I have always believed that a writer’s life begins before the page.
It begins in the listening. In the books carried through ordinary hours. In the sentence that arrives while walking, driving, exercising, waiting at an airport gate, sitting in a bus, standing between one life and the next. It begins in the strange inward pressure of an idea that will not leave until it has been given a form.
For years, my reading life has looked less like a quiet library and more like a moving river. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. I carry voices with me through the day. If an idea rises suddenly, I record it before it disappears back into the dark. In the evening, at the gym, I listen to music or more books, depending on what the soul can bear that day. Sometimes knowledge is needed. Sometimes rhythm. Sometimes silence.
I have always tried to read far more than I write. At least five times more. That was my old rule, and I still believe in the wisdom behind it. A writer who does not read becomes a dry well. Nonfiction gives me knowledge, structure, ideas, history, discipline. Fiction gives me something deeper. It teaches movement, atmosphere, courage, tenderness, timing. It teaches how a world can be built from breath and shadow. It teaches how a sentence can carry a kingdom.
My preferred form has changed with the years, but only slightly. Audiobooks still come first because they let reading enter the body while life is happening. Then print books, because there is something holy about the weight of a book in the hands. Then eBooks, which are useful, especially in airports, buses, hotel rooms, and sleepless nights. When I travel, I still like having a book with me, even if it is hidden inside an iPad. A journey feels incomplete without some other journey traveling beside it.
In 2015, I wrote that my goal was to write one million words each year.
That sounds young to me now, but not foolish.
There was hunger in that goal. There was faith. There was a young man trying to build a life out of language before he fully knew what life would ask from him. I wanted to write books. I wanted to publish every year. I wanted to pour out everything that had been gathering inside me since childhood, migration, friendship, travel, faith, ambition, suffering, and wonder.
I still believe in output. I still believe in discipline. But I no longer measure writing only by volume.
A million words mean nothing if none of them carry blood.
A single honest paragraph, written from the place where life has broken open, may be worth more than a hundred polished pages. Time teaches this. Marriage teaches this. Children teach this. Grief teaches this. The hospital teaches this. The long night beside those you love teaches this.
So why do I write now?
I write because life passes too quickly unless someone bears witness.
I write because my children will one day want to know who we were before memory becomes fog. I write because Aura and Avik deserve more than photographs. They deserve the inner weather of their family. They deserve to know what their mother endured, what their father feared, what grace carried us when strength was gone. They deserve to know the story beneath the story.
When I was younger, I wrote that I wanted to create fictional worlds for my future children and grandchildren, the way C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and J.K. Rowling created worlds that a child could enter at night and remember forever.
I still want that.
I want to build worlds where courage matters. Where goodness is tested but not mocked. Where children discover that wonder is not escape, but a way of seeing reality more deeply. I want to write stories that can be read aloud in a room where the lights are soft and the day is ending. Stories that make a child feel protected, enlarged, and summoned.
Back then, I wrote that I had some time before my children would ask me for bedtime stories.
Now the children are here.
Aura is no longer an idea in the future. She is a voice, a face, a will, a flame. Avik has arrived through fear, blood, machines, prayer, and mercy. The future I once imagined has become a house full of small shoes, tired parents, sacred exhaustion, and love with no clean edges.
This changes the writer.
It removes vanity. It removes abstraction. It asks for truth.
I also write because there is a spiritual record inside every life, and if we do not attend to it, we lose the hidden meaning of our own days. I have always wanted to write memoir, but not merely as autobiography. I want to write the story of a soul moving through family, history, migration, friendship, loss, beauty, temptation, endurance, and grace.
I want to write about extraordinary human experiences, not as spectacle, but as openings. Those moments when reality seems thinner than usual. When the visible world trembles and something unseen looks through. When a person knows, without being able to prove it, that life is not only matter moving toward dust.
There is also a part of me that writes to strengthen others. In 2015, I called this motivation, self-help, and self-growth. I would use different words now. The intention remains. I want my writing to help people live with more courage, purpose, and inward dignity. I want to write against despair, against numbness, against the slow collapse of the human spirit into distraction.
But I do not want to shout advice from a stage of certainty.
I want to speak from the road itself.
Because the truth is, I am still learning how to live. Still learning how to love well. Still learning how to endure without hardening. Still learning how to build, forgive, protect, listen, pray, and begin again. The best writing does not come from superiority. It comes from attention. It comes from wounds that have refused to become bitterness.
One day, after I have written enough of what was given to me to write, I may move more fully into speaking and film. I have always seen that path somewhere ahead. Public speaking. Documentaries. Movies. The spoken word. The image. The face. The music under the scene. The story carried not only by language, but by light.
That desire is still alive.
But I understand it differently now. Film and speech are not departures from writing. They are extensions of the same impulse. To gather what is scattered. To make visible what is hidden. To help another human being feel less alone before the mystery of being alive.
Why do I write?
I write to remember.
I write to leave a lamp burning for my children.
I write to honor the dead, bless the living, and speak to the future before I arrive there.
I write because some truths enter us as pain and leave us as prayer.
I write because the soul is always trying to become audible.
And because, if I listen closely enough, there is still a voice beneath the noise saying:
Do not let this vanish.
Do not let this love go unnamed.
Do not pass through the world without leaving a witness.
