What Six Years Writing One Fantasy Novel Taught Me

In 2020, I started writing a fantasy novel.

Like a lot of first time authors, I thought I knew what that meant. I had an exciting idea, characters I couldn't stop thinking about, and an ending I couldn't wait to reach. I imagined I'd write the book, polish it, and one day see it sitting on a bookstore shelf.

What I didn't realize was that writing a novel isn't just about finishing a story. Sometimes, it's about growing into the person who can tell it.

Cordolium has now been part of my life for six years. In that time, it's been rewritten, restructured, and revised more times than I can count. Some plot threads have disappeared. The world has grown in ways I never imagined. The magic system evolved, new characters appeared, and old ideas quietly faded away.

Yet through all of those changes, one thing stayed the same: the feeling that this story was worth telling. One of the biggest lessons those six years taught me is that stories don't always grow on our schedule.

When I started, I thought revision meant fixing mistakes. Tightening dialogue. Cleaning up descriptions. Correcting plot holes. While those things certainly mattered, they weren't the reason I kept coming back to the manuscript.

The real work was understanding the story more deeply.

Every draft taught me something new. Sometimes it was about the characters. Sometimes it was about the world. More often than not, it was about myself.

I learned that the best scenes usually came when I stopped trying to make the characters say what I wanted and instead listened to what they were trying to tell me. I learned that cutting a chapter I loved wasn't a failure if it made the story stronger. And I learned that patience isn't the enemy of creativity. It can be one of its greatest strengths.

That's a difficult lesson in a world that celebrates speed.

It's easy to compare your first draft to someone else's published novel, or to wonder if you're falling behind because your journey looks different than everyone else's. I've certainly had those moments.

But stories aren't races.

Some need more time than others. Some ask more of the people writing them. Looking back, I don't think I spent six years writing one book. I spent six years learning how to tell one story honestly.

Today, Cordolium is out in the world, navigating the query process and looking for a publishing home. Whether that journey takes months or years from here, I'm grateful for everything it has already given me.

Because somewhere between that first draft in 2020 and the manuscript I'm querying today, something changed.

I stopped trying to finish a fantasy novel.

I started trying to tell the truest story I knew how to tell.

And I think that's a journey worth taking.