Paddling the Relentless Current—A Writer's Journey

Aside from being a garbage man, there were two things I decided I wanted to be when I was very young—a father and a writer. My dad had an outsized impact on my young mind. I idolized and wanted to be just like him. Some of my earliest memories are the visceral clackity-clack of anger-driven typewriter keys, followed by the schwing of the carriage being thrown back into place, beginning another line. Dad was writing his novel, a fictional account of his experience as a professor not willing to play the game and suffering terribly for it. Secretly, I hated that book. It wasn’t fiction to me, and I was jealous of the time he spent writing it.

Perhaps that’s why I never took writing seriously. I was always good at it. Got compliments. When I began my career, I often wrote, shot, and edited feature pieces. I was good at it. I knew it, but running around the world with a camera on my shoulder was fun, so I put my energy there.

The stories kept piling up in my mind, and finally, I thought about putting pen to paper. That was 25 years ago. Ironically, the other thing I wanted to be got in the way soon after when my first child was born. Making a living, providing for my growing family and spending time with the kids became my focus.

Along with the disruption of COVID came an opportunity, unexpectedly opening the door I’d always wanted to step through. I connected with an old friend who was teaching kids STEM via Zoom with drones. He imagined an animated show to go along with his program and asked if that was something I knew anything about. It wasn’t, but telling a story was in my wheelhouse and suddenly I had a writing project with purpose.

Rather than an animated series, I wrote The Rise of The Legends, a novel inspired by the idea that kids love to learn and they do so best through a narrative. The experience was transformative for me. These characters, who were just archetypes with names, became people who developed their own voices and even surprised me with their actions. I’d finally sat down to write a story and found it the most intoxicating creative endeavor of my life.

Since I’ve written a duology, started a screenplay, and am adapting The Rise of The Legends as an audio drama. Writing feels so natural, and I’ve got more stories to tell than I have time. In fact, that relentless current weighs on me. What if I’d just gotten to this earlier in life?

It doesn’t really matter. I’ve had a rewarding and wonderful career behind the camera. I believe that being already successful as a creative and not depending on writing to define me or put food on my table, allows me to write solely for the love of the experience. But I don’t write stories for me, I write them because I want to share that deeply intimate connection, born of our own unique experiences and perspectives, with my fellow human beings. It’s not just rewarding, but a whole lotta fun.

Jake at B&N signing books