Steven A. Twitty

I started creating stories at a young age, even before I put pencil to paper. My family and I were living in South Miami, Florida and the tales I composed were snippets of stories I conjured from scenes and conversations that sparked my imagination. I might have been watching passing scenery through a car window and imagining myself in a wooded landscape hiding from dinosaurs or saving my fellow students in school from some Saturday matinee movie monster.

At nine or ten I brought some structure to those musings when I penned scenes that grew into the six-four page epic I mentioned in ‘Biography’. I read that tale to my three best friends, read; Saving Moses, and remember my excitement of sharing that story to others. The seed was planted. It just grew at a much slower rate than I could have imagined at the time.

By my teen years my interest had drifted from writing to playing guitar in a “rock band” with four junior high school friends. During this same time, I found myself trekking farther afield with a growing interest in girls.

At age fifteen, my family moved from South Miami to Chattanooga, Tennessee where I started high school and later, attended college. Writing had not slipped totally from my mind but dating, fishing the Tennessee River, spelunking in the numerous caves throughout the region and international travel; Mexico, Jamaica and the Bahamas filled in the time when I wasn’t studying. I still created scenes in my mind with the growing a repertoire of experiences that, in later years, I would revisit as an author.

After graduating college, I worked in the product development department of a major snack company and in 1981 I joined their international division. My first assignment was in Singapore and over the next ten years, I worked in Venezuela where writing was back on my radar, compelling me to started a still unfinished adventure story set in the Venezuelan jungle. Australia, my next assignment, was where I set aside the jungle story for “Terror Beneath The Bayou”, followed by an assignment in Ecuador where “Terror” continued and finally China where I wrote a fiction story based on the government crackdown on protestors at Tiananmen Square.

Shortly after leaving China I resigned from my employer and moved to Thailand with my Thai wife and daughter and where I have lived since.

Life in Thailand offered me time to complete both “Terror Beneath The Bayou” and my Tiananmen Square story (“Never Say Never”) while I established a consultancy business dedicated to the snack food industry. Even though that company demanded a substantial amount of my time, I always found time to write, whether in some airport waiting for a flight, cruising on our sailboat or taking a break at home. Writing had become less of a passion than a need.

It was my great fortune that life has provided me a smorgasbord of experiences, both pastoral and human, many of which have sparked new ideas for stories to come. As for what my writing means to me now, I can no more put my proverbial pen down than give up all that I love.

My journey as an author has been a crooked mile, walked sometimes with blinders. Time, effort and increasing on-line resources have removed much of writing’s mystery and complexity. I had never had a formal education in the art of writing fiction and in the early years, I essentially flew by the seat of my pants. I found myself writing and editing multiple times, unconvinced it was the best I could do and returning to edit yet again.

Australia was a turning point of sorts. I had befriended Lois, a gal who lived in an apartment above mine. She was a retired editor for the British publisher, Methuen, which compelled me to explain I was struggling to write a fiction story set in Venezuela. She graciously offered to read the fifty or so pages I had written and what I received from her were red marks, notes and crossed out sentences along with a question, was there some other story I would like to write? I mentioned the sci-fi story that would become “Terror Beneath The Bayou” and her advice was  to set aside the unfinished jungle tale and outlined the sci-fi story for her to review.

As I was to learn, the outline is a progression of key scenes that set the story’s ebbs and flows and forms a template for creating the story’s treatment, three to five pages of narrative prose that define key scene details, main characters and overall story progression. 

Understanding those fundamentals helped me to organize the process of getting words on pages that led to my first published book. Along the way I also learned no matter how well you know a subject, it is folly to not research. There are always facts, large and small of which a writer either overlooks or gets wrong and with such a diversity of readers as there is around the world, someone, somewhere will call you out.

I hope you enjoyed this long path I took you down. What’s your own story? What inspired you to become an author and what have you learned along the way?

Steve