It Took Me 40 Years to Realize I Was a Writer

For most of my career, I never thought of myself as a writer.

I was an engineer, a manager, an executive, and most often, just a guy trying to get a project finished. Writing was simply part of the job. There were specifications to interpret, contracts to review, proposals to prepare, management plans to develop, and presentations to build.

Lots and lots of presentations.

Then I retired and started writing children’s books.

Somewhere between creating stories about a little Yorkie, figuring out how to turn those stories into actual books, and finally holding a published book in my hands, something occurred to me.

I hadn’t just started writing.

I had been writing for more than 40 years. I just never thought to call myself a writer.

Looking back, the evidence was there all along. I even wrote my college thesis on an Apple IIe computer. For anyone who remembers the Apple IIe, that sentence probably tells you just how long I’ve been doing this.

Throughout my career, I wrote about engineering requirements, programs, contracts, leadership, and management. I also taught leadership and management, which meant finding ways to explain ideas so other people could understand and use them. And anyone who has ever assembled a 300-page presentation knows that, for better or worse, that is a serious writing project.

So writing really wasn’t new.

Writing for children was.

Learning to Write Simply

For most of my career, I worked in a world where complexity was normal. A specification could always become more detailed. A contract could always get another paragraph. A presentation could always get another chart, another explanation, or another ten pages.

Children’s books work in almost exactly the opposite direction.

You have to take an idea and make it simple, clear, interesting, and understandable. You can’t hide behind technical language or add three paragraphs to explain what you meant.

Every sentence has to earn its place.

I sometimes joke that writing at a children’s level is about my level.

What I’ve discovered, though, is that writing simply is pretty difficult. It is much easier to add words than remove them. It is much easier to explain something in ten sentences than to find the one sentence that says exactly what you mean.

Maybe that challenge is part of why I enjoy it so much.

Building Something Different

I’ve always liked building things.

Over the years, I’ve done woodworking, worked on cars, repaired things around the house, and tackled more projects than I can remember. I enjoy starting with an idea, figuring out how all the pieces fit together, solving the problems along the way, and eventually being able to stand back and say, “There. I made that.”

Writing a book feels surprisingly similar.

You start with an idea. You build a story around it. You take it apart. You put it back together. You discover something doesn’t work and change it. Then you polish the parts that do.

Eventually, if you stick with it long enough, you have something real in your hands.

Retirement gave me the time to build something completely different. Children’s books gave me a chance to write about dogs, squirrels, friendships, adventures, grandchildren, and some of those small moments in life that adults sometimes hurry past without noticing.

I spent a career helping make projects happen.

I guess I’m still doing that.

The projects just look a little different now.

They’re 8½ inches square, about 32 pages long, usually have a dog somewhere in them, and occasionally involve a squirrel.

And after more than 40 years of writing things that were never called books, I have to admit something.

It feels pretty good to finally see the word Published.