Stumbling Through the Process

I never had much love for writing in school. If you handed me an essay assignment, I’d stare at the page like it was a punishment. Paragraph structures, outlines, grammar drills, none of it came easy to me, and honestly, I didn’t care enough to make it look like it did. Writing wasn’t something I enjoyed, it was something I endured.

So it’s ironic that now, years later, I find myself working through the same struggles only this time with books that carry my name on the cover.

When I sit down to edit, I don’t just wrestle with the words, I wrestle with structure. How long should a paragraph be? Do I let it breathe on its own line, or stack it tight to keep the rhythm moving? How do I decide where a chapter ends and the next one begins? These may sound like small details, but they carry weight. They shape the pace of the story and the way it feels in your hands.

Then there’s the question of space, literally. I’ve picked up books that look clean and beautiful, with wide margins and plenty of white space. It feels elegant when you flip through it. But here’s the tradeoff: every bit of empty paper costs money. And to me, it’s always felt wasteful. I never liked seeing a page half-empty just to stretch a book. I want the words to matter, not the spaces around them.

That’s why my books look the way they do. When you open one, you won’t find a lot of fluff. You’ll find pages that are packed, almost dense at times. They carry weight because they’re meant to.

Is it the “right” way to do it? I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I’ve been breaking all the rules of “good writing” since high school. But what I do know is this: the process is real, it’s messy, and I’m still figuring it out as I go.

Maybe with more feedback, maybe with more trial and error, I’ll keep evolving. Or maybe I’ll always be stumbling forward, trying to shape words that were never meant to sit neatly on a page.

Either way, I’ll keep writing. Not because it comes naturally, but because I’ve learned that some stories demand to be told, even if I have to wrestle them into paragraphs along the way.

So here’s my question: when you read a book, do you prefer space to breathe or do you want the pages full from edge to edge?

"Writing feels a lot like this...steps forward on a winding path, blurred by memory and shaped by perspective. The important part is to keep moving."