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Back in 2019, i hosted a table read at the ���ϲ����� House in Los Angeles for a television pilot I’d written titled “Paper Cut.” I didn’t know it then, but I was only scratching the surface of a story that had much more to teach me.

At the time, I was working for Emmy Award-winning director and president of the Directors Guild of America, Thomas Schlamme, known for his work on “The West Wing.” While my career as a producer was advancing, my dream of being a working writer kept slipping farther away.

At its best, television is deeply collaborative. In Hollywood, it takes about 300 people to say yes to make anything happen. That’s part of what makes the industry both beautiful and brutal. But with so many moving parts, nothing is guaranteed. Even the most promising projects fall apart overnight.

Then came 2020. The industry ground to a halt, and suddenly I was on Zoom calls with Schlamme, director Steven Soderbergh and public health experts, trying to solve the impossible: how to get an entire workforce back on set. The pressure was intense, and my creative pursuits felt paralyzed.

Out of frustration and a desire to create again, I signed up for a novel-writing class. Over seven months, I transformed that old pilot into a rough draft. I learned quickly that writing is really rewriting, and that progress comes not from bursts of inspiration but from discipline.

For the next two years, I helped other writers make their dreams come true at my day job at Dynamic Television, a production company behind projects like the hit Netflix series “Ginny and Georgia.” But on weekends, I was secretly chasing mine. And in January 2023, I sent my first query letters to agents.

That’s when everything shifted. In publishing, the joke is you only need one yes. It isn’t quite that simple — you need an agent, an editor and a publisher’s approval — but compared to Hollywood’s system, the math felt radically different. That summer, “Paper Cut” sold in competitive auctions in both the U.S. and the U.K.

The most refreshing part? My novel is wholly mine. Very few hands touched it, and the ones that did — my brilliant editors — honored my vision and guided me to make the story sharper and more impactful.

Now I can say I’m a working writer. My debut hits bookshelves in January and I’m well into a draft of my second novel. It may look different than I thought it would, but I’d still chalk it up to a dream come true.

For aspiring creatives, here’s what I’ve learned: Don’t wait for an opportunity to knock on your door. Make one. Sometimes, trying something that scares you — teaching yourself a new medium, becoming a student again — is exactly what leads you onto the right path. You may even discover your dream can change.

Rachel Taff ’14 is an author and television producer. Her debut novel, “Paper Cut,” will be published in January by William Morrow and Corvus and is available for pre-order wherever books are sold. “Paper Cut” follows a true-crime icon infamous for escaping a cult as a teenager whose future is threatened when buried secrets come back to haunt her.