I heard that J.K. Rowling wrote her first copy of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” on a typewriter. I heard that Chuck Palahniuk wrote “Fight Club” between screwing bolts in an assembly line. Harper Lee had a rich friend just buy her a year off from work so she could write “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It turns out there are a lot of stories about how people got their writing done before they were famous. Let me tell some stories about before I became (will become) famous.
Each line of code I would write I’d add a comment that was the next line of my story.
I fashioned crude tablets from North Carolina clay on which to write my ideas.
I would whisper my horror stories to my sleeping girlfriend at night and gauge how bad her nightmares were by how tired she was the next morning.
I was so poor I couldn’t afford paper, so I just told my stories to my dog. When I needed to remember what I’d said my dog would bark my stories back to me.
I drank and drank until I didn’t know who I was. I was drunk every day. I still drink like that. I’m drunk right now. What? A novel?
I made a rule for myself that every fifteen seconds I had to write a sentence of my story.
My wealthy uncle died and left me in his will a years’ wages. The next line in his will was that a sniper would have a gun trained at my head for the whole year and would kill me if I did not make sufficient daily progress on my novel. Thanks, Uncle!
I worked cleaning houses alongside sentient, box-headed robots for a month, inspiring me to write my story about sentient, box-headed robots who clean houses.
I listened to the stories I would hear from my Uber drivers, then passed them off as if they had happened to me.
My first novel was written entirely in Microsoft Word 2007. I was so breathtakingly impoverished I could not afford to upgrade to Microsoft Word 2010, which adds hundreds of productivity-enhancing new features.
I spent a year wandering the world, meeting people, taking in sights and having new, mind-expanding experiences. I didn’t get much writing done.
My father demanded a new novel every day before suppertime. I seldom had one ready, and he would calmly inform me what a worthless fool I was and that he didn’t love me. Now I write a bestselling novel every day and my father is dead.
I would have vivid fever dreams when my cat slept on my face, and would shave stories about them into my cat’s fur. I got my big break when I happened to bring my cat to the vet on the same day as Brandon Sanderson.
I lived among the destitute. I ate what they ate, slept where they slept. It wasn’t for a novel or anything, I just couldn’t find a job.
I would fashion stories about my psychiatry patients. The trick is to say you’ve changed the names.
When I was feeling down about my work, I would shout at my wife. When I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life, I would write an angry email to my congressperson. When I couldn’t think of how to finish a chapter, I would kick a cardboard cutout of my dog. My wife doesn’t let me kick our real dog. I’m going to shout at her again when I get home.
My visit to heaven after a near-fatal car accident inspired me to write my book “101 Health-Food Recipes on a Budget”
My Battlestar Galactica/Big Bang Theory slash-fiction just took off.
My homemade Dungeons and Dragons Campaign just took off.
I opened my phone one day and pressed the button to autocomplete the next word in the sentence over and over again until I had a novel.
This moron just pushed a button to let me write a novel for him and thought he would get the credit. What kind of phone could possibly win the Nobel prize for literature? This kind of phone.
I was writing a shopping list for my trip to Lowe’s Foods and it just took off.
Samuel Munk 