In fiction writing, the saying well begun, half done does not really hold.

Part of the reason, I think, is that as a story develops, twists and turns appear that need support from earlier chapters. A new character may turn out to be perfect for moving the story forward, but then the opening has to be reworked to make that person feel planted rather than convenient. A dramatic reversal may be exactly what the plot needs, but it may also need earlier groundwork so it does not look like it fell from the ceiling. That seems to be part of the bargain.

Still, as a newcomer to fiction, I relied not on where modern fiction tends to begin, but on what I had always thought of as good storytelling.

I had learned to be clear. Lay out the environment. Breathe life into the character. Orient the reader. Then start the story.

That made perfect sense to me.

In an early draft, I did exactly that. I introduced my protagonist, David Ross, this way:

thirty miles away—and thirteen years after that unfortunate situation—the subject of Benjamin Ross’s one-sided negotiation now perched himself in a company-issued ergonomic chair, performing biopsies. Not on bodies, but on sickly corporations. David Ross dissected quarterly filings, balance sheets, and debt covenants with the precision of a surgeon—laying bare the vital organs of moribund firms that might, with the right transfusion of capital and a carefully measured dose of ruthlessness, be profitably resurrected.

His pedigree—direct heir to the CEO of Ross Industries—had opened the door to this twelve-by-sixteen glass box on the junior executive floor. The space, which he shared with Suk-Jun Lee, another ravenous associate fresh off the Ivy League conveyor belt, felt more like an aquarium than an office. But only cold, demonstrable profit would lift David from this floor to the gilded suites high atop the Willis Tower. Ross Industries coddled no one. And on more than one memorable occasion, the elder Ross had made it plain enough that his son could easily be made an object lesson should the need arise.

I still like that writing.

After several revisions and a great deal of tinkering, I had a Chapter One that was, honestly, pretty good. It had a mid-century literary cadence. Thoughtful description. A slow camera pan across a life. It read well.

In my mind, I was doing what a good writer ought to do. Let me show you who he is. Let me establish the tone. Let me paint the room. Let me prove I can write.

And yet it was not working.

Because modern commercial fiction does not usually clear its throat, arrange the furniture, and then begin. It begins when something changes. It begins when the rug gets pulled. It begins when the reader’s mind says, Wait—what?

An opening has a brutally simple job: get the reader invested.

One useful way to think about it is this: start the story just before the cue ball strikes. How much sooner? Maybe just as the pool cue is being aimed. Maybe as the player is sizing up the table. That is the art. Give just enough context to understand, mostly, what is happening, and then move.

To my credit, the real opening was already there in the earlier draft.

It was just buried.

Ten or twelve paragraphs later, the conflict finally arrived: the moment when the protagonist’s day stops being normal and becomes a problem. The moment when the novel actually begins.

Ross Industries—often called Ross—stood on formalities, and so did its people, at least until instructed otherwise. That rule applied to everyone, including David Ross, the son of the company’s CEO and owner. And so David stood behind the guest chair in Erin Sumner’s corner office. Behind her, a panoramic window framed Chicago in early June sunshine: the river, the clustered towers, streets alive with frenetic traffic.

A single raised finger kept him in place.

Her eyes scanned a folder, pen hovering. Erin capped her pen and set it aside. “Unusual situation,” she said. “Landed this afternoon.”

David nodded as though he understood. He didn’t.

“You’re being reassigned to Operations,” she added.

“Reassigned?” That was not one of the possible disasters he had prepared for on the elevator ride up. “I’m not due for a rotation.”

“Correct.”

“And I didn’t request—”

“Correct.” She nudged a folder an inch closer to him, the gesture brisk and final. “You’re the acting president of Chem-Tech Ltd.”

“President?” David tried to process it. His father’s rule had always been clear: David would climb the same ladder as everyone else. No shortcuts. No corner offices handed down like heirlooms. This was not a promotion. It felt like a test he had not studied for.

“Acting president,” she said, already turning to her monitor.

He looked down at the folder, willing a clue to rise off its cover. The company name meant nothing to him. No memos. No email chains. No stray jokes.

“There must be—” he tried.

“You fly to Louisiana tomorrow. HR will send the itinerary,” she interrupted. “That’s all I have.”

He had been at Ross long enough to know that was boss-speak for please leave now. David picked up the folder and tucked it under his arm. “Should I treat this as temporary?”

Erin tapped her monitor awake. “One’s choices dictate whether fate is an ally or an adversary.”

That is where the story starts.

Before: a beautifully written runway

My original opening began with a calm, controlled tour of David Ross’s life: his apartment, his morning, the curated remnants of privilege, the self-conscious “salary, not trust fund” identity he had built for himself.

