Shedding the Shoulds

When I was around thirteen, already an avid reader, my dad's secretary gave me a well-worn copy of The Princess Bride. I devoured it in one night. From then on, I was hooked on the fantasy genre. David Eddings' Belgariad and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings soon followed.

At the same time, I fell in love with Star Wars and Star Trek, while Alien taught a masterclass in creating horror with tension—becoming a perennial favourite. As I grew older, I discovered my own love of writing—mostly short stories but also personal essays that became a safe soapbox when I needed to scream into the void. The idea of writing my own novel one day hovered in the background for years. Then, in 2013, I decided to act on it and enrolled in the UCLA Extension Fiction Writing Certificate program.

I finished it in two years, and it was both fun and frustrating. Short fiction came easily, but I floundered outlining a full novel. Poetry? Let's just say—never again. Though completely unrealistic, part of me believed that program would magically turn me into a novelist. My lack of published works proves how misguided that notion was.

Still, I believed loving sci-fi and fantasy meant that's what I should be writing. That real writers create epic worlds, pantheons of gods, and invent languages. If Ursula Le Guin and Tolkien could do it, why couldn't I? And so I tried—hard. Harder than I care to admit. The problem was, I discovered I didn't want to.

You'd think I'd have listened to that inner voice screaming, No! Please, just no. Alas, I did not. For years when inspiration struck, I wrote out plot outlines, character sketches, and bits of scenes with witty banter. I'd have these bursts of creative energy that would make Red Bull jealous. But all I ended up with over the years was a Scrivener graveyard full of half-baked plot ideas and shoddy narratives and dialogue that would make a middle-schooler cringe.

But then there were moments where the words flowed and magic swirled in the liminal spaces, coalescing into a tightly-knit narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. There were no galactic empires or ancient prophecies waiting for a chosen one. They held what I truly cared about: internal landscapes, the moments between moments.

Writing those stories didn't feel like building worlds; it felt like discovering hidden ones. Days later, I'd read them back and think, Did I write that? Where did it come from?

The problem? They weren't genre pieces. No dashing hero, no powerful wizard, no vengeful gods or forgotten languages. And so I concluded I was not a good writer, or worse, that I was a lazy one. Drafting a plot with all its moving parts felt like a slog through a swamp and I did not want to do it.

It took a full decade for life to grant me the time and space to start writing again in earnest. It took less than a month for the wheels to come off—again. But this time, I didn't stop or banish my ideas to the graveyard. I examined them and compared them to finished pieces I was proud of, the ones I loved writing, and like magic, it appeared: my voice.

I didn't need to conquer genre. I needed to conquer perfectionism and the belief that being a "real writer" meant meeting someone else's definition. It wasn't about flashy covers lining bookstore shelves. It was about sitting back and letting the words flow, following what made me happy.

Maybe that's what the Midlife Rewrite is about: Finally shedding the shoulds and embracing what makes each of us unique. There is no single path; just as our characters have their epic journeys, so do we as their authors.

Maybe the bravest plot twist of all is to trust our voice and the stories we are meant to tell.