If you read or listen to a lot of author interviews, as I do, you will note that most writers' origin stories follow a particular trope. It’s something like this: I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a kid, and I’ve always been obsessed with the written word. 

Something squishes inside my belly as I write this. But that’s not my story at all. 

Yes, I read — probably a lot by most standards — but I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Instead, I consumed (begrudgingly) the great American novels I was force-fed in school. The Grapes of Wrath. Their Eyes Were Watching God.  

I read mainly because I was expected to.

And writing…woof. I was about as eager to apply pen to paper as sandpaper to skin. When given an assignment, I would race through a draft to declare it “done!” Inevitably, it came back wounded with violent red marks. I usually had a meltdown. 

Once I took up fencing, I quickly dedicated all my creative energies to improving. As competitions took me farther away from home, I read more, but only to fill the endless hours I spent on planes. 

I bought a journal only once I began struggling to perform at those competitions. My writings there certainly had no literary aspirations. They were largely a tangle of unanswered questions and angry cajolings. 

Still, I ascended athletically, eventually arriving at the top of the mountain — the Olympics. Still struggling with pressure, I read every sports psychology book I could get my hands on. But my driving motivation was my fear of failure.

After fencing, I joined the advertising industry as a strategist, a role requiring extensive knowledge about culture. A rabid intake of trend papers, PowerPoint decks, and TED Talks commenced. Predictably, I got a subscription to an online service that summarized business books. 

I wrote often during those years, but my output was entirely functional. During presentations, I provided the “smart stuff” — the analytical appetizer — that could ease clients’ anxieties about buying riskier creative ideas.

Over time, I grew uncomfortable with my role in this strange act of commercial theater and began looking for an escape hatch from a new career.

I want to say that it was due to a moral quandary related to helping people sell unnecessary stuff. It was partly that. But it was more that I was dismayed by the need to posture as an expert on any topic at hand.

Having spent nearly two decades fencing, I knew what expertise actually felt like. I usually had no more than two weeks to study a new industry. So, I returned from these research periods feeling not like an expert but instead like an actor playing an expert on TV. 

This led to a strange sense of nostalgia for my fencing years. Although they had been painful, they had also afforded me clarity of purpose. I missed that my sole aim was to burrow deeper into my craft and leverage daily efforts into marginal gains I could feel and see.

As I thought about what I could credibly do next after advertising, I took into account that my professional writing had received occasional praise from colleagues. Wondering if graduate school might be my exit, I also took the GRE and scored well in the writing section. 

Again, my stomach squishes at this admission. But it was a matter of A + B = C. Writing, I realized, was an activity that could offer me the kind of deep focus I so badly craved. 

My efforts began humbly with Better Fencer, a now-retired blog and newsletter that dispatched helpful tips to insiders in the sport. A year later, at age 34, I undertook efforts to write a memoir about my Olympic experiences. 

Something happened while writing that manuscript (which remains unpublished). As I read more books and wrote more words, my Machiavellian focus on “craft” began to melt, transforming into genuine interest and, later, a love of words. 

I couldn’t believe the gold I’d stumbled upon.

If the notion of “discovering” reading and writing in my mid-thirties seems absurd, rest assured, it’s absurd to me, too. Still, these activities soon felt less like a mountain to climb and more like a refuge—a place where I could recharge and figure out what I actually think. 

I tell you all this because I know how easy it is to feel discouraged from engaging in activities that, at times, can feel solitary, elitist, and tedious. 

Every day, I worry that I haven’t read enough, written enough, and can’t possibly provide better insight into a topic than the people I now look up to who write for prestige magazines. I think my prose suck. I feel like I started too late.

But I remind myself that while doubt may not be the enemy of truth, it certainly is the greatest obstacle to getting anything down on the page.