. . . It has not gone the way I planned.
I’d always known I would eventually write creatively. I was an English major, and you know what they say—you can take the man out of the English department, but you can’t take the English department out of the man. When Silas Lopez, my rancher-turned-police-chief main character, wandered into my imagination, fiction became the next mountain: craft to learn, an industry to understand, an entirely new world to master.
Writing, it turned out, had a bigger curriculum in mind.
Ka-boom: The first-take man arrives in the many-draft world. In the world I’d come from, nobody stands up in front of a PowerPoint and says “wait, the pacing was off, let me run that again.” This new world was a triple shock: the industry is glacial; the writing itself is slow and recursive; and the finished book is at best a nice-to-have for a certain kind of reader and a need-to-have for no one. It must slowly earn its cheerleaders one reader at a time.
For the first time in my adult life, there is no lever. I cannot speed up this industry, cannot rush a reader, cannot force a book to find its people, cannot will a draft into being finished. Agency—the organizing principle of my whole professional life—simply doesn't apply. For two years I treated this as a bug, fought it, resented it a little.
But slowly, I came to see—not through an epiphany; more like erosion—that the slow lane has its wisdom, its logic. The first take doesn’t have to be the only take. Endless editing is where good goes to become great. Unlimited revision isn't a burden for writers to complain about; it's a privilege for us to enjoy. The boardroom never gives you a second take, but the page gives you a million. I got a bigger lesson than I bargained for: I came to learn to write, and instead got taught that some things can't be sped up, that I am powerless over that, and that there is goodness living in the parallel slow-lane universe I’ve spent a lifetime driving past.
I don’t want to imply that I’ve fully adjusted. In truth I may never—at least once a week, waiting to hear back from someone in this industry, I shout to myself “who ARE these slow people?!” But I am learning to be okay with that, and okay with learning slowly—the lesson practicing itself. Book three is on the desk right now, being written by an ever-so-slightly more patient craftsman. Slowly, of course.
