Life is something we are all always figuring out.
For me, I thought I had my answer: I lived to create stories.
Specifically, stories about the future. Stories that asked questions about what life would be like 20-30 years down the road. What forces are shaping the world of tomorrow? Who has the power to create their own vision of tomorrow? And how can we empower others to live their best life today, tomorrow, and every day? In short, how can we use story to make the world of today and tomorrow a better place?
Since I was a little kid, I would obsessively think about and experience stories. Whether it was Super Baby, a comic book series I wrote in the fourth grade, Lost, my take on Hatchet written soon after, or Control Freakz, my first published book that I finished at 13, creating stories has always been my passion.
But writing was more than just a passion for me.
It was therapeutic, it was how I expressed the ideas always bouncing through my brain.
It was what made my life worth living.
I worked for 6 months on my book while attending middle school at the Charleston School of Arts and playing trombone in the band. When I was done with my first book, which has never seen the light of day, I emailed my grandma and Uncle John (he used to own a bookstore in Key West) a pdf copy.
This is the first page:
“Before the great crash my family and I lived in Scottsdale, a large suburban town right outside of Phoenix Arizona.
Before the great crash life was good. I’d spend my free time hanging out with my two best friends Olivia and Hunter, we’ve pretty much been inseparable since birth. My mom is a former senator of Arizona, and she served on the U.S Senate for 6 years and that’s where she met Jennifer, Hunter’s mom. And my dad worked with Olivia’s dad at Auto-Bots, a company that engineers autonomous weapons.
Besides just hanging out with Hunter and Olivia, I enjoyed playing with my dog Lucky, going outside with my family, and I was young enough at the time where school was still fun. But that soon was all about to end.
Before the Great Crash I had everything a 7 year old girl could ever want, my wishes always fulfilled by my loving parents. Before the Great Crash America was still the land of the free and home of the brave.
After the Great Crash, my life went to hell and America went right with it.”
At the time I didn’t know it, but this story was about me as much as it was about the fictional character Natalie. At 7 years old my own parents got divorced, the 2008 financial crash happening at around the same time. School used to be fun for me, but then the pressure of grades and homework eroded my own purist passion for learning.
My mom is not a senator (she used to own a muffin shop in Connecticut) and my dad is not an engineer (he’s a former stockbroker on Wall Street).
But, in this story, when Natalie is 7 years old her father disappears, not unlike how my own dad left the house when I was 7 years old. There are endless other connections. The feeling of loneliness Natalie felt. She even states in this first draft:
“I was never happy. In the wake of my family’s death, I had no explanation for what happened and no one to talk to. Most of the time I felt alone and depressed, without Hunter and Ethan I don’t know what would’ve happened to me.
The fact that I was mercilessly bullied didn’t help either. And everyone constantly seemed happy. They were unphased by anything. The kids were even happy to do homework. What kid is excited to do homework?
Since everyone was constantly happy or at least just okay with life it made me feel even more upset and more of an outcast. On many occasions my thoughts drifted to dark places, but knowing that my family wouldn’t want me to do it always saved me. Knowing that I could still find out what happened to my family kept me going.
And now all I needed was one more miracle and I would finally get my answer.”
From the age of 7 to 14 years old, I too had no idea what had happened to my family. Why my parents were divorced. Why my dad lived on his mother’s couch, unable to see me and my brother after the evening. Why we lived in a house that was falling into disrepair. Or why my dad always blamed the divorce on my mom without an explanation.
I felt like I had no one to trust. Like I was alone. And creating these characters finally gave me someone to talk to. It gave me hope.
Ironically, writing the first draft of this story, a dystopian adventure where Natalie and her two best friends try and figure out why their families were taken from them and why the world around them fell apart eventually led to me figuring out the answers as to what happened in my own life.
My grandma was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer that winter. My mom flew up to New York, where we had moved away from to live in Charleston, South Carolina. I stayed with my dad for the first time in my life. This was shortly after he had also moved down to Charleston, getting an apartment for a brief period.
