Nicole Adel Rivens

Or rather… it has already begun.

How did it come to this?

In Fall 2025, I left a regular, steady-paying office job to write fiction full-time. I know, I know, I know. That’s just… idiotic. How can I assure you that I’m not totally out of my mind?

Crafting fantasy stories is something I’ve done since childhood. When I was little and everyone would asked that awful question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I felt pretty confident that I had a ready answer.

But I had no idea how to make it come true.

There is no How-To-Do-It model for storytellers – although many authors have tried to write one. Who knows? I might try my hand at writing one too. But the best I could ever hope to pass on to other aspiring authors, is a model of what works best for me. One author’s methods may not work well for anyone else on the planet! So writing advice, in general, has this underlying, problematic fallacy at its core. Each writer is unique. No amount of How-To videos on YouTube will change this fact, though I have watched plenty of them, hoping they will find a way.

Still… how was I supposed to get started? In these beginning steps of fiction writing, with very little to go on despite all the scrolling, I was forced to conclude that no one can figure this process out on my behalf. I would have to figure this out alone – old-school, trial-and-error style.

“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” –Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I love this quotation from Stephen King, pulled from one of the few books that has offered tangible inspiration to me through this beginning stage. Over the last six months, I have definitely felt like I’m alone in the bathtub, my fingers curled over the edge, chin resting on the rim, my eyes desperately straining to see land somewhere on the horizon. How the hell am I going to get across all this water?

But I am getting across – slowly, carefully, with lots of prayer and tears. Land does seem within reach and all I have to do now is show up. “Keep at it!” – “You got this!” – “In the end, this will be all worthwhile…”

[continued in part 2]