Old dogs do learn new tricks
I am often asked by people who have known me for a while, “What on this earth made you write a fiction book? I can see a business book or something, but fiction?”
It tracks well if given some thought; I am a lifelong learner. I enjoy taking a risk and getting out of my comfort zone, and trying “crazy stuff”.
Closing in on 60 fast and at the tail end of a successful career as a technology executive, I was looking for that next learning experience; it is a path of discovery, and I did not have a target. As it would happen, I was just doing my thing and networking at a local grand opening of a friend's company, and I came across a writer. She had just finished her memoir, and we struck up a conversation.
As it turns out, she is also an editor and ghostwriter. She was also kicking off a new facet of her offerings with a coaching program. A couple of conversations later, I hired her, and I was off.
I was 100% clueless about what to do, but she pushed me to just put words on paper, clean them up, and repeat.
I was writing about what I knew in a world where I could imagine or even remember some of the conversations had, so the words came easy. This was the blessing and the curse. I was forcing the characters to do what I wanted them to. Honestly, I did not know there was any other way.
Cutting to the “ah-ha” moment, I realized I had to let the characters go. I was not a puppet master telling them what to do, but instead, a god who would just randomly do shit to them and see what happens. These characters needed to be alive and react to those things.
This realization let me write even faster; good thing too because I re-wrote the first three chapters.
This was when I fell in love with telling the stories. This is when I realized that for every bit as much as I was a god, I was a historian documenting the story as it unfolded TO ME.
The trick I learned was to tell the story as it happened in my mind’s eye instead of following some predetermined path that I made up before I really “met” the characters. I create it and write it down.
AND I LOVE IT!!!!
