A Hobbyist Writer

It’s a day when the sunlight isn’t too bad. Even in Seoul, flowers have begun to bloom little by little. Seeing the late-blooming cherry blossoms brings both a sense of delight and a hint of sadness.

I couldn’t sleep last night. It was a day filled with fatigue. In the afternoon, I had to prepare for an important negotiation meeting. Though it ended more anticlimactically than I expected, I received good news today—the negotiation had passed a critical milestone. Late at night, I returned home and spent a long while going through trade records. There was an issue where the entire requested amount wasn’t purchased during a high-volume trade on the system. It wasn’t critical, but as I plan to deal with larger sums, I knew I had to refine the process. I keyed in numbers one by one, checking formulas and algorithms. It must’ve been around 1 a.m. by the time I was done.

I was ready to sleep from exhaustion, but for some reason, sleep didn’t come. I thought deeply about the dream I had the night before. I had dreamt that I was a part-time worker at a local grocery store, where I witnessed a gruesome murder. I felt compelled to turn that dream into a novel. I got out of bed and sat back down at my computer to sketch out a synopsis. I set up the basic plot and built backstories for the characters. Since so many forms of media already cover murder and thrillers, I felt the need for striking, vivid imagery. What I chose was a concept involving dismembered bodies discarded in food waste bags. The killer would always dismember victims and toss them in food waste bags as a grotesque form of display.

While I was able to vividly imagine individual scenes as I wrote the synopsis, weaving them into a coherent narrative arc wasn’t so easy. To create a solid synopsis, characters need justification. Their actions are a blend of upbringing and genetics. Every serial killer, no matter how horrifying, has a childhood. Through this, their actions can be portrayed with causality—either helping readers understand or creating further confusion.

Although I haven’t written many novels, building characters and crafting a narrative felt like breathing life into imaginary humans. If God were a novelist, perhaps this is how humans were made.

Once the narrative is complete, characters must take on visual form—height, age, physical features, gender, favorite clothes, preferred food, body scent, favorite shoes, whether they wear accessories, hairstyle, education, current job, wealth, friends, romantic relationships, family… When all these elements are defined, you can almost infer the character’s life. The writer then weaves that life into emotional imagery, as if observing someone else’s existence.

The quality of a story depends on how vivid that imagery is and how delicately it’s conveyed. A novelist who can see a clear vision can portray a world with the clarity of a high-resolution photograph. Just building such a world and shaping its inhabitants takes a lot of time.

Some writers start by crafting a world and the events within it. Others build from the protagonist’s perspective and shape the world around the story they want to tell. Both methods are common, and neither is more correct than the other. After a few hours outlining the synopsis and major story arcs, I finally felt sleep coming on. Or maybe it’s better to say the hours kept passing, until finally around 5 a.m., I could close my eyes with ease.

While imagining the novel, I began thinking like a filmmaker. I used to enjoy capturing short stories through performances. Not as an actor, but by filming others and editing their performances. I loved the process of editing so much that I would lose track of time, even on a sluggish old computer. Thankfully, the videos I created always seemed to bring joy to those who watched them. People really enjoyed them.

If I had more chances in life, I would want to fully live out different lives—the architect I once dreamed of becoming, the true hacker, the novelist telling stories, the guitarist who plays with flair. If I had started piano earlier, perhaps I could have been a jazz pianist. Now I’m older, too immersed in my current work and company to chase those dreams fully. But I’m still grateful that I can make time to do what I love.

I don’t know how consistently I’ll continue writing fiction. In creating these fictional worlds, I’ve imagined the most despicable villains and, conversely, the tragic side characters who must die at their hands. For a story to be complete, someone must suffer. It’s a strange irony.

A good story needs conflict. No tale can remain happy from start to finish: happy, happy, happy, and then happily ever after. There’s no interest in that. To draw the reader to the final page, there must be villains who make them seethe, events that make them cry. It’s this fertile ground of misery that creates emotional payoff.

To reach the final page, I must imagine more evil, more death, more horror. And in doing so, I can’t help but compare the fictional world to our own. The damp, musty reality. The suffocating heat, the sticky sweat. These unpleasant sensations ironically make a story more immersive. They are raw and sensory. If you can make readers smell the scene, if they can taste the blood in the air—that alone is art. Art has the power to evoke emotions that never existed before.

So far, I’ve mostly written essays and technical books. I’ve dabbled in fiction, but even to myself, they felt lacking. How much must a hobbyist write before they can guide a reader all the way to the final period of the last page? I hope that one day, my story might quench someone’s sorrow, even for a moment—like cool water with ice cubes floating in it on a hot summer day. With that hope, I lay the foundation of my novel.