful. And that I was an awful person for quitting so quickly. And then, I would blame myself even more for blaming myself.
Then there were the long periods of time where I did not do any sort of creating. I was afraid to even start—probably because of my own self-punishment. When I wasn’t actively avoiding the thought of writing, I would tell myself “oh, let me do some more research on how to be an effective writer”, then proceed to only read half a book on the topic before I get bored and go back to my avoidant state.
And so the years go by, and I see fellow creatives that I love pursue the work and even come out with a product that they are able to share with the world. All the while, I look at my own lack of creative output with distain. On worse days, I allow my negative self talk to use it in its argument to convince myself that I should disappear.
But I’m still visible. I am here. And though I have struggled many times to figure myself out so I can properly create, I am starting to think that, perhaps, I shouldn’t wait until I’m ready emotionally. I should just do it right now.
And I’m not going to use AI to generate the work. I think it’s important that I struggle through this process from beginning to end. It’s important that I keep myself connected to the work, no matter how tedious or boring that process may be.
Certainly, I can use the tools I have available to brainstorm and copyedit. But even when I incorporate suggestions by AI, I will type it out manually. There is something lost when you allow AI to actually do the writing for you. I know from experience. I don’t want to lose that here. I owe it to my creative self.
I admit, I am going at this thing blind. I have a vision, though. This book will be a memoir in parts. It will have short essays, sure. It will also have poetry. It will even have short fiction. I don’t know how that will all manifest, but I can feel that is where my creative urge is taking me. I’ve seen poetry executed in a memoir. Short fiction, however? I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure it’s out there. A good part of me wants to look for examples and read those before I come back to my own work — but that is a delay tactic. And that is one of the traps that kept my creativity dormant for years.
No, this is now or never. I have already taken the first steps by typing the words above. I hope, by the end of this journey, I will have re-read this introduction, made my final edits, and will look at it all and say it was a job well done, and a promise that was kept.
Jonar Isip
8/5/2025
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