Non-Technical Writing
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Published Books
The Old Man
This is the one book, thus far, that I’ve published. You can order a copy through Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Feel free to do so. Get some for your friends. Or you can just peek at the first few pages.
How I came to write the book is rather interesting, or at least it is to me. If you’ve read my Technical Writing section, you know that most of my writing has been of a technical nature. After thirty or forty years of that, I started getting interested in trying my hand at not-so-technical writing. I started writing short essays on life experiences, autobiographical short stories, that sort of thing. Then one day I had a mental image of an old man, rather forlorn and haggard, sitting at a wooden table at the back of an old colonial-style pub. There was a fire in the stone fireplace, nearby.
I didn’t know where that image came from, or why I had it, but I decided I would try my hand at writing a description of the scene—sort of a self-imposed creative writing assignment. It was bad. Well, not bad, just not good. There was nothing about it that would make you want to read it twice—or maybe even once. I was puzzled. I thought I was a pretty good writer. So why did my creative writing attempt seem so, well, uncreative?
I would read some Steinbeck, or some F. Scott Fitzgerald, and would think, This is really good. Why is mine so not like theirs? I tried again. And again. And again. Things got better, but not really, and I couldn’t understand why. Then it finally dawned on me. I was writing as though it was going to be published in the Scientific American. I had lots of information, but no story. The problem, I finally comprehended, was that I knew nothing about that old man. Why was he there, in that tavern? Why did he look so disconsolate, so discouraged? Where was that tavern? When was he there? To make my story appealing, I had to make my character appealing. My reader had to come to know my old man, and care about him.
With that epiphany, I could then begin to write a story. I had to start wondering about him, and his life. As I did so, the story came to life. Obviously, something had gone wrong in his life. What had happened to him? As each element of the story developed, as I came to know more of the characters, new situations developed and required answers. The story kept telling itself.
When finished, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Mostly, I was just pleased that I had been able to write it, and wanted my family and a few friends to read it. So, I turned to iUniverse, and self-published it. That automatically made it available online, and several friends have ordered it. Being friends, they all said they liked it. But I wanted to know more. How would it stand up to real scrutiny? How would people in the business judge it? To test those waters, I submitted it in the Writer's Digest 2006 Self-Published Book Contest. I didn’t win a prize, but was pleased to get the following evaluation by the judges:
The Old Man, a book by Delmer D. Hayes, is a very sweet love story that crosses social and international boundaries. Hayes expertly weaves historical facts into a novel that follows one couple’s search for love against all odds. And just when readers think things are winding down, Hayes shocks them with a surprise ending.
Throughout the old man’s retelling of the story, Hayes intersperses chapters where the old man is remembering the story in the present-tense. These, combined with the historical facts, expertly orient readers and make it hard to put the book down.
They gave my plot a 5-out-of-5 rating, and that made me feel pretty good.
I have read comments by certain authors of novels that they have no idea how the story is going to turn out, they just have to “let the characters in the story tell me how its going to end,” or something to that effect. I always thought that was a bunch of hooey—until it happened to me. The “surprise ending,” mentioned by the judges? It surprised me, too. Elements of the story seemed to just create themselves, as the story progressed. I went to bed one night stuck on a major plot point. My characters had problems, and I had no idea how they might get out of them. I woke up the next morning with a strange twist that resolved the problems, and moved the story along. I have no idea where that idea came from. I never have that problem, or joy of revelation, when writing about a megawatt klystron transmitter for a radar.
Submitted to be Published
Happily Ever After: A Tribute to Marriage by a Fifty-Year Veteran
This is my most recent project, and my first attempt at a non-fiction book. You could assume, correctly, that it is more personal than some of my other writing.
I had the good fortune to marry well. Because of that, we were able to celebrate a 50th anniversary not so long ago. That milestone, and what I saw happening to the people I know and to the country I knew, caused me to do a lot of reflecting on the subject of marriage in our society. So much reflecting, in fact, that I had to write a book about it.
The book is at that stage that authors might refer to as hopeful waiting. I’ve submitted it to several agencies, and am waiting with bated breath. It’s hard to type with all your fingers crossed, but I’m doing the best I can. If you’d like to get a feel as to its content and message, I’ve included portions of it.
Works in Progress
Ad Astra
After writing The Old Man, I realized that I very much enjoyed writing fiction. Creating characters, letting their personalities develop and lead you down the path of their lives, was a fascinating change of pace from all that I had been writing for so many years. It is fun to let to let them speak, to hear what they have to say as it comes out of the keys of my laptop. When I got the printed copies of The Old Man back from the publisher, and held a copy in my hot little hand, I knew I was hooked. I started looking for a second story. It didn’t take long to find it.
