On writing

I used to write fiction for fun. Some of my earliest memories are of scribbling down story starts (I rarely finished them), character descriptions, plot outlines, and so on. I still have a lot of the paper I generated back then, starting with the outline of a little sci-fi soap opera I conceived when I was about 13. It's full of complex and intertwining relationships between various members of various royal families scattered across several planets. Had I ever actually written the book, I'm sure it would have been High Art.

These days, my forays into fiction writing are few and far between. I believe the last was more than a year ago, when I produced two pages of a romance novel in order to satisfy a commitment to Chloe. The writing was as fun as ever, and the output was surprisingly decent for having sprung from a command performance rather than true inspiration, but the spark faded as it too easily does these days. I'm not sure I can explain why that is. Maybe it comes from too many years of Doing What Needs To Be Done; the spark is vulnerable to excessive responsibility. That isn't a complete explanation, though. As mentioned above, I never had much follow-through when it came to my dream of writing the American novel (great or otherwise), not even when I was a good deal more footloose than I am now.

I still write, obviously, and I make a decent living doing so (something that—I must confess—gives me a certain smugness thinking back on the various people who tried to rain on my writing parade over the years). Fiction has given way to Help files, white papers, 300-page user manuals, and, of course, blog entries and other online offerings. These are not the tomes my younger self had in mind when she dreamed of becoming a writer, but they are satisfying nevertheless. Writing nonfiction comes easily to me and provides the thrill of that quick, fingers-flying flow of words that happens much less frequently when I write fiction. Plus, it's fun to use and stretch my expertise in creating end-user documentation.

But I think there are still stories inside my brain, waiting to be told. Every now and then, I hear voices in there that are not quite my own. (Sometimes one even takes over when I blog, so a post comes out with a tone rather removed from what I intended when I sat down to type.) When the spark flares to full life again and I find someone else's tale streaming out of me, I'll be pleased but not terribly surprised.