by Soman Chainani
When I was a kid, my dad used to call me “America’s Storyteller” because I couldn’t open my mouth without it turning into an epic, dramatic tale, usually involving unicorns or dinosaurs.
“Where’s your lunch box?” my mom might ask, which would prompt a story about pterodactyls that I suspected were living in our basement, both as a distraction from the fact that I’d lost the lunch box and because I was pretty sure there were Jurassic beasts taking up residence in our house.
Everyone told me I would be a writer one day. It wasn’t just the only thing I was good at. It was what I was put on this earth to do from day one. Spin fantasies. Tell tall tales. Turn missing lunch boxes into pterodactyls.
But there was a time where I gave up on being a writer.
Too many things had gone wrong, too many rugs pulled out from under me.
Until that point, everything had been a little too charmed. I’d come out of film school at twenty-six years old, a hot-shot writer/director signed to a big Hollywood agency, and was on track to direct my first feature film in London the following summer. Off the heat of that project—a romantic comedy about two Indian families warring over a marriage—I’d been hired to write an animated movie for Sony Pictures about Indian elephants and given a deal to create my own television show about a divorcing couple who runs a wedding house in northern England. I woke up every day with too much to do but in my own creative heaven where every dream seemed to come to life.
“America’s Storyteller” was on his path.
Backing up a bit, it’s worth noting that being a writer was my only real option for a job, because I was fired from everything else. I wasn’t sure how to be a professional writer when I was young. It didn’t seem like a viable option for a career, even if it was the only thing I was good at. So I tried other, more respectable jobs . . . none of which worked out. Pharmaceutical consultant? Fired. Production assistant? Fired. Website copywriter? Fired. Not because I was so terrible at any of these jobs, but because I’d inevitably hide in a corner and work on a new screenplay instead of the spreadsheet or PowerPoint I’d been asked to deliver. Writing was my higher calling, and it took me a long while to accept that I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else. The universe rewarded my commitment by gilding a path to film school and beyond, a life that once stutter-stepped between failures now parading through open doors of movies and TV deals.
Then one frigid February morning, I woke up in my apartment in New York to two messages from London. First message: the movie I was supposed to direct would now be put on hold, because one of the financiers was going into bankruptcy. Second message: the animated film was canceled, since the production company had lost its deal with Sony. The TV show about the wedding house didn’t last long either, sunk by personnel changes at the production company a couple weeks later.
The worst part was, given the projects were all in fairly early stages, I wouldn’t be paid in any real way.
Not only did I not have a job, but I also had no income.
Looking back now, I remember having a strange reaction to all this. Not misery or depression or anxiety . . . but relief. The feeling that it was all too good to be true, so when the glass house shattered, I could retreat to a safe thought: “Of course it wasn’t real. Of course it wasn’t going to happen.” When you don’t believe you deserve the opportunities you’re given, eventually the universe will take them away.
For the next year, I ambled about aimlessly, finding work as a tutor and an essay editor, helping everyone else with their writing but doing none of my own.
Somehow I convinced myself that I was a tutor for life, that facilitating the writing of people not myself was my true calling. In my darkest days, I’d go to a bar twice a week for midnight karaoke, even though I don’t drink, don’t sing, and don’t like to stay up late. Even now, I can’t understand what I was thinking, other than I was seeking an escape hatch, a portal into another life that wasn’t mine.
Then came a fever. A ten-day, raging storm that sent my temperature rocketing over one hundred degrees without any other symptoms. A steady bout of chills and delirium. I didn’t bother going to the doctor. I knew what the fever was—my body revolting against the life I’d accepted for it. On day eleven, I found myself alone in an AMC movie theater in the middle of the afternoon, watching a Céline Dion documentary, wondering what it would be like to be Céline, to have a purpose, a mission, a calling in life that actually was answered. To be an artist with the courage to make art, instead of a failed artist who’d so easily accepted his fate.
A week later I was in London, back to clean up the wreckage of the lost projects and convince my British film agent to keep me on, despite the lack of work and income. (He didn’t.) One afternoon, I was wandering through Regent’s Park, with no agenda, no plan, no anything, just empty time and space, and I had a sudden image pop into my head of a girl in black falling through the sky into a pink castle and a girl in pink falling through the sky into a black castle. It was so sharp and arresting that it stopped me cold. Such symmetry and vibrance in a single picture. I had no idea what it meant, but as the afternoon went on, the edges of the picture filled in—two schools, one for good, one for evil, and two girls, a princess and a witch, falling into the wrong castles. By the end of the afternoon, I had names—Sophie, Agatha. By the end of the week, I had the story, the world, the mythology, as if all this time that I’d been tutoring and singing at midnight bars, my subconscious had been working out a creative volcano and was just waiting for me to give it the freedom to erupt.