It had atmosphere. It had texture. It showed who he was.

How quaint.

The modern reader is thinking: Nothing is happening. When is something going to happen?

My early chapter was mostly runway.

And the reader was waiting for takeoff.

Readers, bless them, are under no obligation to wait.

After: the status quo gets overturned immediately

The revised opening does something much more useful. It sketches the background quickly and then disrupts the status quo.

“You’re being reassigned to Operations.”

That one line does more work than all the careful staging that came before it.

Before, I was saying: here is David, here is his life, here is his vibe.

After, I am saying: here is David, and something is happening to him.

That immediately creates the next question: Why?

And that question pulls the reader forward.

But do readers not need context?

Yes.

They just do not need all of it at once, and they certainly do not need it before anything has happened.

This is the part that still surprises me when I get it right: you can give readers much less context than you think, so long as the situation itself is legible.

In the revised opening, the reader does not need to know everything about David or Ross Industries. They only need enough to understand the pressure of the moment. David works at a powerful company. He is the CEO’s son, which creates pressure whether he likes it or not. He is being shoved into a role he did not ask for. No one is explaining why.

That is enough.

I am comfortable that this opening gives readers enough footing to stand upright and, I hope, enough tension to keep moving. I am certain it is a far stronger opening chapter than the one I started with.

I should note that I do have a prologue that sheds light on the deeper backstory. But that prologue does not ground the reader for Chapter One any more than the blurb on the back cover does. Chapter One still has to do its own work.

The unexpected benefit: discipline

There was another benefit to starting with the disruption.

Once I began with the change in trajectory, I found myself explaining only what was necessary to support that change and its likely consequences from David’s point of view.

Gone was my soaring prose about the Chicago skyline. Gone was the lovingly rendered train commute. Gone was the impulse to take the scenic route simply because I enjoyed the scenery.

I started with the pivot point and then built the rest of the chapter around that pivot.

The chapter read better.

Much better.

What I am mindful of now

I am nowhere near accomplished enough to make pronouncements. All I can say is that I made a mistake, figured out what I had done wrong, and now understand what I need to watch for.

The point is not “never write nice prose.”

The point is not “always start with action.”

The point is this: start with the right action, the action that creates the central problem.

You can still have texture. You can still have voice. You can still have those delicious mid-century sentences that want to stroll around admiring the sunlight.

But for me, the opening is not where I indulge them.

The opening is where I drop into the conflict, give the reader just enough context to stand upright, and then move.

Because if I do not, the reader may do what modern readers are trained to do.

They will assume nothing is going to happen.

And they will leave just before it finally does.

In my last post, I described the first challenge of taking up fiction writing after a long non-writing career: learning to put to a different use the habits that made us successful professionals.

Those habits are not bad habits. Quite the opposite. Pursue clarity. Be logical. Be defensible. Inspire confidence. Do not digress. A fine rule in the business world, though perhaps not one that would have helped much with The Catcher in the Rye.

Still, those habits serve a different purpose.

When I reread some of my early fiction from nearly twenty years ago, I noticed something. It was not bad. It was not clumsy. It was not even especially amateurish.

It felt like a dramatic documentary.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here again is a short excerpt from something I wrote back then:

So, in the fall of 1977, Jed Motter left Buffalo and headed south to a small Louisiana town named Lafayette. A town, he had read, where he could retire in comfort with the sizable cashier’s check that Mike had eagerly cut for him just a week before. Still in his forties, Jed had too much energy to settle into a sleepy retirement. Thus, it wasn’t long until Jed became drawn to the Louisiana oil patch and the rough-necks that worked it. In talking—and drinking—with the locals, Jed learned that corrosion was a nagging problem in the pipelines…

When I sit here now and read that, I do not think, That is awful.

I think, That sounds like a narrator explaining a man’s life.

It sounds like a voiceover.

If this were a streaming series, it would be the opening montage: grainy footage, trucks, oil rigs, maybe a bar, and a calm voice explaining who Jed is and what he discovered.

It is dramatic.

But it is also reporting.

And that is the shape of the challenge.

What Makes It “Dramatic Documentary”?

Let me talk this through.

“In the fall of 1977…”
That is archival language. It signals that we are looking back.

“Still in his forties…”
That is biography. Commentary from above.

“Jed learned that corrosion was a nagging problem…”
That is analysis.

All of it is clear. All of it is orderly. All of it is exactly how I would introduce a new business unit or investment opportunity. And that is not accidental. For decades, I was rewarded for writing that way.

State the context. Explain the situation. Identify the problem. Move toward a solution.

