Confessions on a Novice Author - Part One
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d become an author — but here I am. And strangely enough, I soon discovered that the same process I used throughout my software career turned out to be surprisingly useful in my writing life.
I’ll begin with the vision, which I talked about in my earlier post, The Story Behind the Story. How important is a vision? I’ll let Helen Keller answer that with her memorable line: “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.” For me, nothing could be truer. My vision became my guiding light — the thing that helped me see the forest through the trees.
Next came the character profiles and chapter summaries. These were the writing equivalent of the system‑level artifacts from my former world — the big‑picture roadmap. At this stage, I wasn’t aiming for perfection. I just needed something solid enough to start writing. And it worked. As expected, I had to adapt the roadmap as the story unfolded, but nothing major. The biggest change was splitting the chapter on the BIG LIE into two because it was getting too large.
With a clear vision and a workable roadmap, I finally sat down to write the chapters. I lost count of how many revisions I made. At times, the process felt overwhelming. But then something clicked. I realized I wasn’t alone in this feeling. One night, while watching a Beatles Anthology DVD, I saw how many hours they spent rehearsing and reworking their material before a song ever made it to an album. Most listeners never see that effort. As the old adage goes, “A pro makes a hard job look easy.” That certainly applied to my experience.
And for the sake of transparency: yes, I used AI as an editing tool. I’d submit a draft and, within seconds, got a refined version. It wasn’t always perfect, but overall, it was incredibly helpful. And then came even more refinements — lots and lots of them — during the book’s formal editing process. I’ll talk about that in Part Three, which will be coming shortly.
Stay tuned.