As an avid reader, I’ve always dreamed of writing novels. Over the years, I made several attempts — most of them unfinished, all of them unsatisfying. The ideas were there, but the spark always seemed to fizzle before I could carry a story across the finish line.
Professionally, I spent a career immersed in writing of a very different kind. I authored engineering books, technical manuals, computer guides, operating procedures, research papers, and — of course — countless memos. Precise. Structured. Efficient. That kind of writing served its purpose, but it also conditioned me to think in bullet points and conclusions, not dialogue and nuance. For a long time, I blamed that ingrained, technical style for keeping me from writing fiction the way I truly wanted.
Eventually, I stopped trying to write the way I’d been taught — with outlines, rigid timelines, and carefully sequenced chapters. I turned to a more instinctive approach: unplanned, irregular, and non-chronological. I began to jot down scenes and snippets of dialogue as they came to me, letting the characters lead the way. I’d drop them into situations just to see how they’d respond, and gradually, something more honest and surprising would emerge. Characters began to grow. The story began to breathe.
What I didn’t realize at first was that I might not have been the first in my family to take this path.
My maternal grandfather, James Warren Hale (1886–1966), spent most of his life as a laborer for the railroad. I’d always heard that he “wrote stories” during his retirement, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned the full scope of his creative output. What we found astonished me: over 4,400 handwritten pages, across 35 journals, filled with 28 short stories, plays, and novels — all penned in his own careful script, beginning around 1942 and possibly even earlier.
His writing remained unknown to most of our family for decades. Now, I’m slowly sorting through his pages — grouping, skimming, reading — and getting to know a man I thought I already understood. His voice, preserved in ink, feels familiar yet new. He, too, had the itch to write, and he scratched it not with ambition, but with persistence.
His wife — my grandmother, Annie Lena Bennett (1890–1940) — passed away on Christmas Day in 1940. Two years later, he completed his first story. Was it grief that opened the door to storytelling? Or was it a quiet passion long held in check? With his children off serving in World War II, perhaps writing became a form of company. Maybe it was simply something he loved. We’ll never know for sure.
But I like to think that, just as I’ve come to enjoy writing later in life, he did too. Not for fame, and not for publication — but for the joy of it. The work of it. The soul of it.
In many ways, I’m walking the trail he never finished.
And I’m grateful for the inheritance.