I was beginning to work on my second book in the Control Freakz series. It was called Delusional. Maybe at times cause I felt delusional, maybe at times because I felt the people around me were delusional.
I was desperate for answers as to what happened to my life—to our family. Then one late night, as we were up watching television, my dad told me. He thought we were finally ready. That we deserved to know.
He told us that he had an addiction to sports gambling, over the course of years slowly gambling away every penny that my family had. Eventually he resorted to stealing from family members, taking out lines of credit on the mortgage, until eventually he stole 60k from one of his clients… and got caught.
The FBI arrested him one day after me and my brother got on the school bus in 2009. My mom soon learned that her husband of nearly 20 years had lied to her about well… almost everything. A divorce soon followed with years of legal and personal turmoil.
My dad never went to jail. Of course, I’m happy he didn’t. The privilege of being white in America with a white-collar crime and not having my father locked away during the formative years of my life is one I am still grateful to this day for and one that I also owe to my own grandfather (my mom’s dad).
Given that my entire relationship with my dad consisted of playing sports with him and talking about sports, I found it hard to reckon what had happened. One of the major reasons for me even writing so much the last few months before that was due to a knee injury that had kept me from attending basketball practice and running as much.
After hearing this news, I was devastated.
I decided then, right as I turned 14 years old, that my life was about creating stories. And that I didn’t want to escape the moment with drugs or alcohol, but instead live my best life in the moment.
So, I kept writing.
Soon I had a second book written and was a freshman at Wando High School. I was struggling to still grapple with everything that had happened with my family but was playing sports less, writing more, and thinking lots about my passion for science and technology.
If I didn’t have writing to turn to during that period of my life, I don’t know what would have happened to me. In many ways, it was my escape, my reflection, my therapy, and my creative passion all bundled into one hot mess that gave me purpose.
The rest of my story between 14 and 18 has a lot of different milestones and memories, all of which I will share on later days. The highlights were publishing 3 books in high school and working at a resort to fund their publication. Then I graduated high school a year early, didn’t apply to college, and took a gap year where I wrote 9 books and learned Facebook and Amazon Ads among many other things.
By the time I was at college, somehow attending Harvard (which getting in is a story for another day too), I was mind-blowingly stressed out.
Writing books about the future combined all my passions for storytelling, technology and science, and politics and people while giving me the freedom to pursue my own projects and live anywhere in the world.
It sounded amazing, except that required me to make a living at it.
And I was not. Not even close.
Throughout high school and even a good chunk of my gap year, I didn’t care about metrics or about sales. I wrote my first 9 books only ever selling a couple of hundred copies of all my books combined, most of this happening at a single book convention in Rochester, New York (which the flight cost more than what I made, but it was way worth it in fun and I did sell out of books which was so cool!). I didn’t care about the ads, the revenue, or anything like that.
I just wanted to create the best possible story that I believed in.
But after 2 and a half years of publishing books, I knew if I wanted to make a business selling books I’d have to try and sell books.
Oh boy, did I have no idea how much this would mess with my mind. I was supposed to be having the time of my life. I was 18 years old working full time writing books and living out my dream. I was doing the only thing I ever wanted. But internally, I felt like I was slowly living a nightmare.
What happened to my life this last year, I will spare you for another time.
But what I will say, is that the biggest reason you haven’t gotten any emails from me and that I haven’t released any books is simply because I gave up on being a writer. To love something so much and have it become your worst enemy is heartbreaking. To do it out of pure passion but be forced to try and make money out of it in order to pursue that very passion taints one’s relationship to their own stories and makes the process of creating feel forced (maybe explaining why I wrote 9 books in a single year).
I didn’t think it was possible for me to make a living doing what I love. And more importantly, I didn’t think it was possible for me to be happy writing stories, to be pursuing that passion. It was too stressful. Too unpredictable. And most of all, I thought I wasn’t good enough.
So, I’ve spent this last year experimenting, traveling, and reflecting. And also working a lot. Maybe too much… actually definitely too much.
