I’m going to write something that I’ve always been fascinated by:

Fractals

And I’m not entirely sure why I’ve been fascinated by this concept but I remember my first encounter with it during my days at uni. A science paper written by a staff member of Prudential wrote about its application. Whether that application was based on insurance – I couldn’t recall. But ever since then the idea stuck with me.

Every time I sit at my desk to put together a way to explain my layperson’s application of the concept in my career, I would make the mistake of visiting one of the numerous sites on the subject and immediately shy away from sharing my own amateur perspective.

After all, the concept I’m using is borrowed from the Mathematical Arena and using it in the way I am may be viewed as trivialising it. I don’t think that I am but I must start somewhere in my reflections and so this post is my starting mark.

With that little I-am-not-worthy disclaimer I shall, nevertheless, proceed. Ta very much.

Changing careers successfully is something that I’m not too unfamiliar with as I look back at my previous experiences which include:

• Actuarial Trainee
• Physics Teacher
• STEM Games Designer

It was by accident that I stumbled on writing. A purely organic process. When one of my games turned into a story I began to scribble down what I thought was ‘writing a novel’ – it wasn’t. Many writers know this first encounter when approaching the idea of writing their first book. But I honestly was too naïve, call it ignorant, to understand that actually what I had was an elaborate synopsis at best or a shoddy piece of work at worst.

Never mind that. Upon finally deciding that I wanted to become a writer, I asked myself for the first time recently ‘what do I need to change in myself to become a writer’. The answer seems obvious, doesn’t it?

To write.

That’s fine but being who I am I had to find a way to adopt a habit without forcing it otherwise I’ll get bored and move on (again). I don’t want to do that. I want to write. And I want to write well and not be put off by anything in reaching that goal.

By accident, I discovered a method that might help me do that. I’ll refer to the ‘accident’ in another post.

Before that, you’re probably wondering what on earth do fractals have anything to do with this. Well, fractals have two fundamental properties:

• They’re repetitive
• They’re scalable

In their scalability, they exhibit self-similar patterns (of behaviour when I applied it to myself).

So being lazy or, I’d prefer calling it, working to my strengths, I considered the simplest form of a fractal to change my behaviour and allow myself to exhibit that of the writer that I want to become.

Thought – that’s what I came up with. (Actually, it might be intention from an even smaller scale – I’m not sure.)

This was the smallest component in my fractal template that I am now using to become a writer – my thoughts. I had one thought. That thought was imagining myself in the act of writing. Remember that I haven’t got the habit of writing as a writer, so the first step is to see myself doing so. And I had to do this repeatedly until my body had enough of seeing it in my head that I had to physically do it. When you think about something enough to avoid doing it you have to stop thinking of it otherwise it’s inevitable to happen in my experience. (And yes I have used this to exercise – that was the ‘accident’ I discovered).

I wrote each day, it didn’t matter if it was a sentence here or there. A paragraph, a chapter. It didn’t matter. I just wrote. I even started to journal, again.

Words became

sentences became

paragraphs became

chapters became

acts became

a story.

Now after 12 months, I have the first draft of a manuscript. But whilst that is true the fractal theory is clear – I must rewrite it again and again and only once I am happy with that. Repeat with another.

The above is partly written to share with others but also as an intro to a journey that is more exciting to me than possibly the destination. If there is one.