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.