What Writing My Book Taught Me About Myself

I think everyone experiences the world differently. People process life in different ways. We all have our own outlets for what happens to us, for the emotions we carry, for the things we don’t fully understand yet.

Writing has always been that for me.

Through writing, I’m able to make sense of things I often don’t even understand at the moment. Sometimes they are feelings I can’t explain. Sometimes they are memories that feel distant or blurred. But the more I write, the more I begin to organize the way I see myself and the world, through stories, through scenes, through words.

Very often, while I’m creating, I don’t fully understand why I’m writing what I’m writing. But then days, weeks, or months pass, and I return to an old scene. I read it again, and suddenly I understand exactly who I was when I wrote it. How I was feeling. What I was carrying. How I was seeing the world at the time.

Of course, in fiction everything becomes more dramatic, more heightened, more symbolic. But the emotion behind it is still real.

One of the biggest themes in The Puppet King is control, or more accurately, the inability to keep it. And if I’m being honest, I think that has been one of the biggest struggles in my own life too. I don’t know if I would call myself a perfectionist, but I do like things a certain way. I like structure. I like plans. I like knowing what comes next.

So when things don’t go the way I expected, when plans change, schedules fall apart, or life interrupts everything I carefully arranged it affects me more than I’d like to admit. Because in those moments, it feels like control has been taken away. And often, life is exactly that.

We plan. We try. We adjust. We do our best. And still, there are things we cannot control.

Maybe that’s why this became such a central theme in my book. What is control, really? Can we ever fully have it? Or do we survive by learning how to adapt instead?

The other thing writing this book taught me is how important it is to take responsibility for our own actions.

Sometimes we let life happen around us. Sometimes we wait for other people to fix what we should be facing ourselves. Sometimes we become something we don’t even like, and then act surprised when we have to live with it.

Wanting to become better sounds beautiful in theory. In reality, it asks something from us. It asks for effort, discipline, honesty, and daily choices. And that is something my main character had to learn on his journey. Which means, in many ways…so did I.

I thought I was writing a story. But in many ways, the story was writing me back.

If you’d like to follow the journey of the book and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:

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