Books have power, often more than we realize. I imagine each of us has a book that changed our lives, whether for good or bad. I’ll tell you about one book that changed how I view the world, as well as giving me impetus to realize my own dreams.
While I was in college, a roommate brought a book from home that her father found while perusing the bookstore. It was an international best-seller, though none of us had heard of it before. She read it, praising it to the sky, and let each of us borrow it in turn. When it came to me, Christmas break had started and I was alone much of that time because I had to work while my roommates went home for the holidays. During that time, I read quite a bit, books on a variety of topics. Basically anything I could get my hands on.
One evening after work, I sat down with this short book. Barely more than 100 pages, I wondered what could be inside a book so small that my roommates would rave about it so much. And then I started to read.
It was the story of a Spanish shepherd, content to travel with his flock, until dreams came to him of a treasure buried a long distance away. When he asked a gypsy what those dreams meant, she told him to travel to the pyramids in Egypt, and there he would find his treasure.
This shepherd’s life changed in a moment as he sold his flock and bought a passage to Morocco. Though many trials came along the way, he persevered, eventually finding love and treasure more than he could have imagined.
As I closed The Alchemist, I thought about the words I had just read. Certain passages stuck out to me. Words of inspiration and learning. I looked at the world with renewed vigor.
The real change, however, would not come for several years.
In the meantime, I made my own impulsive decision to postpone school until I had made a similar journey of self-discovery. That let me to Montreal, Canada, where I spent a year and a half working as a missionary. When the time came to return to my life, the one I had left behind for a time, I realized some things. I had traveled to a distant place to learn important lessons before coming back to the same place I was before. But I was not the same.
I purchased a copy of The Alchemist sometime after my return and reread the words that had affected me so deeply years before. They touched me again, though in different ways than before.
Soon after, I felt the need to write. I’d always enjoyed writing. Through junior high and high school, I wrote poetry and short stories, but I never attempted anything longer than that. Writing a book seemed so difficult. To write enough words to fill 200, 300, 600 pages—it was incomprehensible to me.
But with this urge to write, I quickly realized the story I wanted to tell would be longer than a short story. I wanted to write a story as powerful as the one that I had read. I wanted to change someone else’s life for the better as mine had been changed. I determined to write a book the same length as The Alchemist. I could write 100 pages. That was possible.
Months and years passed, and eventually I did write 100 pages. Then I discovered that 100 pages weren’t enough to tell the story. So I kept writing, and a few more years passed. After four years of toil, I had written 300 pages. I had written a book. It seemed something so abstract and unreal for me at first, something I didn’t ever think I could accomplish. But I had done it.
As every writer knows, the work didn’t end there. Revising, rewriting, and rewording followed, and eventually I sent the book out to agents. I received favorable responses, but the overarching feedback was that the book wasn’t ready yet.
I had accomplished so much, but still I wasn’t done. I had written a book, but without a way for people to read the words I had written it didn’t mean as much.
While in the midst of my search for someone to publish my first book, an idea struck me for another story. I had come home from work one evening, frustrated with everything. I needed some time to process my thoughts, and so I decided to do some free-writing in a local coffeehouse. The words seemed to come out of nowhere. I wrote, and as soon as I had placed several words on the page, more would come to me. Within an hour, I had an entire book’s worth of ideas bouncing around my head.
I spent the next three weeks in a feverish sort of daze as I wrote and wrote, and then wrote some more. After work, on weekends, every spare moment was spent transcribing ideas onto the page. In the middle of that process, I realized this story was too large for just one book. It would take three books to really flesh out the lives of these characters.
As I neared the end of this first book in the series, I also discovered that I would have to make some tough decisions. In a torrent of tears, I broke my main character’s heart. I wept with her and felt her pain, but I knew that I had to tell her story, even though it was only the workings of my imagination.
To make a very long story a little bit shorter, I finished writing the first book and outlined the plot of the next two. Not only had I written one book; I had written two. It was then I knew it wasn’t a fluke. I could write, and I was actually pretty good at it. I don’t write groundbreaking fiction and I’ll probably never win a major prize, but I can tell beautiful stories.
This isn’t the end of my story. I’m still in the middle of finding someone who loves my book enough to bring it to the world. But because of one book, a short 100 page novel about a shepherd, I recognized a dream I hadn’t even realized was there: I wanted to be a writer.
And so, this is the story of how a book changed my life.