That is competence.

But fiction, especially now, does not usually begin there.

The Cultural Shift We’re Writing Into

This is where the landscape changed under our feet.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, stories unfolded in a different environment. We had a few television stations. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theater. Stories often moved at a more measured pace. Visual storytelling was limited, finite, and event-driven. Books could summarize. Readers tolerated, and often expected, an authorial voice guiding them through a character’s history.

Fast forward forty years and we live inside story all day long.

Streaming platforms, cinematic arcs, binge consumption, prestige dramas that begin in the middle of conflict and refuse to explain themselves. Readers are conditioned by thousands of hours of visual narrative to expect immersion before explanation.

They expect the camera on the ground.

Instead of:

Jed learned corrosion was a problem…

They expect something more like this:

A welder throws down a wrench and mutters, “Give it six months. That tank’s splitting.”

Same information.

But now we are inside the moment.

The Realization at My Desk

When I look at that old paragraph now, I do not see failure.

I see muscle memory.

I was holding the microphone.

Modern fiction often asks you to drop the microphone and pick up the camera.

That is not easier. It is harder. Or at least it is harder because it is unfamiliar. It is something I had not done before, and perhaps something many people coming to fiction later in life have not done before.

And that is precisely why it is interesting.

Learning to write fiction after fifty is not, at least to my mind, about discovering whether you have talent. It is about pushing yourself back into awkwardness. In my case, awkwardness again. It means writing scenes that initially feel incomplete. Leaving questions unanswered. Trusting readers to infer.

In business writing, friction is inefficiency.

In fiction, friction is engagement.

That shift, from eliminating friction to engineering it, is not a problem. It is a fascinating new discipline. And for those of us who spent entire careers mastering one discipline, it may be daunting. But it is also invigorating.

Learning a new way to think on the page may be exactly the kind of difficulty that keeps us growing.

At this point, the one or two readers generous enough to click in might reasonably say, “That is nice. So what is the solution?”

The solution is not easy.

Good.

If it were easy, the brain would have no need to stretch. I will get into the solutions, if that is even the right word, in later posts.

But I want to emphasize something now. Modern fiction writing is not somehow better than fiction writing of the past. Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Mary Shelley, each in a very different way, gave us extraordinary literary gifts. Their styles were not inferior to modern ones.

Still, story comes first. And modern fiction techniques have real strengths. So with that caveat in place, the question becomes: what is worth embracing, and what is worth adapting?

Show, Don’t Tell — And Why That’s Not the Goal

After realizing I was writing in what I have come to think of as dramatic documentary mode, I did what most people do.

I went looking for craft advice.

And everywhere I turned, I found the same phrase:

Show, don’t tell.

At first, that felt like the missing key.

Of course. I have been telling. I need to show. Simple.

Except it was not simple.

Because “show, don’t tell” is a tool, not a destination. When it hardens into a rule instead of remaining a means, it can quietly paralyze you.

Let me walk through a recent example from my own writing.

In one scene, David notices a bartender. My first pass looked something like this:

The waitress’s hairstyle reminded David of how Elise wore hers in high school.

That is efficient.

It communicates the connection. It tells you what matters. And if I am honest, that is exactly how my professional brain prefers to operate: direct, clean, clear.

But something about it felt thin.

It functioned.

It did not live.

So I rewrote it:

As Fifi settled in beside him, David’s gaze snagged on movement near the bar. A girl restocking bottles, dark hair falling forward as she bent to reach the lower shelves. The way it spilled over her shoulder—

Elise had worn her hair like that in high school. Loose, long, catching light when she turned her head. He’d spent an entire semester sitting behind her in Calculus, watching her twist it into knots when she was thinking, then let it fall when she gave up on whatever problem she was working through.

Is it longer? Yes.

Is it less efficient? Absolutely.

But it is also more human.

In the first version, I gave you a fact.

In the second, you experience the memory forming. You see the movement. You feel the hesitation. You understand why it lands.

The revision is not better simply because it “shows.”

It is better because it deepens character and emotion at a moment that matters.

That, to me, is the key distinction.

“Show, don’t tell” is not the destination. Immersion is the destination. Emotional participation is the destination. Showing is only one way of getting there.

And that, I think, is the real good news.

The problem is not that I learned how to write incorrectly. The problem is that I learned how to write well for one purpose, and now I am trying to write well for another.

That is a much more hopeful problem.

It means the old skills are not useless. They simply need to be redirected, loosened up, and occasionally told to sit quietly in the corner while the scene does its work.

That is the caper.

