In college, the Air Force and 30 years in the corporate world I have written and edited many different types of papers from very short to very long and for every kind of purpose and audience one can imagine, but none of that experience prepared me for a work of fiction like the business parable There’s More to Life than the Corner Office released a month ago by McGraw Hill Professional. Unlike writing to persuade or provide factual information, fiction is about providing a framework, but allowing the reader to fill in many details. We each have life experience, attitudes, beliefs and pride. We want to “get it” and when reading fiction, we most enjoy the writers who respect us as readers and don’t spoon feed us too much.
For a business man with long experience fully supporting every major point in his writing, this was a tough lesson for me to learn. The co-author on this project, Tammy Kling, was very persistent in her correction of me because I was very quick to revert to the style of providing as complete a picture in living color with as many details as possible. “Show, don’t tell,” I heard Tammy say many, many times.
Another requirement is writing in the character’s own voice as the dialogue and banter switches back and forth. You really have to get fully inside the character’s personality and break out of your own limitations to find that voice. If you do, the character becomes real and if there is change in the depth of the people in the story as in the case of young Patrick Mitchell in this book, you can show clearly that he is making personal progress without saying it.
It is great to have the freedom to express your ideas through a fictional work, but it was much tougher skill to acquire than I imagined. As it turns out, you actually write each chapter about 7 times on average. But in the end, it is worth it if the readers find the work enjoyable and beneficial. We are getting enough feedback to see that goal was reached for most who have read the book.
