I Wrote a Fantasy Novel

Some thoughts on the experience

Deepti Kannapan
5 min readJul 30, 2024

Below is a partial transcript of the embedded video.

Back in January 2023, I made a video series of me trying to unstick my novel project.

At that point, I’ve been working on my novel for over two years, and I hadn’t been able to finish a draft in a while. I kept running into questions and story problems.

In the winter of 2021, I made a focused effort on world building. It turned out a lot of the things that were sticking me in my project were world-building questions.

(So don’t let anyone tell you that world building is always procrastinating. In my case, it was the other way around. I was procrastinating answering world building questions by trying to make more and more drafts.)

So sitting down and brainstorming those questions, and making a series wiki, unstuck me for a while.

But then by winter of 2022, I started getting stuck again.

By the way, I realized I haven’t said much about my novel. It’s fantasy, and it has nature and coming of age themes, and a pretty subtle magic system. That’s all I’ll say about it for now.

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Deepti Kannapan

Painter, occasional cartoonist, aerospace engineer. Writes about sustainable technology, creativity, and journaling.