If you were to ask me for a “how to” guide on becoming a stellar author, I’d tell you:
“I don’t know. There isn’t one.”
Unless you’re asking me to beta-read something you’ve already written, I have no “how to become/improve/move forward as an author” advice for you. Every author’s journey is different. We all have different milestones, subjects and genres we’re obsessed with, styles, life experiences, psychological profiles, and nuances to our creative process. Advice that’s incredibly useful to you may be completely useless to me, and vice versa.
You may feel best and get the most work done plotting out your story start-to-finish before actually writing it, but me, I’m what the writing community calls a “pantser”. My creative process is full of surprise. When I write a story, I don’t know where it’s going outside of maybe just a few things. I write it scene-by-scene, often very out of order. I write a good scene. Then another. Then I repeat until I have enough scenes to string together into a story.
When I wrote the first Starlight book, the final product was completely unlike my original plan for it. Characters developed in ways I couldn’t have predicted until I wrote the scene where they did. Entire chapters and plotlines got scrapped. I had a vivid dream one night about a TV series about a doctor for aliens, then woke up thinking “he’d fit perfectly into Starlight”, and I replaced one of the original 6 main characters with him. I originally planned it to be 13 chapters, then after writing a good 10, I realized that Chapter 10 was the perfect ending to Book I, and adding more chapters would have dulled the ending’s emotional value. Those 3 chapters I’d intended to be the ending of Book I, they actually work way better as the first third of Book II, which will also be 10 chapters.
Life is incredibly unpredictable, and so was my journey as an author. This unpredictability is what this post is about. It’s about learning to embrace territory uncharted, not to map it before it’s ready to be mapped.
Every second of my life, as a child, adolescent, and young adult, I’ve had the visceral sense of purpose of “I’ll be an author someday” in every cell of my body, and soon after I turned 26, I published my first novel. And I couldn’t have possibly written it without those 26 years of life experience.
I currently have 3 books for sale, which you can find on the front page of this site and that I’m promoting in this post too.
Now I’ll tell you about how they came to be:
Surprisingly.
I had loads of ideas for stories as a teenager and a young adult.
In March 2017, when I was 19 years old, I wrote one of them out.
I titled it First Year Alive.
It was about an Alex Rider-esque teen super-spy who decides to give that life up for a normal young adulthood in university… Before some ghosts from his past come back and make his life a lot more difficult. It was a very convoluted yet original story. A very ambitious project for 19-year-old me’s first time creating a novel. But I gladly took it on. Odd-numbered chapters taking place in the present day. Even-numbered chapters being flashbacks to the main character’s origin story as a 15-year-old recruit in a secret organization that thinks 15-year-old boys are worth trusting national security with, then to his final mission, as he travels the world, gets betrayed by his mission partner, gets superpowers, and has a real-life Metroid experience at one point. The present-day subplot about the main character’s first ever girlfriend ghosting him… And nobody but him ever having seen her in the first place. Fight scenes. The female villain falling in love with the protagonist and having to reconcile her feelings for him with her evil agenda. The humor. The action. The side-characters the main character hides his past and true self from. The subplot where his body begins to deteriorate because of his former superpowers having overwhelmed it. First Year Alive was a very diverse mix of ideas, and I had fun writing it.
Later on, I decided to cut out all the spy/sci-fi/superhero/flashback stuff, and make it a grounded, down-to-Earth dramedy about a young guy from a small city going to university in the big city and having many first times, with the novel itself being retitled First Time. It was basically a fictionalized, dramatized, remixed version of my own first year of university. I got a ton of work done on this version of the story in late 2019 and early 2020, and the writing process sure kept me busy. I thought I’d get it done in the end, but I didn’t. Surprise, surprise. Looking back on First Time, it’s actually not that good. All the characters were one-dimensional. The main character was a sounding board for all my political beliefs at the time. The plot made zero sense. It had some genuinely funny and well-written moments, but the bulk of the story was implausible garbage. I had no idea where to take the story, because it was hardly a good, viable story in the first place.
