Samantha Laycock

Every novel, memoir, or collection of stories begins the same way. Not as a masterpiece but with a single idea.

Every January, creativity gets treated like a resolution. Write every day. Start the novel. Post consistently. Take yourself seriously as a writer and creative. And every year, by February, most of those plans quietly fall apart.

There’s a quiet kind of magic in the rhythm of fingers on a keyboard. One word becomes a sentence, a sentence becomes a page, and before you realize it, a story begins to take shape. What starts as fragments slowly forms a structure, page by page, block by block, until a book exists where there was once only an idea.