Dauntless by Elisa A. Bonnin Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 8/11/22}

In what ways has writing affected other aspects of your life?
I’ve always been a writer.
I started writing when I was eight years old, decided I wanted to get published someday,
and basically never stopped. So for almost all of my formative years, I considered myself a writer and defined myself by my desire to write and by the stories I came up with. That meant that I was basically always coming up with ideas.

On a road trip, when trying to fall asleep, in a waiting room, even in class when I was bored, my mind would immediately wander to my stories and I would imagine what I could write next. I volunteered for everything in school that was vaguely related to creative writing, which meant I wrote a lot of scripts for school plays and things like that. I wrote a lot of fanfiction, and I spent my high school years writing a story that I would write chapter by chapter and let my classmates read, letting them suggest what I could do next.

I honestly don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t a writer, and I know that my obsession with writing influenced my life in a lot of ways. I became really good at time management, because from a young age I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy novel and that to do so I would need to write upwards of 100,000 words. Figuring out how to do that taught me how to break up large tasks into manageable chunks, and how to make sure that I was contributing a little bit each day. This helped me a lot in othernaspects of my life, especially when I decided I wanted to get a PhD.

I learned how to draft quickly, edit my own words, and express myself as concisely as
possible, all things that helped me write scientific papers and cover letters for job
interviews. And I learned how to become comfortable with a high-rate of rejection,
because I spent my late teens and early 20s sending manuscripts out to agents and
publishers. This definitely helped me after I graduated and had to try to find a job in
research.

Writing is a part of who I am, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but it’s definitely interesting
to look back and consider all the ways that being a writer influenced my life.