Mostly, to see if I could.

So there I was, newly retired but too young to sit around, with 35 years of engineering and one nonfiction book behind me. I’m happy enough to spend time reading, rowing, knitting and all the rest of it, but I know how to do those things. I spent my whole career never once having a job where I knew how to everything I needed to do; if I ever got to that part, I knew it was time to look for a new role. If I spent my retirement doing only stuff I knew how to do, I was afraid my brain would turn to mush. And my mom died of dementia less than a year ago, so I was very motivated to find a challenge!

Also, I could – I was in a luxury position. Being retired meant I didn’t have to choose between fitting my writing in after a ten-hour workday while still trying to find time to eat, exercise, sleep and (if I was lucky) socialize, or else try to earn a living writing, which the vast majority of authors never manage. (Except for a very few huge bestsellers, your favorite authors are almost certainly not making the kind of money you’d think your favorites deserve.)

Problem was, I really didn’t know how to write a novel. I’d never written any fiction longer than a couple pages of fanfic. I knew I could handle the words; I’ve done a lot of writing in my career, in addition to the book, and have had some poems published over the years. I knew I can handle dialogue, too (though I wasn’t as correct about the technical part of that, it turned out; I kept having to look at other people’s books for good examples of when I needed to start new paragraphs.)

The biggest problem was plot. I’d never done the kind of storytelling where you keep multiple threads going. But I had a realization: there is no overarching plot in Little Women. Or Tom Sawyer, or a whole lot of the gentle, slice-of-life between-the-wars novels I love (DE Stevenson, Angela Thirkell, O. Douglas, etc). They have themes, character growth, many small stories and interlocking threads, but they’re not going out to carry out a heist or save the world, and falling in love and getting married isn’t the only goal. Also, Steven King (in his On Writing) says to avoid not to plot. I think he means not to plan a story’s plot out in advance, not that a story shouldn’t have one (his own obviously do). I think he means to set up a character and their situation, and let everything else grow out of that.

So that’s pretty much what I did.