One of the things I loved doing long before I actually had to earn a living was writing fiction. Now I am at a stage where I can devote more time to the things I want to do in addition to the things I need to do, and fiction writing was an obvious choice. It felt like an easy way to get back to cutting a caper, back to the sort of thing I might have done before I had to behave like a productive member of society.

Over the course of my professional career, which involved a great deal of writing, I developed what I think was a justified sense that I was a good writer. People paid for my work. They relied on it. My writing had value in the world. So when I turned to fiction, I assumed it would be a fairly natural transition.

Not really.

It did not take long, maybe only a paragraph or two, to realize that business writing, whether technical writing, legal analysis, or the many other forms of professional prose, does not naturally produce the kind of writing someone would want to spend time reading as fiction.

So I went back and relied on what I thought fiction writing sounded like. And that is where I realized I had run into a beneficial difficulty, maybe even a desirable one.

It is always more useful to see a problem than merely to hear it described, so let me take that approach.

An Old Paragraph

I wrote this about eighteen years ago, when I first thought, Maybe I can write a novel. It came from the first chapter of a book I was trying to write at the time:

So, in the fall of 1977, Jed Motter left Buffalo and headed south to a small Louisiana town named Lafayette. A town, he had read, where he could retire in comfort with the sizable cashier’s check that Mike had eagerly cut for him just a week before. Still in his forties, Jed had too much energy to settle into a sleepy retirement. Thus, it wasn’t long until Jed became drawn to the Louisiana oil patch and the rough-necks that worked it. In talking—and drinking—with the locals, Jed learned that corrosion was a nagging problem in the pipelines, storage tanks, and ship cargo holds that oil well owners used to carry their products to the market.

When I reread that now, I do not think, That is terrible.

Actually, I would say, That is competent.

It is clean. Logical. Sequential.

He moved.
He had money.
He got restless.
He identified a market problem.

What is not to like?

Well, let us find out.

Let Me Talk This Through With Myself

What am I actually doing there?

I am standing above the story. I am telling you what happened. I am clarifying.

Of course I am. That is what I did for decades. In business writing, you begin with context. You explain the situation. You lay out the sequence. You reduce ambiguity. Anything less tends to get you a frown from the boss.

What I have been learning, however, is that fiction, especially modern fiction, often does not begin there.

It begins inside the moment.

Take this line from the original:

Jed learned that corrosion was a nagging problem in the pipelines…

That is me explaining.

What if instead it were this:

“You ever seen a pipe split?” the roustabout asked. “They don’t burst. They peel. Like skin.”

Same information.

But now we are in a scene. There is a person. A voice. Something a little unsettling. I am not explaining corrosion anymore. I am letting someone imply it.

Here is another one.

Original:

Still in his forties, Jed had too much energy to settle into a sleepy retirement.

That is biography. That is me diagnosing him from above.

What if instead:

By the third morning, Jed was awake before sunrise, pacing the motel balcony, watching shrimp boats idle out and wondering how long a man could pretend he was finished.

Now I am not telling you he is restless. You are watching him be restless.

And one more.

Original:

In talking—and drinking—with the locals, Jed learned that corrosion was a nagging problem…

Again, summary.

What if instead:

The third beer was when they started complaining. First about the heat. Then about the rigs. Then about the tanks that “never last like they’re supposed to.”

Now the information arrives through behavior.

Nobody announces that corrosion is a market opportunity.

They complain.

Where Did I Get It Wrong?

In one sense, nowhere.

The writing was clear. It was to the point. I did not get anything “wrong.” I wrote the only fiction I knew how to write.

When I was in school in the 1970s and 1980s, a great deal of the fiction I read was measured, observational, often somewhat detached, sometimes sparse, sometimes formal. It felt serious.

And it belonged to a different storytelling world.

We had three television channels. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theater. Movies were events. Books did not have to compete with a thousand streaming narratives delivered in cinematic arcs.

Now we live inside story all day long.

We binge seasons. We absorb prestige dramas. We take in visual storytelling grammar constantly. And whether this is good or bad, readers now often expect prose that feels more like a camera than a report.

Scene.
Movement.
Tension.
Interior reaction.

My old paragraph feels like a report.

That is not because I cannot write.

It is because I was trained to eliminate friction.

Modern fiction, by contrast, often runs on friction.

The Real Peak to Climb

If you come to fiction after a long professional career, here is what happens.

You are good at writing. Maybe very good at writing.

And that can make the problem harder to see.

You think, This is clear. This makes sense.

And you are right.

Yet there is real pleasure in being dropped into a moment rather than being told about it from above. It is the difference between watching a game and reading the article the next day describing what happened.

The first hurdle in fiction is not vocabulary. It is not imagination.