In my head I knew it was a book, not a screenplay, but it was also a book I refused to write.
For one thing, I’d never written a book. I’d tried here and there, but I found the experience lonely and scary, a commitment to years of work that might result in nothing. A screenplay was easier, shallower, less . . . intense. To write a book was to commit to my imagination, to the depths inside me, to another world.
So instead of writing The School for Good and Evil, instead of plunging into the Endless Woods . . . I flirted with it instead. I wrote outlines and treatments and synopses, big proposals for a book, but no book.
I was afraid. I was afraid of writing. After three canceled projects, the idea of giving myself to something fully again was too hard to take. The equivalent of a broken heart that’s locked itself up.
But hope is a funny thing. Even when you’ve surrendered it, deep inside, the spark of flame is always there, looking for its tinder. Why else would I spend hours a day brainstorming character names and class schedules and maps, if I had no intention of ever following through on it? I wrote no prose, no chapters, no story, but slowly but surely, I was dipping my toe into the waters of another world.
A year later, I sent my agent a ninety-page collection of . . . thoughts. That’s the best way to describe it: a scrapbook of The School for Good and Evil. Looking back, it was a ridiculous gambit. There was nothing to sell. Just the musings of a writer too pen-shy to write. And yet, she saw what it was . . . She saw how much commitment I had to the world if I could just give myself the permission to write it.
Later that month, she sent the scrapbook to seventeen publishers. Sixteen of them passed on it, with the predictable response: there’s no book here. The seventeenth bought the idea, hook, line, and sinker, and I was instantly signed up to write three books, without a single word of any of them having been written.
What fortune. What a dose of luck. It’s punch-drunk silly, really. Like winning the lottery when someone else bought your ticket.
But looking back, I like to think that the world knew I was lost. That there would be no happiness, no future as a writer without a little help. I’d lost faith in myself, in my art, in my talent, and yet, I was still there, at the edges of the water, flicking at it, searching for a sign to wade in.
This wasn’t just a sign. This was a command.
And yet, even still, I remember asking my friends and family a parade of stupid questions—do I really want to write a novel? Won’t I be lonely? What about my dream of directing movies? Cold-eyed stares greeted me in response. The kinds of stares you give a tutor/failed karaoke singer who’s questioning whether he should follow his real life’s dream.
But deep inside, I knew the answers, and eventually, I was smart enough to stop puttering around and get to work. Once I started, I never looked back. Ten years and six books later, I have such sympathy and admiration for that lost, shambling version of myself who had universes bubbling in his mind, universes frantic to find expression—and yet had somehow convinced himself that he was meant to do anything on this earth but write.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about hope, it’s that the universe is always conspiring to help you be the best version of yourself possible. To bring you into alignment with your higher purpose and your higher self. The question is whether you resist it or whether you have the courage to become who you’re meant to be, to live out your life’s story, even though it might be bigger than you can consciously imagine. At some point, you accept your fate. You accept that you’re a piece of the puzzle and not the whole puzzle.
In my case, I’d gotten so out of alignment that the universe threw me a bone. But once I had permission to write The School for Good and Evil, I gave my blood, sweat, and tears to it, this time believing I deserved the opportunity I’d been given.
Sometimes you need to lose the thing you love to find it again. It happens with athletes who burn out from their sports. It happens to best friends who start to take each other for granted. It happens with talents that feel more like pressure than fun. It’s a fact of life. In my case, I had to fail as a writer before I could become one. I had to hunger for what I’d lost before I could walk through that door a second time. And that chance always comes back around. The same way love always comes back around, just when you thought it’d left you.
I’m not afraid to write anymore. I’m afraid to not write. Because once you have a taste of how big your life can be, how fresh and new . . . how can you go back to the old one?
SOMAN CHAINANI is the New York Times bestselling author of the School for Good and Evil series. The fairy-tale saga has sold over three million copies, has been translated into thirty languages, and is a major motion picture from Netflix, which Soman executive produced. Soman’s latest book, Beasts and Beauty, was an instant New York Times bestseller and will soon be published in ten languages. It is his seventh New York Times bestseller in a row.
Soman is a graduate of Harvard University and received his MFA in film from Columbia University. Every year, he visits schools around the world to speak to kids and share his secret: that reading is the path to a better life. You can visit Soman at SomanChainani.com.