I know for some, the idea of writing a novel with another person seems inconceivable and a bit tedious when it comes to agreeing upon singular ideas.
Though this may be true to an extent, the process of writing with my friend is a story that started a decade ago when we were still sophomores in high-school and AIM was still a thing.
You see before I met my friend I had already been writing for years: short stories, poetry (that won a couple of district awards), and even botched manuscripts of a ten-year-old's vapid imagination. Boxes of work that to this day I keep stacked behind shoes in my closet.
Now fast forward five years later and you have two High School honor students being bored to death by the busy work teachers are trying to pass off as an education. So naturally I introduced my side hobby of writing to my new friend. It didn't take much for my so called hobby to over take our lives. We found ourselves writing all the time, emailing scenes, chapters, ideas constantly over the World Wide Web, reading tons of books and expressing how we could make our stories better. It was drug and we were hooked. But then gradation happened and we figured it was time we get serious since we were both pre-med.
But naturally within a couple of semesters of being in college I ended up receiving the spare email titled, "I had an idea, what do you think?" And the train was off again. By then we were seniors in College and knew we wanted to write a book before applying to Med school. Crazy I know. But we knew if we didn't write it now, we would not have a chance to write it for another eight years. So graduation came and went and and we wrote for five years straight. Embarking upon a Journey I never could have imagined. The process of learning how to write, and to write well. So many chapters deleted, characters cut, arguments persisted. But we never gave up, even though we felt like doing so a hundred times over.
However sitting here now, with a completed manuscript, I can honestly say I regret nothing. That even though I could have been done with medical school right now and moving into rotations. I chose writing over comfort, security, and an obvious future. But like Dean Karnaz the Ultra Marathon man said, "Any goal worth achieving involves an element of risk."