It is reining in the learned instinct to clarify, summarize, and smooth everything out.

What I was taught about good professional writing, the writing that earns a paycheck, was essentially this: tell them what you are going to say, say it, then tell them you said it.

Fiction asks for something different.

It asks: pull me into a conflict, then tell me only enough to let me feel that conflict deepen and resolve.

That is a very different discipline.

So Where Does That Leave Me?

Obviously, I am not writing this from the penthouse suite of the bestseller list. All I can offer here is a record of what I have run into, how I think about it, and how I am trying to sort it into categories I can understand and actually use.

One of the most valuable habits from the business world is this: understand the problem before rushing to the solution.

That is really what this post is about.

It is an attempt to assess where I am, to identify what needs to be strengthened, and to see more clearly what has to change if I want to write the kind of fiction I actually enjoy reading.

This may only be a modest blog post, but it touches on something I have been learning, in one form or another, for decades. I learned how to write efficiently. I learned how to write clearly. I learned how to write usefully.

What I am learning now is that this mindset, valuable as it is, will not by itself generate the kind of fiction I want to produce.

In the next post, I want to get more concrete about that. What exactly has to change? What additions need to be made? What habits need to be curbed? What tools actually help a person step from professional prose into fiction?

That is the next caper.

If any of this sounds familiar, or even mildly intriguing, stay tuned.

The basic premise of my novel is simple.

Two people who once cared about each other meet again years later, this time on opposite sides of a lawsuit.

People sometimes ask how I came up with that idea, and the question usually comes from one of two directions.

Some assumes it was a carefully engineered project, as if I sat down with a whiteboard, mapped out a concept, and designed the story the way an engineer designs a bridge.

The others assumes the opposite, that it came from some bolt-of-lightning moment where the whole idea suddenly appeared.

The reality is neither.

The seed for this story goes back to 1986.

At the time, I was in the middle of working on my mechanical engineering degree, and I ran into a girl I had dated a few years earlier. There was nothing dramatic about the breakup. No heartbreak, no unresolved drama. We were simply chatting the way people sometimes do when they run into someone from their past.

She mentioned she was considering law school and then tossed out what she thought was a funny comment.

Instead of meeting there, she said it would have been funny if she had sued my company. In her version, she was the lawyer and I was the engineering representative for some technology company. I do not recall her entertaining the possibility that I might own the company. Hmm.

We laughed about it. Just a throwaway joke.

But something about that idea stuck in my head.

What if two people who once knew each other suddenly met again on opposite sides of a lawsuit?

That little moment stayed with me.

Every once in a while over the years, I would mention the idea when talking with friends. The decades rolled by, 1996, 2006, and it was still sitting there in the back of my mind.

At some point, I got it into my head that I wanted to write screenplays as a side hustle. Do not ask me why. In any event, this seemed as good a concept as any, especially if it were dressed up properly.

So I bought screenplay software, learned the basics of the format, and wrote a script.

Then I sent it to a screenplay evaluator, the kind of professional whose job is essentially to take money and tell you everything that is wrong with your screenplay while making it sound like a valuable service. In fairness, it was.

In retrospect, he was right. My screenplay was not good. That was probably around 2012. After that, I moved on and tried writing other screenplays. This story went onto a hard drive somewhere in the cloud and sat there for a very long while, until around 2024.

Then I thought of the story again. But all I had was the PDF. So I thought, why not run it through OCR, recover the text, and reformat it?

So I let AI do the grunt work.

It was not pretty. More like a hot mess, as the kids say these days. But it was a workable collection of scenes. Nowhere close to a novel, more like a pile of material that ran the gamut from laughable to cringey.

From there it was month after month of shaping, rewriting, and reorganizing. Now, the novel may be ready by December 26, 2026. Coincidentally, that is about forty years after the conversation that started all this.

So from the first spark in 1986 to the expected publication date, the idea took roughly four decades to reach the page.

That may sound like a long time to write a book.

But in another sense, it was not time spent writing at all.

It was time spent living.

Those decades were filled with ups and downs, careers, travels, mistakes, remarkable people, and all the other things that give characters their texture. Without those experiences, I doubt I would have had much chance of making the people in this story feel real.

So in one sense, yes, forty years is a long time.

But in another sense, that is simply what it took to get from a spark of an idea to a finished story.

A Couple of Takeaways

First, you never know what might become the seed of a story. Something that starts as a casual joke can stick around for decades.

Second, a story takes the time it takes. You do not measure it by how long it took to write. You measure it by whether it was written well enough when the time finally came.

Ideas do not arrive fully formed. Sometimes they sit quietly for decades, waiting for you to catch up to them.