I Never Planned to Become an Author

Becoming an author was never part of the plan.

There was no grand decision, no lifelong declaration that I would one day write books. It happened far more casually than that. One day my husband threw me a challenge: write a book based on the silliest concept we could think of. It was his playful way of nudging me to finally start something creative.

What began as a joke somehow became a doorway.

Looking back, storytelling had always lived quietly inside me.

As a child, I spent long hours alone at home while my parents worked. Like many children of that time, my companions were television and a box of art supplies. But this was before twenty-four-hour television, before the internet filled every spare minute with endless distractions.

And there is only so much television a child can watch.

The rest of the time, my mind wandered. I daydreamed endlessly, imagining people, places, and stories that did not exist anywhere except inside my head.

Some of those stories followed me to school. They appeared during math lessons when the numbers in my textbook began to blur and dance in front of my eyes. They helped me survive history homework, which I must admit was never my favorite subject.

Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly a stellar student. But thankfully, I never failed.

What I did learn early, however, was that stories are everywhere.

In many ways, we are all born storytellers. Children invent worlds effortlessly. Imagination is perhaps the only thing that keeps us tethered to the innocence of childhood, the one creative instinct we all begin life with.

Even as an adult, that instinct never quite left me.

After work, when I would sit in cafés or restaurants, I often found myself quietly observing the people around me. Couples sharing meals. Friends laughing over coffee. Someone lost in thought by a window.

My mind would immediately begin weaving stories around them.

Who were they?

What had their day been like?

What conversations had they carried with them into that moment?

It may sound a little intrusive, but it’s also strangely perceptive. Writers often live in this quiet habit of observation.

Years later, after watching several author masterclasses, I discovered something comforting: many great writers do exactly the same thing.

Apparently, imagining lives for strangers is a fairly common occupational hazard.

Still, I might never have taken writing seriously if it hadn’t been for my daughter.

Bedtime became our storytelling hour. I began retelling familiar fairy tales, but with playful twists and ridiculous details. The same old stories she had heard a hundred times suddenly became fun again.

She loved them.

We laughed our way through countless nights, inventing characters and absurd adventures together. Eventually we started creating entirely original stories.

And somewhere between those bedtime giggles and that silly challenge from my husband, something unexpected happened.

I became an author.

Of course, telling stories to your child in the comfort of your home is very different from publishing them for the world to read.

As adults, we carry a quiet fear of opinions. Reviews. Rejection. Criticism. Social judgment. All those invisible barriers that make creative expression feel risky.

After all, I am not someone with a long résumé of traditional professions. I’m simply an artist and a small business entrepreneur.

But sometimes all you really need to overcome fear is a little ignorant courage—the kind that allows you to simply be yourself.

In my case, that courage arrived disguised as a silly challenge. Once I started writing, there was no turning back.

I write the kinds of stories I would love to read.

Many of my characters are inspired by people I might have encountered somewhere in my life. I imagine them in new circumstances, different cities, unexpected situations.

As for the places in my stories, some of them exist only in imagination. I’ve written about locations I’ve never actually visited—at least not before writing about them.

But then again, H. G. Wells didn’t really need to time travel to write The Time Machine, and Jules Verne didn’t have to journey to the center of the Earth to imagine it.

And if they did… we might never know.

Stories begin with curiosity. Add inspiration, a little research, and a lot of imagination, and soon a narrative begins to take shape.

I enjoyed creating these stories more than I ever expected.

I hope you enjoy reading them just as much.

For now, words continue to lead me into places I’ve never been before, and I am enjoying every step of the journey.

I’m in no rush to find the perfect destination.

Life, after all, is a learning curve that never stops turning.

I’m Sanyukta Stargazer.

And these are the books I loved writing.

https://tinyurl.com/y22953el

If you’d like, I can also make a more “author bio essay” version (like you see on Penguin Random House or HarperCollins author pages), which would make this even more polished and publishable for Medium or literary magazines.