Confessions of a Stephen King Wannabe
Some of you may have wondered what this picture in my moblog was all about. The picture was taken at the Harriette Austin Wrter's Conference that I attended a couple of weeks ago. In the picture with me is my sister Pam, and Stephanie who I met as part of a little writer's group I've been participating in on a semi-regular basis.
So what's a geek like me doing going to "writing conferences" and "writer's groups"? Well, I haven't given up my day job, but I've reached a point in my life where I've decided to devote a lot of my energies towards writing fiction. I don't know if I will ever be the next Stephen King (one of my favorite authors) but I do nurture some delusions of grandeur of being a best-selling novelist someday.
Some of you may not know this side of me, mostly because I have neglected it for so many years. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, long before I was obsessed with writing clever little programs on the computer, I was obsessed with writing clever little short stories. I wrote several "books" when I was a kid (they were really just short stories, but I proudly "bound" them as if they were books) and they provided a great creative outlet for me. I never had anything published, but I showed some promise, if I say so myself. I wrote a couple of plays for school and even won an award for one of them. I can still remember how excited I was when I got my first electric typewriter! I felt like a real writer then.
It wasn't long before writing stories sort of fell by the wayside. I got my first computer when I was fairly young, and I started putting all my creative energies into that. From the time I modified that first BASIC program on a Timex Sinclair 1000, I was hooked. Computers provided me with a different type of creative outlet, one with immediate feedback and lots of dazzling, blinking lights! Where I had once thought that I would be a writer when I "grew up", my career now seemed to be destined to be computer programming. Instead of being a best selling author, I was going to be a best selling computer game programmer, with my own software company. I must admit, I typed up several "catalogs" of my various software products on that electric typewriter (it was a long time before I could afford to get a printer for my computer!). My software company was going to be called "APE" for Asberry Programming Enterprises, and our motto was going to be "We don't monkey around with our customers!". Yes, even then I was fascinated with monkeys. :)
Programming is a great way to make a living, but the sad reality (at least in my experience) is that you don't get to do the types of fun, creative things that you get to do when you are choosing your own projects on your own time. Instead, you are generally being paid to make incremental changes to huge, complicated, monolithic software systems that were created by someone else long before you arrived on the scene. The parameters of the software's operation are generally defined by someone else. It's a good living, sure, but generally speaking not all that satisfying to the creative part of you that wants to make something completely new.
There is some opportunity to be really creative if you are lucky enough to be on a project where you are on the original project team, designing and creating the first version of a software system, but those types of projects (again, at least in my experience) are the exception rather than the rule. Generally, instead of designing beautiful architecture and going on to build your wonderful design, you are doing repairs to treat termite damage or making some kind of emergency repair to prop up some shoddy construction done by a half-drunk, low bidding subcontractor. Not that I'm bitter.
So while I'm sure programming will continue to pay the bills for some time to come (at least until my job is outsourced), I've come to a point in my life where that aspiring young writer that is still inside me wants to come out of the dark basement I've had him chained up in. He wants to come out into the sunshine and play!
It's been such a long time since I really tried to sit down and write something, so I started going to the writer's group. My attendance record has been lackluster, I'm afraid, with my "real life" often interfering with my ability to attend. Also, I feel like such a pretender in the group, because I have no real writing bona fides, whereas one member of the group is a published ghost writer, and another member has had several magazine articles published. But, through the writing group I found out about the writer's conference and it seemed like a good way to get an intensive review of the fundamentals as well as learn some completely new things, such as the business side of getting published.
The conference was great, and very motivating, despite being often reminded of the unfortunate truth that only a small percentage of wannabe writers will ever be published, and only a small percentage of that fortunate group will ever be able to actually write for a living. One of the authors I had lunch with at the conference has had about a dozen books published, and yet he still has a "day job". A little discouraging, but the truth of the matter is, I want to write for the sake of writing. Getting paid for it will be icing on the cake. Of course I'd be lying if I denied that, in my dreams, I'd like to have lots of people reading my work and be paid a lot of money for it. :)
Tonight I finally finished reading On Writing
, a book I've had for awhile, started once, and never seemed to get back to. I started reading it again yesterday from the beginning and finished reading it tonight. It seemed like an appropriate choice for a book on writing, since Stephen King has always been one of my favorite authors.
Indeed, it was a great choice! I got a lot of inspiration out of the book as well as some valuable insights. Many of the things covered reinforced principles that I learned at the writer's conference. There were also a few things that differed a bit from what some of the speakers at the conference said. For example, at the conference there was a lot of emphasis on plot, doing outlines, creating character profiles and narratives, etc., whereas Stephen King feels that the most important thing is to come up with an idea of some characters in a particular situation, and evolve the story from that point forward, rather than trying to come up with a fully realized plot first, and then fill in "the details" with characters, etc. Stephen King's approach seems a little more natural to me.
One thing I've definitely come away with is that I need to spend a lot more time actually reading and writing! Seems obvious enough, but with countless distractions on the internet, television etc. it is very easy to neglect these fundamentals. I plan to start focusing a lot more on my writing, which will include more frequent updates to this blog. One post a month just ain't gonna cut it!
While I'm talking about writing, I should mention that I've split my blog in two. The blog you are currently reading will mostly just be personal stuff, random rantings, etc. OK, granted, that doesn't seem like much of a change ... what else do I do here but rant? But technology-specific stuff will be relegated mostly to my "tech" blog shriekingmonkey.com. Please note that the other blog is currently in an even greater state of neglect than this one, but I hope to be adding more content soon.