I fell in love with the B-17 Flying Fortress when I was in kindergarten. Pearl Harbor had just been attacked, and the B-17 began to play a prominent role in America’s struggle to survive world war. Three years later, my cousin took off from an airbase in England, on his first mission as a tail gunner on a B-17. He never made it back alive.
Maybe that’s why the Seventeen has filled such an emotional hole in my heart and psyche ever since. I’ve wondered, many times, what it must have felt like to my cousin, and all those boys who were snatched off our Kansas farms, to suddenly find themselves flying that magnificent machine and fighting for their lives. I’ve wondered just as often, had I been a few years older like my cousin, how I would have handled it.
I became aware some years ago of a story about a B-17 crew that flew in the South Pacific. They flew alone over hundreds of miles of empty ocean to take reconnaissance photos of Bougainville Island. Over that island they were attacked by over twenty Japanese fighters. They became, because of that mission, the most highly decorated air crew in the history of the United States. And so they remain. My son wrote a feature screenplay about that crew, and mission, and I was intrigued by it. I finally chose to write a story that combined elements of it, but was a fictional account of how a Kansas farm boy, crazy over airplanes, comes to find himself flying a B-17 in the South Pacific. I refer to the story as my “imaginary autobiography.”
My fictional farm-boy-turned-B-17-pilot story is a work in progress. It was well along when I decided to write my marriage book, so I laid Ad Astra aside for a spell. I plan to get back on it, soon. It’s at that stage where I need my tough old editor lady, who challenged me on my first big radar proposal, to make me convince her “why she shouldn’t tear this page out.” I hope to make Ad Astra my next published novel. All does not go well for my hero, but all’s well that ends well, someone famous once said. I’ve included the opening chapter, if you’re interested in reading it.
(A note: I took the picture of that B-17 used on my cover art, as it took off from an airport near where I live. My son—the one who wrote the screenplay about the B-17 mission—and I had just been flying on that plane. It was a lifetime dream come true, for me, to have finally flown in a B-17. Liability rules didn’t permit them to let me take the controls and actually fly it for a few minutes—that would have been too good to be true.)
Final Approach
Everyone, I suppose, wants to be remembered after they are gone. It is not so surprising, then, that many of us attempt to write some sort of memoir or autobiography. I’ve been working on something of that sort, for quite a while. It’s more of a personal retrospective on life than just a retelling of what I did as a kid growing up on a farm.
I’m calling it Final Approach to reflect my experience as a pilot. When a flight nears its end, and the runway is in sight, it can be a good time to reflect on the flight. That seems to be a good metaphor for life.
Not very many people got to benefit from the variety of life experiences that I was fortunate enough to enjoy. I got to start life in Depression-era rural Kansas, growing up on a farm, getting a taste of life as virtually all previous generations had lived it. Outdoor toilets, muddy roads, hand-cranked telephones, no electricity, farming with draft horses, making do and doing without, fixing whatever broke. I got to see life as my parents and ancestors had to live it.
Yet, now that I am on “final approach,” I live in air-conditioned comfort, and talk to my grandkids a half-continent away on my cell phone as I cruise along on an interstate highway. I took my first flight lesson in a rag-wing tail-dragger, bouncing along under the clouds and navigating by dead-reckoning. Forty years later I was flying in pressurized comfort over the clouds, navigating with a color-screen, moving-map GPS. I worked my way through electrical engineering courses using a slide rule, and now sit typing on a powerful laptop computer. Some things didn’t change, except in the technology used. We were at war when I was five, bombing with B-17s. We’re now at war, bombing with laser-guided bombs.
I feel as though my life has been lived with one foot in history and one foot in the future. That has given me a perspective on life that not everyone will get to experience. I hope I can share some of that through Final Approach.
Future Projects
What do I plan to write after my existing projects? I’m not certain, but I do have several ideas. Such as?
All those friends who told me they liked The Old Man are also telling me that the “surprise ending” of the story begs for a sequel. I didn’t have that in mind, when I wrote that ending, but the idea is intriguing. I’m thinking through some plot ideas.
There is a compelling true story that I see at my church, most Sunday mornings. About twenty years ago a quiet, unassuming little Cambodian guy came to our church, and began working as a custodian. Turns out he had escaped, barely with his life, from the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. His escape itself was sufficiently harrowing to make a good story. But it didn’t end there. He came to America, eventually finding his way to our church. He was, as you might expect, a Buddhist. He would visit in his halting English, and began to ask why everyone in our church seemed so friendly. That influence led him to convert to Christianity. He is now a lay minister in our church, and has organized a service for Asian members of our community. He who was led to us, is now leading us. I would like to write that story.
There is a line in the song “Getting to Know You,” from the movie The King and I, that says “...by your pupils you are taught.” I’m learning that writing is like that. When it comes to writing, by your writing you are taught. Each time I write a story, or work on a project, it seems to trigger thoughts and ideas for another one. I wish I’d started on this thirty or forty years sooner.