Craft tip# 9: Why do I write what I write?

People ask writers why they write what they write as if the answer will be neat, respectable, and suitable for a panel discussion.

It usually is not.

I remember being in high school, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, reading The Catcher in the Rye. Around the same time, I had either just read Fight Club or was deep in my Chuck Palahniuk phase, which lasted well into college. I also loved The Book Thief.

Looking back, the pattern was already there: damage, voice, irony, grief, instability, tenderness—people trying and failing to make sense of themselves in a world that was not especially interested in helping.

Then it hit me: I could write a story for myself.

So I did.

Over the course of a school year, I wrote a 40,000-word draft about a dying rockstar with three split personalities trying to survive the complications of getting older. It was, in hindsight, The Catcher in the Rye wandering into Fight Club by way of adolescent emotional chaos. Then I let it sit on a hard drive like a small, persistent haunting.

Apparently, my brain never developed normal hobbies.

Give me political tension, emotional damage, desire with bad timing, a little menace, and at least one person making terrible choices for extremely understandable reasons, and I am home. I keep returning to stories about power, vulnerability, performance, and the dangerous gap between who people are and who they need the world to believe they are.

On the craft side, I gravitate toward work where humor and pain occupy the same space. That balance feels closest to how life actually behaves—not in clean categories, but in collisions.

Then came 2012.

In college, I wrote an early draft of Starforge between classes, awkward dates, loneliness, and the slow realization that life is complicated no matter which gender you fall in and out of love with. I got about fifteen chapters in before I stopped.

Not because the draft was good. It wasn’t.

But also not because it was hopeless.

I stopped because I didn’t yet have the skill to finish what I had started.

I think I cut chapter fifteen because it leaned heavily into religion, and at the time I was still trying to figure myself out more than I was trying to write about God. Even now, when I write gods and goddesses, I tend to write them as flawed people with too much power and all the usual emotional defects. It makes them more interesting. Probably more honest.

Then came 2020, when the world ended and everyone was expected to behave as though that was a normal thing to live through.

I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t lose my job. Instead, I was told to be ready in case I was called to help vaccinate people if the CDC needed us. It was one of the strangest and most chaotic periods of my life.

And somewhere inside that chaos, I started writing again.

Part of it was time. Part of it was fear. Part of it was the need to make something when everything felt unstable in a very public way. And part of it was curiosity. I wanted to know whether AI could write a better novel than I could.

So I studied Ai prompting.

That ended up helping me in my medical-field survival job, but it also helped me as a writer. I used AI to assist with outlines, developmental plans, and writing exercises—not to replace my voice, but to give my ideas structure. To give the chaos somewhere to go.

And this time, I finished the novel.

Then I submitted it to over 300 literary agents, pitching my sci-fi novel as Good Omens meets Dune, which at the time felt both accurate and ambitious. Later, after allegations against Neil Gaiman became public and parts of the industry started distancing themselves from him, that comparison became less useful.

By then, I had already collected around 200 rejections.

By 250 rejections on QueryTracker—plus me complaining loudly enough on the site that the website master probably deserved hazard pay—the process somehow led me toward a hybrid publisher and an acquisitions editor I later blind beta-read for.

Around that same time, I submitted to Baen Books and started writing the follow-up Starforge novel as a film noir detective story, because apparently my response to uncertainty is to make things even stranger on purpose.

Baen rejected me.

Phoenix Voices Publishing did not.

While my first two books were in that long stretch between editing, production, and becoming real objects in the world, I started writing a queer romantasy.

Partly because the genre was trending.

Partly because most of what I saw didn’t reflect me as a person. And partly because I wasn’t seeing nearly enough stories with a male Asian love interest at the center.

That mattered to me.

Not in a branding sense. Not in a market-calculation sense. In a real sense.

My wife, who is Chinese, has been a huge inspiration for my books. So has a close friend of mine who is also one of my former partners. I’m not naming him here because that’s his business, not mine, but he became the foundation for the main character in my romantasy.

When I gave him the rough draft of Kitchen of the Stars and asked whether I could use his first name while changing the last name, he told me it read true and it was a story he would have read when he was younger.

That meant a lot.

Since then, I’ve completed the Starforge series and kept working on the other ideas I’ve been carrying around for years like badly behaved ghosts.

So why do I write what I write?

Because I’m drawn to moments where people stop holding themselves together. Where identity slips, where performance fails, where love collides with fear, and where people keep going anyway.

I write about longing, damage, humor, survival, and badly timed desire because those are the stories that feel the most honest to me.

Some obsessions don’t leave.

They just get better sentences.

If this resonated with you, leave a comment and tell me: what kinds of stories do you keep returning to, and what do they reveal about you?

Xiào kǒu cháng kāi, and as always—until next time. 🧋✦

Alex Eos 🧋