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.