Well, that's all for now ... I know this is a long entry but except for yesterday's short appeal, I haven't posted anything for nearly a month, so I had lots to say! For now, that is all. :)
So what's a geek like me doing going to "writing conferences" and "writer's groups"? Well, I haven't given up my day job, but I've reached a point in my life where I've decided to devote a lot of my energies towards writing fiction. I don't know if I will ever be the next Stephen King (one of my favorite authors) but I do nurture some delusions of grandeur of being a best-selling novelist someday.
Some of you may not know this side of me, mostly because I have neglected it for so many years. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, long before I was obsessed with writing clever little programs on the computer, I was obsessed with writing clever little short stories. I wrote several "books" when I was a kid (they were really just short stories, but I proudly "bound" them as if they were books) and they provided a great creative outlet for me. I never had anything published, but I showed some promise, if I say so myself. I wrote a couple of plays for school and even won an award for one of them. I can still remember how excited I was when I got my first electric typewriter! I felt like a real writer then.
It wasn't long before writing stories sort of fell by the wayside. I got my first computer when I was fairly young, and I started putting all my creative energies into that. From the time I modified that first BASIC program on a Timex Sinclair 1000, I was hooked. Computers provided me with a different type of creative outlet, one with immediate feedback and lots of dazzling, blinking lights! Where I had once thought that I would be a writer when I "grew up", my career now seemed to be destined to be computer programming. Instead of being a best selling author, I was going to be a best selling computer game programmer, with my own software company. I must admit, I typed up several "catalogs" of my various software products on that electric typewriter (it was a long time before I could afford to get a printer for my computer!). My software company was going to be called "APE" for Asberry Programming Enterprises, and our motto was going to be "We don't monkey around with our customers!". Yes, even then I was fascinated with monkeys. :)
Programming is a great way to make a living, but the sad reality (at least in my experience) is that you don't get to do the types of fun, creative things that you get to do when you are choosing your own projects on your own time. Instead, you are generally being paid to make incremental changes to huge, complicated, monolithic software systems that were created by someone else long before you arrived on the scene. The parameters of the software's operation are generally defined by someone else. It's a good living, sure, but generally speaking not all that satisfying to the creative part of you that wants to make something completely new.
There is some opportunity to be really creative if you are lucky enough to be on a project where you are on the original project team, designing and creating the first version of a software system, but those types of projects (again, at least in my experience) are the exception rather than the rule. Generally, instead of designing beautiful architecture and going on to build your wonderful design, you are doing repairs to treat termite damage or making some kind of emergency repair to prop up some shoddy construction done by a half-drunk, low bidding subcontractor. Not that I'm bitter.
So while I'm sure programming will continue to pay the bills for some time to come (at least until my job is outsourced), I've come to a point in my life where that aspiring young writer that is still inside me wants to come out of the dark basement I've had him chained up in. He wants to come out into the sunshine and play!
It's been such a long time since I really tried to sit down and write something, so I started going to the writer's group. My attendance record has been lackluster, I'm afraid, with my "real life" often interfering with my ability to attend. Also, I feel like such a pretender in the group, because I have no real writing bona fides, whereas one member of the group is a published ghost writer, and another member has had several magazine articles published. But, through the writing group I found out about the writer's conference and it seemed like a good way to get an intensive review of the fundamentals as well as learn some completely new things, such as the business side of getting published.
The conference was great, and very motivating, despite being often reminded of the unfortunate truth that only a small percentage of wannabe writers will ever be published, and only a small percentage of that fortunate group will ever be able to actually write for a living. One of the authors I had lunch with at the conference has had about a dozen books published, and yet he still has a "day job". A little discouraging, but the truth of the matter is, I want to write for the sake of writing. Getting paid for it will be icing on the cake. Of course I'd be lying if I denied that, in my dreams, I'd like to have lots of people reading my work and be paid a lot of money for it. :)
Tonight I finally finished reading On Writing
, a book I've had for awhile, started once, and never seemed to get back to. I started reading it again yesterday from the beginning and finished reading it tonight. It seemed like an appropriate choice for a book on writing, since Stephen King has always been one of my favorite authors. Indeed, it was a great choice! I got a lot of inspiration out of the book as well as some valuable insights. Many of the things covered reinforced principles that I learned at the writer's conference. There were also a few things that differed a bit from what some of the speakers at the conference said. For example, at the conference there was a lot of emphasis on plot, doing outlines, creating character profiles and narratives, etc., whereas Stephen King feels that the most important thing is to come up with an idea of some characters in a particular situation, and evolve the story from that point forward, rather than trying to come up with a fully realized plot first, and then fill in "the details" with characters, etc. Stephen King's approach seems a little more natural to me.
One thing I've definitely come away with is that I need to spend a lot more time actually reading and writing! Seems obvious enough, but with countless distractions on the internet, television etc. it is very easy to neglect these fundamentals. I plan to start focusing a lot more on my writing, which will include more frequent updates to this blog. One post a month just ain't gonna cut it!
While I'm talking about writing, I should mention that I've split my blog in two. The blog you are currently reading will mostly just be personal stuff, random rantings, etc. OK, granted, that doesn't seem like much of a change ... what else do I do here but rant? But technology-specific stuff will be relegated mostly to my "tech" blog shriekingmonkey.com. Please note that the other blog is currently in an even greater state of neglect than this one, but I hope to be adding more content soon.
Well, that's all for now ... I know this is a long entry but except for yesterday's short appeal, I haven't posted anything for nearly a month, so I had lots to say! For now, that is all. :)
posted by eric at
7/28/2005 12:06:00 AM
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