The real value of me writing First Year Alive / First Time was not to get the story itself done, but to keep me busy. Get me having some fun. Not take the writing process too seriously. See in practice what it’s like to write a bad story, so I can learn from the failures and mistakes, and end up writing top-quality stories.
Despite this being a low-quality story, I look back fondly on the days I’d be writing it.
I won’t tell you about every single novel or short story I’ve planned or started that ended up not being viable, because that’s quite a long list. I’ll just tell you about the two that were.
In December 2020, I had a very vivid dream, the events of which I won’t weigh this post down with, but as soon as I woke up, I knew I needed to make a story of it.
Sabrina from Sandwich Avenue was a genuinely top-tier attempted novel. Unlike my prior failed projects, I did everything right with this one. A plot that’s exciting and makes plausible sense. Nuanced, believable, and well-developed characters with flaws, character development, and realistic, believable, human motivations. Emotional impact. The tension and forward-movement of the murder mystery not coming from “who’s the killer?”, but from the main character falsely believing that someone perfectly innocent is the murderer. Comedy and drama both perfectly executed. Everything I got wrong about storytelling in First Time, I did perfectly in Sabrina.
Then surprise surprise, I never finished Sabrina from Sandwich Avenue. I got older, and the events in my life that fueled the story receded further and further into the past. I fell out of love with the story, and like First Time, the true value of this one was in the process, not in the finished product.
Then Starlight came to be. One day in April 2021, I got spontaneously inspired to write something new. I never planned it. I never followed a “how to” guide to write it. I just spontaneously had an idea for a book, wrote out a character sheet, got started on the actual story, and I wrote over half of Starlight I in about a month. Then the creative flow stalled, and I ended up writing the second bit-under-half over late 2022-Summer 2023, before making final edits and publishing it in early 2024. Then immediately after, I got the first 3 chapters of Starlight II done lightning-quick, and in 2025, I got Starlight II halfway complete, with major sections of the second half written too.
The longer you sit on the reservoir of creative energy and don’t deploy it, the brighter the burn will be once you do. You will condense everything into the span of time you have left to make all the wait worthwhile.
And exactly when the creative fuel gets ignited…
Surprise, surprise.
In Starlight Book I’s case, I had 23 years of creative energy waiting to be deployed. Books, TV series, and films I was obsessed with as a child and adolescent inspiring my own homages to them in Starlight. My days as a university student in Ottawa that inspired the setting. Problems and challenges I’ve personally dealt with, that I put my characters through too. I would not be a top-quality author without the rough edges I’ve faced in life and can now perfectly depict in fiction. That immense amount of creative fuel plus the capability as an author I’d developed through my failed and unfinished projects, that led to me writing the first half of Starlight I in about a month, then the life experiences I had over the rest of 2021-2023, those were perfect creative fuel for the second half, as well as the first third of Starlight II.
Then my life experiences over 2024 and 2025, I needed them to write Starlight II so far. It’s currently over halfway finished, and I’ll get it done when the time is right.
Now let’s talk about my other two books, and the “surprise, surprise” of writing them.
Writing Measuring What’s Divine was also a spontaneous, unplanned decision. I got it done over a few months in 2024, then decided to release an updated edition earlier this year. I made some quick additions and subtractions to it, and the second edition came to be.
Prior to that, I had 5 years of life experience as my creative fuel.
I had a long list of failed ambitions in my early 20s, and I also got heavily into studying the esoteric and the supernatural. I was obsessed with self-help, self-improvement, and all that jazz too. Over those 5 years, I explored a very diverse amount of schools of thought on both the subjects of the esoteric and how to optimize one’s life. I failed at every ambition I tried. The only things I did right with my early 20s were author and artist related stuff. Everything else was nothing but mistakes, grievances, and ignorance.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I learned, grew, and expanded my perspective on life way more as a failure making mistake after mistake, with more mistakes for dessert, than I would have winning all the time.
That’s how my early 20s went.
Surprise. Surprise. Surprise.
A path to success I used to think was infallible, that turned out to be a path to misery for me.
