The story behind the stories
I’d been chasing the wrong version of myself my entire life.
In February 2023, I was writing in my journal in a tea house in the mountains of Taiwan when that sentence forced me to face something I’d been avoiding for years.
A few months earlier—in December 2022, the same month I published my first book—my only client shut down their business, and I was suddenly out of work. I had enough savings for one year, which meant I had exactly one chance to find out if writing could stop being a dream and become my life. So I didn’t look for new clients. I bet everything on becoming a writer.
But even then, I hadn’t stopped scattering myself. Programming. Digital marketing. AI. Photography. Whenever writing demanded that I choose it over everything else, I found another path that looked like progress but allowed me to postpone the decision.
In Taiwan, with my savings disappearing faster than planned, the excuses finally ran out. I could keep looking for other exits, or I could bet on writing once and for all.
One focus
The answer was obvious. The hard part was accepting everything it meant.
I’ve always needed to create. When I was eight, it was a cardboard house; at eleven, my first book; at fifteen, a 3D printer. I was always building, learning, or trying to turn an idea into something that could exist outside my head.
But writing was different.
Writing gave me a kind of freedom I couldn’t find anywhere else. I could begin with a blank page and invent a character, a city, or an entire society. I could walk into that world, live inside it for a few hours, and come back to real life slightly changed.
And still, for years, I treated writing like something secondary. Like a hobby I had to justify with a more conventional career. There was always another path that seemed more sensible—one I could follow before giving myself permission to truly try.
In that tea house, I realized I didn’t need to discover a new calling. I needed to stop protecting myself from the one I had already chosen.
Choosing writing didn’t mean closing off every other path. It meant finding the only one that could bring them all together.
Since then, writing has stopped being one possibility among many. It has become the center around which I build everything else.
The raw material
Writing turns all my obsessions into something alive.
For a long time, I thought choosing one path meant abandoning everything outside it. Writing does the opposite.
Anything that captures my curiosity can end up inside a story. Technology can become the system that sustains an immortal society. A city can become the setting for a conspiracy. A journey, a conversation, or a question can give birth to a character.
Culture, psychology, the ten countries I’ve lived in, the people I meet, and the ideas I can’t get out of my head stop being separate interests. Through writing, I can connect them and turn them into worlds other people can explore.
That’s why I don’t want to create stories that merely fill a few hours. I want them to pull you in from the first page and keep you there until the last—but also leave something behind when they end: a question, an emotion, or a different way of seeing the world.
I write because a story can entertain you while allowing you to live a life that could never have been your own.
The road ahead
I want to write for the rest of my life.
My name is Kian Noren. I write stories that feed the spirit without sacrificing the fun. Stories you can binge with the addictive pleasure of a great TV show—but that still leave an aftertaste. Questions that stick with you for days, without turning into an academic paper.
And I’m chasing something very specific.
You may have heard the idea of “1,000 true fans”: a thousand people who don’t just consume what you make—they wait for it, share it, and feel part of it.
My goal is that idea, but with three extra zeros: to bring together one million true fans around these stories.
Not because I want to collect followers or become famous. I’m doing it because I want to write for the rest of my life, and I need a goal big enough that the journey never runs out of story.
On YouTube, I document that journey as it happens: the progress, experiments, travels, setbacks, and obsessions that shape me as a writer and eventually find their way into my stories.
I don’t want to show you only the finished result. I want you to witness everything that happens before a book reaches your hands.
If you decide to join me, you won’t arrive after everything is finished. You’ll be here while I’m building it.
And perhaps one day, you’ll be able to look back and say:
“I was there when it all began.”