Ruining That Engineering Stereotype
Posted by Nicole Sharp on 05 April 2005 at 22:30I have a dirty little secret.
If I tell you that I’m an engineer, can you guess what it might be?
No, it has nothing to do with bridges or circuits or engines or bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red in the early morning hours. It’s far more fundamental. Some would even say that it interferes with my ability to call myself an engineer.
I am referring, of course, to my love of writing.
And I’m not talking about all those SAGES essays and certainly not those ENGL 398N assignments. (Really, who does enjoy those?) I mean that I spend my free time writing.
Writing fiction, in fact. Moreover, I don’t even go in for fanfiction--actually, I detest the stuff. I spend my time writing original fiction. Before you go searching your secret archive of Case Reserve Reviews, I’ll assure you that I’m not there because I tend to write the longer stuff. As in novels.
Countless pages of notebook paper, a whole shelf of binders and notebooks, and over 7.5 MB of text files verify the obsession and cannot even begin to describe all the stories and characters lurking in my mind. Why do I do this? What possible reason to I have for spending so much time on what will likely be no more than a footnote to my life and career?
I don’t know. Why do you play CounterStrike until 3 A.M. on a week night?
The truth is, whether or not I get one of my novels published one day, I have succeeded simply by taking that chance and that stab in the dark. I don’t have many pretensions of greatness—I simply love asking the question “What if?� and then answering it. Or, as it sometimes feels, I have a character answer the question for me. As strange as it sounds to someone who doesn’t write fiction, characters tend to take on lives and personalities of their own. Stories frequently dictate themselves. As Heinrich Heine once said, “We do not seize the idea; the idea seizes us.� Well, first it stalks us with relentless pursuit and admirable patience; it tickles the edges of the subconscious, works its way into dreams, startles us into wakefulness, and nips at the conscious mind with tempting lines of dialogue and irresistible imagery. Then it seizes us and threatens to throttle the life out of us unless we write everything down right now.
Even with that sort of hassle—they’re demanding creatures, these stories—the joys are really unfathomable. To watch a character grow and take shape, to feel it move you and to see others moved by it—it’s like nothing that I’ve ever experienced. A spark, a heady rush, a smile, and a sigh.
And, typically, good grades on writing assignments. For an engineer, I mean.
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Nicole said
On 06 April 2005 at 22:14Mano,
Thank you for your comment and the article link! Although I don't write nearly as much as I'd like to these days, I can appreciate Parini's attitude and argument. In ninth grade, when I wrote the first version of my first novel, I was playing on the school basketball team and in the orchestra, participating in speech and debate, earning all A's, traveling nearly every weekend (since I was living in Europe at the time), and writing in every spare second, it seems. I produced a novel of 92,000 words in somewhere around seven months. I can't say how long, exactly, it took because I don't know when the idea for the novel first struck me, though I know just about every other detail of the incident!
I have always admired writers of fiction, mainly their ability to look at a situation from different points of view and to see how someone other than yourself would react to a situation.
That is probably the driving force for me. I've always had a very active imagination, and, for me, it's a lot of fun to imagine what people in very different circumstances from my own would do. Given your ability to understand and articulate the opinions and ideas of others, I think that you short-change yourself by assuming that all the characters would end up as variations of yourself. Writing fiction is not nearly as difficult, I think, as it's cracked up to be. As with all things, it requires practice.
As for characters ending up like their creators: I think it took me two years or more to realize that one--and only one--of my characters was really very much me. On the surface, we're quite different due to our backgrounds and circumstances, but, after some reflection, I realized that she was essentially who I would be had I been born into her circumstances. Thankfully, I haven't had to face such a frightening revelation with my other characters!
With a little luck, a short piece of mine will be coming out in the next issue of the Case Reserve Review. Other than that, we'll just have to wait for that first novel to get its overhaul finished and for a publisher to realize just how much it deserves to be published.
Mano Singham said
On 06 April 2005 at 09:55I can completely understand your compulsion to write, especially if you enjoy posing "what if?" questions. Because it is in the act of writing that the shape of the answer takes form. When you see the words "out there", as opposed to ideas just sloshing arround in your brain, it has an enormously clarifying effect. The words act back on the writer. As novelist E. M. Forster said, "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"
I have always admired writers of fiction, mainly their ability to look at a situation from different points of view and to see how someone other than yourself would react to a situation.
I have not been able to master that skill, unfortunately, which is why I steer clear of fiction. If I wrote a novel, all the characters would end up as variations of me and how boring would that be?
I look forweard to reading your work one day, when you feel ready to publish.