My Journey Through Writing Fire & Flight

Behind the Scenes of Fire & Flight

As I’m sure many of you have come to know, Fire & Flight captures the personal journeys of my main characters, Nyla, Xander, and Shamira. Not only did I get to see these characters come to life and develop on the page, but through their stories and writing Fire & Flight, I found myself undertaking a journey of my own. While I didn’t know it when I began my very first draft, Fire & Flight is as much an adventure of my own as it is my characters’s.

When I first began writing Fire & Flight, I didn’t know what I was doing, where the story was going, or what my intention was. There was no plan, no outline. I only had a few rough sentences, barely a paragraph. I had a girl with silver hair and lilac-colored eyes, and she was lost, in a perilous woods, and utterly alone. I was immediately captivated by the concept, and began pouring myself into her story. This was the first time in a long time that I’d been truly excited and invigorated by the prospect of something. You see, at this point in my life, I was battling a chronic illness and kind of “lost” myself. I began to empathize with this heroine that I would call “Nyla.”

That was somewhere around my junior year of high school, and through the years Fire & Flight became my refuge, then my pride, and now it’s a part of me in a way I didn’t know it ever would be. Nyla, Xander, Shamira, and this world became a vehicle for my life experiences in grief, friendship, and my hopes. Through them, I was able to tackle different aspects of life and, in doing so, it helped me grow as a person. I learned different depths and intentions to emotions that I never realized before. Grief can be difficult, but did you know it can be beautiful too? Through my losses, I found meaningful connections and experiences I otherwise wouldn’t have or never would’ve considered before, growing closer to those around me and coming into who I saw myself as in my own head. Anger, while volatile, can be a source of creation. When channeled productively, I learned that anger can be harnessed into something productive, such as motivation or even inspiration. With focus and determination, the anger fades and in its place is often satisfaction at what you’ve accomplished with that energy.

Prior to creating my characters’ journeys, I would’ve never thought or examined the range of these different emotions, and how grief or anger can be more than the negative connotations we have of them. I never expected to have my way of thinking challenged or my view of the world to be affected by writing this novel, let alone the lessons I learned and the personal journey writing Fire & Flight over the last several years of my life has taken me on. Grief, while painful, not only led me to create something so magical but also made me more receptive to things like taking an excessive number of pictures to capture the mundane and the important moments in my life. Anger, as it turns out, isn’t always just an ugly force that we should try to tamp down, but it can be the motivating factor into making ourselves stronger and more mature as a person.

So while my characters embark on their own adventure, I find mine coming into a new chapter—I have high hopes that this new chapter ends just as “happily ever after” as the previous. When I realized writing was something I want to spend my life doing, a revelation that came upon me with the start of Fire & Flight’s second draft, I also realize the thing I want most from my writing is to have an impact on others. I hope my work takes readers on a journey of their own as well. Sometimes, I think, we all just need a little adventure and there’s no better way to travel than within the pages of a good book.

I’m beyond excited to finally be able to share Fire & Flight with all of you this summer. Keep an eye out for July 2022—I hear the weather’s great in the Shadow Forest during Hugony!