RADHA–KRISHNA MANTRAS FOR KIDS

From engineer to storyteller, I left the world of circuit diagrams and technical specifications for sentences and story scenery while retaining that same curiosity and attention to detail that allowed me to excel at technical problem-solving. While I did not make a direct or drastic change, my new occupation developed gradually through nudges—perhaps a short story devoured on a rainy afternoon, a journal entry that surprised me with truth, a character developed on the back of a notebook meeting note. A hunger developed as time passed to learn, to experiment, to take ideas and develop them into stories that connect.

Engineering school gave me a sensibility to see process: cause and effect, limitation and potential, pattern beneath apparent randomness. These skills have helped me think about stories in terms of process. I think of story structure as a system of gears to be engaged, pacing as a matter of managing energy flow through a given location in a story, and characters as processes affected in systematic ways by their own underlying dynamic and by outside forces. It doesn't make me unfeeling in what I write—that's not helping at all. It gives me a way to ensure emotion has a functioning engine and keeps me honest for its execution. A failed sentence? Debug. A failing scene? Prototype a solution until it drives home.

As a complete novice in this field, I bring with me an eager beginning mind. I read widely and frequently, not to imitate, but to learn in depth the ways in which words can heal, startle, enlighten, or obfuscate. I am particularly interested in the study of form and tone, the memorization of dialogue, and an understanding of how writers strike this balance between showing and telling. Workshops, crit groups, and late nights filled with rewriting are going to become the tools I use. Feedback is important to me, something I seek, evaluate, and act upon.

Curiosity is the engine that drives my writing. It takes me to places that are unexpected—histories that never intersected in my education and education that never intersected in my experience. It raises questions that an engineer would raise at the beginning of designing a project: What does this world require? What is lacking in it? What are the forces acting on this world that determine who and what the people are? It has helped me create believable worlds and motivations even when the narratives are more and more speculative. I find the research process of interviews and small experiments that shed light on the characters’ decisions enjoyable.

Patience is also part of my artistic bargain. So I think progress is more important than perfectedness. Progress could be one sentence that has been rewritten dozens of times. A tiny bit of scene that has been rewritten from a fresh perspective. This is what adds up to skill. Progress is what I gauge by the pages written and the lesson learned. Progress--and not genius--is something that develops over time. This is also where the patience part comes because plot and character developments happen organically.

My own work seeks to be both precise and, yes, “humane”: I want my sentences to deliver, to feel inevitable once their reader has finished reading them, and my characters to be flawed, surprising, and, yes, sympathetic, to be people whose choices, even in their difficulties, add up and make sense. This is what it means to write toward understanding, for oneself, for others, for the small truths one finds in the darkness, in what’s hard to see, in what’s hard to understand, in what’s hard to write, in what’s hard to think, in what’s hard to feel, in what’s hard to say, in what’s hard to hear, in what’s hard to see, in what’s hard to see, in what’s hard, in what’s hard, in what’s hard, in what Starting up a new practice, I mark small victories along the way: a paragraph that starts singing, a character that surprises me, a voice that remains steady in a scene. Each one is a data point in a grand experiment of writing craft. And what I’m trying to do is make steady progress toward becoming someone who learns constantly, someone who refines and refashions and creates stories that find a home with readers. Sentence by sentence, I’m working toward creating the kind of writing that is precise, that is patient, that is curious.