The first obstacle was ideas. I was one of those science fiction fans who always marveled at the ideas my favorite writers came up with for their stories. In the hopes of learning the secret to coming up with my own story ideas, I read author interview after author interview. To my frustration, they always gave the same response when asked where their ideas came from.
"Ideas are easy," the author would say, "it's turning ideas into good stories that's hard."
There was one author who didn't give that response, though I can't remember his name. Tired of being asked that question over and over by wannabe writers, he came up with his own special answer. When asked where he got his ideas, he would point to his head just behind his right ear and say, "Right here."
As I was one of those wannabe writers, I hated the way those authors answered that question. But eventually, I learned the truth about ideas. I learned that ideas become easier to find the more experience you have finding them. That first idea may be extremely tough to come up with, the second one very tough and the third quite difficult, but the twentieth idea is downright easy.
I learned this lesson in two ways. First, I learned it coming up with ideas for role playing game adventures. As the games were fun for both me and my friends, I was coming up with adventure ideas on a weekly basis. Second, of course, I learned about it while writing comic books. Comic book writing also gave me much more experience developing a simple idea into a full fledged story.
So, with ideas no longer an obstacle, I was left with only one thing standing between me and the life of a writer. That obstacle was -- and is -- the fact that a big part of a writer's life is actual drudge work. I love coming up with ideas and developing them into stories. I hate the actual work of typing those stories so others could read them. And I hate writing by long hand far more than I hate typing, so that isn't an option.
How many of you remember an episode from the original Star Trek series featuring Gary 7? At the end of the episode, Gary is dictating a report to his typewriter, which is typing everything he said. Now that was the way to type up a novel! Yeah, if I could just lay my hands on a typewriter like that, I'd be set! But how far off in the future would that be? Not so far, as anyone who's ever heard of, or tried, software designed to accept your spoken words and put them into word processing software. Truth to tell, the software works pretty well, too. I bought one of the leading titles and, after a short bit of "training" the software to recognize my voice, was easily able to speak into a microphone and watch the words just appear on my computer screen. Honestly, I found it to be a pretty amazing piece of work.
So, where's the novel I dictated? About that... It turns out there are a couple of problems with that kind of software. First, if you pause to think for a minute or two, you have to remember to put the software in pause mode, too, or it tends to get upset at you. Second, unless you speak your sentences quickly and confidently, the software ends up making mistakes. But those weren't really big issues for me. The big issue is that the software doesn't work if the microphone is picking up two boys shouting back and forth to each other or you wife asking what you want for dinner. Put simply, you really need some quiet if you're going to use dictation software. Alas, my house is too small to have a room to use as an office. My choice was to only write after everyone went to bed or to write the old fashioned way. In case you're wondering, I'm typing this column on a laptop sitting in the dining room. Well, it's supposed to be a dining room. Instead, it's the room where all four of our family computers are setup.
In the long run, it turns out I'm apparently too lazy to be a novelist. Or maybe I suffer from attention deficit disorder because I have a lot of trouble getting past the issue that I won't be able to finish writing a novel in one sitting. My wife leans towards the latter explanation, by the way. I'm willing to go with her explanation because claiming to have ADD is a much better
My dreams of having my own novels on bookstore shelves instead transformed into realized dreams of having my own comic books on comic book store shelves. Then I dreamed of writing children's stories for magazines and pictures books. While I'm still pursuing that dream, along the way I found the perfect way to share my stories. I became a storyteller. No typing, no dictating, no waiting months to hear back from a magazine publisher. I can create a story and tell it the same day.
Maybe I am lazy, after all. But the laziness paid off big time as it led me to a craft I love and which is tailor made for me. What more can a guy ask for?
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