Ultimately, I tried YouTube, founding my own tech company, live streaming, and a million adventures along the way. It was lots of fun, at times extremely hard, but it always brought me back to one thing: storytelling.
It’s like a disease that I can’t get rid of. I see it everywhere, I feel it everywhere, and every day my mind is plagued with dozens of ideas to create. As much as I tried to redefine myself and hide from my passion, in the end I found myself coming back to school after a 22,000 mile road trip this spring feeling one desire: to write.
So I started writing, all while figuring out how I could balance that with needing to make a living doing something. A few months later, I decided I wanted to dive fully back into writing, around November to be exact. But I still had no plans for how I would grapple with the need to sell my books and the desire to simply create the stories that ooze out of my mind.
Then this last week, I connected with Max Reisinger, an incredible YouTuber who you should definitely watch. He had this infectious energy of just wanting to create a story, not giving a damn how many views it got or how many people liked it. It was this inspiring sort of drive just to create, and just to be true to oneself that made me feel like I wasn’t alone.
Now, the idea I’ve had all along just to write and see where it takes me and be fully dedicated to it, is what I not only feel but now believe with every bone in my body. And every time I feel a pull in a direction that takes me away from that flow and passion, I have a community to turn to.
Finally, I feel free from the pressure and stress of being a storyteller in the 21st century, an age where algorithms and data are more important than actual people (at least it feels that way at times).
I put everything I had into writing. My memories, my darkest moments, and my greatest hopes, I poured them onto the pages. Not getting sales, the thing that society values, felt like a devaluation of my own self. But, a great story isn’t about a number. It’s about the feeling and place that it takes one to. It’s about sharing something that you believe can do good in the world, not just sell good. It’s about living in the moment and not worrying about what will happen tomorrow if X happens. But instead realizing that life today is colorless unless you decide to be the author of your own story, not let the world write it for you.
I have made a vow to myself, to no longer care about the result or end process of my creation. If my books sell that’s great. If they don’t sell that’s also okay. I now know that my passion is for creating stories, not selling them. My passion is for sharing my life and thoughts with the world on pages. And no matter where that journey takes me to, it’s that sail that I am setting out against the wind every single day.
My life is about creating the best possible story because that’s what makes me feel happier than anything and it’s those stories when remaining true to myself and true to the people that I love that can change the world for the better. It’s my ideas, unfettered and unoptimized for any algorithm, that can help change how others think about the world. And it’s the perspectives and experiences I share, my life and world all wrapped up into fiction, that can give others tools to think and approach their own world differently.
And ultimately, story can bring us all together to make anything happen. And it’s my mission in life to use story to bring that future to life in an as equitable and amazing a way as possible.
But it’s about something even deeper than that.
Creating stories isn’t just my purpose. It’s what saved me. It gave me a place to feel the pain of my childhood, it gave me a voice when I felt I had none, and it allowed me to discover myself and my happiness in a time when I needed it most.
And I have a belief that stories can do that for others too. It’s why I don’t just write these things down and keep them in a drawer. They are meant to be shared with others.
So this is it from me for now.
I’m back to writing. And I’m working on a new book I hope to share with you soon. I also plan to share with you more about my life not only from the last year, but everything that has gone into the process of my creation.
Thanks for reading my books.
And no matter what, whether 100, 10, or 1 million people read my next book, I’ll always be creating stories. Because in my heart I know that I can do this. In my heart, I can feel the stories inside of me that must be brought to life.
Creating stories is my reason for living.
Thank you for being a part of that reason. And thank you for being a part of my life in a way that is more intimate and beautiful than anything in this world.
A part of my story.
All the best to everyone.
And don’t forget…
Together we are boundless.
~Michael Evans
P.S. Inspiration for this also came from this video which I highly recommend you watch: https://youtu.be/Tiu8Aro-U2I
Author’s Note: I am writing this to you from my dorm room, one day after finishing my classes for the first semester of my sophomore year at Harvard.