How I Went From a Book Lover to a Book Writer

It’s the realization that you have something inside you — an interior life — unlike anyone else’s that makes writing your own book so incredible.

Home is where the books are. This is my new place in Lehi, Utah.

I love books. 

Everything about them. The way they look on shelves. The way they feel. The way they smell. The way they can do so many things: transport us, inspire us, surprise us, make us feel less alone.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

When I was a kid I didn’t love reading. I didn’t hate it either.

I just preferred playing sports or video games or hanging out with friends.

That changed around high school when I had a similar epiphany to Baldwin. Books were a portal to a different life. A life that often felt more authentic, textured, meaningful.

I started buying the books I enjoyed. Forming my own mini library. I honestly can’t remember the first one I got. Maybe Fahrenheit 451. It’s kind of funny to think back to a time when my entire book collection could fit on one small shelf. 

It was an important shift, though, buying books. They didn’t belong to my parents or brothers. They didn’t belong to the library. They were mine. 

You know how when you get to the end of a great book you just kind of hold it for a while? 

I liked that after I read a great book it could literally stay with me. I’d eventually put it back on the shelf, but it was still there, still a part of me, a reminder of how I’d been transformed or comforted or illuminated. And I could go back to it, see the parts I underlined, travel back through its pages and sentences. Remember. 

As I got older my collection grew and grew, an accumulation of stories and wisdom, even some I no longer liked. I kept them all. Whenever I moved to a new city, they’d come with me, an ever-growing collection of boxes. They were the thing I was most eager to unpack. A new place didn’t feel like home until I was surrounded by my books. 

Something great about books is that they are inexhaustible. You can never read enough. There’s always one more on the nightstand or in the Amazon cart, one you’ve been meaning to read, one that will cast its own unique spell, one that might change everything. 

I have vivid memories of going to Barnes & Noble in college—that distinct smell of coffee and books, searching the rows, pulling out titles that looked intriguing, reading the back. I was always hoping to stumble across that book, that story. 

Sometimes you couldn’t find it. Which was both disappointing but also kind of thrilling because then you knew what had to be done.

I remember discovering this line by Toni Morrison:

“If there’s a book you want to read that doesn’t exist, then you must write it.”

Few quotes have been as important to me. I already had the desire. Now I had the green light.

I’d known I wanted to be an author from a pretty young age. I wanted to create that magic. I wanted my own thoughts, ideas, stories to have a home. A book was a home. It was a home and a memorial and a vehicle and a deep deep well. A book could be so many things.

But it’s the realization that you have something inside you — an interior life — unlike anyone else’s that makes writing your own book so incredible. 

I believe all of us have at least one book inside us that we are meant to write.

Sure, there are genres. There are formulas. There are common tricks of the trade. 

But the particulars, the specifics of a memory, the texture of something we felt, the contours of our imagination, the unusual connections we’ve made…. Those are ours and ours alone. 

We can keep it all inside us. 

Or we can write. And eventually publish.

I’ll never forget getting a box in the mail with copies of my first book. Seeing my name on the cover. Flipping through the pages. This was something I willed into existence. It was small, sure. It wasn’t Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But it was my first contribution to the great pantheon of books, it was my declaration that my life would be a creative life.

I would be a reader always. But I would write too. I would be an author.

We may doubt our abilities. We may question the value of our contribution. We may feel unready.

But the opportunity is there, always, waiting for us.

As the poet Walt Whitman wrote: 

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.