How I Got Hooked On Writing
I hear people say all the time that they knew that they wanted to be a writer from a young age, loved writing stories and essays in school, or wrote short stories and poetry as a hobby. Their life goal was to become an author and see their books on the New York Times bestseller list. Me? Not so much. I was fortunate to be able to whip out an essay or book report at the last minute and get a passing grade, but I didn’t love it. I wasn’t someone destined for writing success, that’s for sure.
Things changed when I was about 13 years into my career in the technology world with a company that was, at the time, a Forbes Top 10. I’d been promoted and relocated to New Jersey to work in a group that provided presales technical support for our global sales force. My group’s specialty was focusing on products from our top competitors, and that included reverse engineering their products, providing sales and technical support, and being the all-around subject matter expert on our competitors for our product teams. The best part of the job, though, was writing about those products and technology in general. My team of 5 people wrote, edited, and illustrated a newsletter, and I’m not talking about the typical 2 or 3-page newsletter with a few little blurbs and current news. Ours was 36-52 pages, produced bi-monthly, and distributed to 5,000+ people for each issue. It wasn’t long before all I cared about was the writing; working in the labs, taking calls from our sales teams, etc. soon became the penance I had to pay in order to be able to focus on the writing. And, as one of my friends and coworkers used to say, “Sonny never met a blank page that he didn’t want to fill up”. Guilty as charged!
It didn’t take long before I realized that I loved writing and had the ability to take complex technical topics and make them easy to understand for our sales teams across the country and around the world. I also found that I loved adding a little bit of humor or lightheartedness to make it more readable and relatable. That included song lyrics that might have a tie-in with the topic that I was writing about, or a reference to a book or movie or TV show that helped the reader understand the point I was trying to make. I was in that role for about 3 years, but the writing bug had definitely taken hold by that point.
My first non-work attempt at writing came about when one of my coworkers and I decided to enter a short story contest. I don’t even remember who it was for or what the prize would be; obviously it doesn’t matter, since I didn’t win, but once again I was hooked. My story was about a man that wanted desperately to take his own life, but he wanted it to look like an accident so that his family wouldn’t feel guilty, and they wouldn’t be denied his life insurance. He decided to kill himself by crashing his car into an overpass bridge support while not wearing his seatbelt, and since his car was from the mid-80’s, there were no airbags. It was the perfect plan. Until it wasn’t. He crashed the car into the bridge going fast enough that dying should have been a certainty. But it wasn’t. He survived, and the ultimate irony is that he had wanted so desperately to die to get away from the pain, depression, and anguish that he felt every day. Instead of dying, he was left completely paralyzed and ‘locked-in’, a medical term that means that you cannot communicate with anyone, in any way, even as you’re aware of what’s happening around you. Instead of dying, he was left to live out his life in a bed, paralyzed, unable to communicate, and simply exist 24x7. For anyone, truly a fate worse than death.
Sometimes I think about brushing that old story off and rewriting it for current times and technology. It feels almost like an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or is it just me?
