Writing
I was babbling on amongst my friends that some of the fiction that I was reading was not particularly entertaining. I claimed that I might be able to write something at least as good. After all, I had been nationally published at the age of 18 in my field. Could fiction be much harder? One buddy gave me the clipping of a quote:
“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
Epicticus
I started writing fiction on one warm summer day in 1985. I plunked my computer down in a corner of the living room and began to hammer away. To make more rapid progress, I decided to get up at 5 AM and write daily. This was a bit difficult as I was not a nighthawk. By the end of summer, I had 6 chapters ready and decided to go back to read the content end-to-end for flow and consistency.
It was terrible. It reminded me of the originality of the first-grade reader book I had as a youth. My action scenes, intended to be epic, instead read like “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” The snappy and insightful dialog in conflict sounded like, “Oh, Yeah?” Followed by… “Yeah!”
The secret to being a writer is just what Ole’ Epicticus said. Just keep writing. I reached a point in stories that I stopped thinking about writing and began to hear the characters speaking and see them taking action. The chapters started to seem more believable, even when set in fantastical fantasy or outer space locations. If your people remain real, your story will work.
I did take a detour from fiction writing as I found that I had a knack for developing software. Ironically, some of the skills of fiction carry over nicely to creating big applications. The hard-won habits as a writer allowed me to succeed in communications within the notoriously introverted field of IT engineers. I presented hundreds of topics in auditoriums and in articles for a professional audience. The non-fiction work Leaders and Software Engineers: Communicate and Motivate without Speaking in Code is a compilation of my favorite articles.
But the desire to write fiction never left. Sixty days after deciding on a early retirement thanks to Covid, I resurrected an old outline and sample chapters that has become Comets of Omen: The Presser Arc. Oddly, this is a story that I could not have written as a young novelist. I could only write Comets if I just kept gaining skills and didn’t abandon the fun of fiction. Here’s my advice (stealing a bit from Epictitus) for people who wonder if they should write.
“If you like to write, write.”
CW