Successful people I used to idealize, surprise surprise, they get a whole ton wrong about life too and are often horrible people in their personal lives.
Like with the failures of my fiction-writing journey, I could not have written Measuring What’s Divine without all the surprising failures of my early 20s, and having stress-tested all the self-improvement and spirituality theory against the real world. Like with Starlight, the creative process of Measuring What’s Divine burnt bright and quick after years of the fuel building up, and of it, came a top-quality book.
Finally, Musings of a Failed Dating Coach is exactly what it says on the tin:
My best writings from the years when I’d attempt to make it as a dating/relationship coach, which was my favourite failed ambition in my early 20s.
I was incredibly competent at the work and all my clients would get stellar results after just one month or one call with me, but I ended up having to give it up for good cause there was no growth left for me in it + I was getting zero market-demand and next to no client flow every step of the way.
I had to be brutally honest with myself that being a coach isn’t my true professional calling, and that “making it” professionally is its own journey of “surprise, surprise” for some people who don’t yet know their ACTUAL professional calling.
My romantic life’s been nothing but “surprise, surprise” for me.
In my first year of university, it was nothing but me getting burnt and led on by low-quality girls I’d falsely believe were good people. That was a surprise to that naive, idealistic version of myself exploring the real world outside of his hometown high school bubble for the first time.
Then the summer after that, I was hell-bent on getting the girl(s) of my dreams, getting a job, and living my young life to the fullest. I did one of those things by the time that summer was over. In the end, I’d handed out literally HUNDREDS of resumes to every minimum-wage job I could find and not gotten hired anywhere, made 2 figures freelance writing, chatted up a ton of girls at parties and bars and on dating apps, gotten a few successes with the ladies among my failures and incompatibilities with all the rest, and lived more in 4 months than I did in the 5 years prior combined. But enough about my life story.
The “surprise, surprise” of my trash-tier dating life back in university plus the occasional win, that’s exactly what made me a top-quality dating/relationship coach.
If it was all disaster, I’d have become a woman-hating doomer.
If I got more wins than failures, or ended up with a high school/college sweetheart, that would have made me a terrible coach. I’d have been giving guys advice like “it’ll happen when you least expect it”, “just put yourself out there and go to more social things”, “be yourself and don’t overthink it”, “just ask her out bro !!!”, “learn to be happy without a girlfriend first, focus on your hobbies and passions instead”, etc…
But it was precisely my experiences navigating failures and going out with bad-hearted girls, as well as the good-hearted girls I got some experience with, that gave me a perfect sense of Point A and Point B, and how exactly to get ANY guy from one to the other.
It’s 100% true that guys who are “naturals” will naturally give the worst possible dating advice. They don’t know the reality of NOT having abundance all the time one bit, and cannot comprehend life without it. A good coach needs to both relate to the client when the client’s at 0, and when the client’s at 100. And if they only know 0-20, and most of their “knowledge” is from books, pretty obvious where that’ll lead.
If there’s one lesson I want the reader to get from this post, it’s to be okay with, and even love not having things all figured out. Not to look for the right roadmap to success, but to let life’s surprises happen as they do.
Creativity comes from limitation.
If you knew the way forward all the time and your life was nothing but wins, that wouldn’t be inspiring or interesting. You’d be a boring Mary Sue. You would not grow nor expand nor learn nor live any interesting, memorable stories.
Good stories do not happen when the protagonist has life all figured out and everything goes right for them. This is true in fiction and in real life. Good stories come from the protagonist facing limitation, insecurity, uncertainty, challenge, adversity, and all these rough edges of life, then experiencing character development through them, not through avoiding them.
Your wisdom, capability, and expertise can only come from this.
Have a fucking day,
– Ben
Now here’s a couple Author Interviews with me, if you’re interested in further seeing my perspective on the craft:
https://buymeacoffee.com/michaelparkesauthor/ben-foth-author-interview
And an interview about my art:
https://buymeacoffee.com/michaelparkesauthor/ben-foth-artist-interview
