The answer is an indisputable yes. Write your dream novel and write it now. 

Your book doesn’t have to be a best seller or garner Harry Potter acclamation. It doesn’t have to gain positive reviews from strangers who do so in anonymity. The novel, which has been your dream to write, needs only to fulfill your vision. 

I waited fifty years to write my dream novel, and the satisfaction of fulfilling a long dream is indescribable. 

Since my high school days—eons ago—writing was what I wanted to do. My English teacher said I didn’t have it in me. The school counsellor told me it wasn’t what my career tests indicated I should pursue. My parents steered me away from writing, a profession they said wouldn’t generate an income. 

Those influential adults, whose opinion I relied on as a young, impressionable, naïve teenager, pushed me into a computer programming career, which was the rage at that time. In the end, I ended up hating the field of computer programming and anything associated with it. 

Bills needing to be paid, I accepted the first job that came my way. It’s how I fell into Sales and Marketing. I’d never thought of pursuing a sales career, but I excelled at it, and it stuck for decades. 

Now in my fifties, deep into my mid-life crisis, I gave writing a shot. That’s a one-eighty turn—three times over.

What I’m saying is, if writing your book is what you’d like to do, do it. Whether you write a good book or not is not as crucial as scratching that itch and doing what you want to do. At worst, you’ll find out writing is not for you. At best, you’ll enjoy it so much you will become good at it. What is important is that you shouldn’t let others dissuade you if it’s something you want to try. 

In retrospect, my teachers weren’t very inspiring, and my counsellor, had she cared, would at least have encouraged me to give writing the old college try—if only as a sideline. What’s the worst that would happen if I failed? I’d shed some tears and re-group once I was cried out then, cross it off my bucket list, and get on with life.

At least I could say I gave it a shot, and I, not everyone else, decided it wasn’t for me.

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