Today we’d like to introduce you to Spencer Dickson.
Hi Spencer, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve enjoyed reading for most of my life. In middle school, I’d often sit on the steps away from the crowd and devour novel after novel, ignoring the kids who’d come by and make fun of me. I was in my world – or rather, a world an author had created seemingly just for me. As I got a little older and more interested in friends, events, and general growing-up things, I read much less often. It wasn’t until I began my career and decided to start taking the train to work that I picked reading up again. Once again, I found myself transported into magical places with amazing people, all the while oblivious about all the people surrounding me on the train.
My greater maturity at this point in my life allowed me to realize a few important things about novels. I learned that books aren’t just a fun pastime – they are so much more! A good novel will show you who you are, who you want to be, and what it takes to get there. Trials and pain are a part of every human life, but there is also happiness, play, growth, and triumph. A book lets you get into the mind of wonderful characters, and you understand why they make the stupid mistakes they do.
You almost imagine yourself making those same mistakes if you felt the same pressures and emotions. The characters become so relatable, that you feel like they’re your friends for the brief time you read about their story. And in a way, though these characters are fictional, they are also real – because it was a real human mind that created them. A human mind that has probably also gone through incredibly difficult challenges and come out on top.
When a book comes to an end, it is just a story. But you walk away feeling different. The hardships in your life seem a little more manageable because after all, you aren’t carrying the weight of the entire world upon your shoulders like the book’s protagonist was (although you might be carrying the entire weight of *your* world).
This might give you a taste of how I felt when I decided to dabble in writing my novel. I wasn’t trained for it. My college major was Computer Science, not Literature. But I did feel like I understood human growth and emotion. I understood the necessity of trials and hardships in life. And I had a love for the fantastical – things you find in sci-fi and fantasy.
I began writing Aram in 2010 as I rode the train to and from work. I almost felt silly at first as I started outlining and doing character write-ups. I felt no less silly after writing my first chapter, and very daunted by the scope of what I was trying to do. Aram is about space travel, and I found myself doing a lot of research about planets, light speed, and many other astronomy topics. I was a baby – and honestly, I was trying to run before I walked.
Practice makes perfect, they say. And I sure practiced. My train ride was an hour one-way, and I’d spend both ways writing, editing, and researching. It became hard to stop when I arrived at work or back home. But I had little choice most days but to stop. I’d often think about my story and my characters during my downtime. I’d pitch ideas to my wife, friends, and colleagues. And I’d often write in my limited free time.
I took breaks sometimes. It was nice to stop writing and go back to reading once in a while. It helped clear my head. But I always itched to get back to it.
In 2016, I had a manuscript I thought was pretty polished. After six years of work, I thought I was done. I’d gone through and edited every chapter five or more times, I’d read the whole book over and over, eliminating any continuity mistakes. I thought I was ready, so I submitted the manuscript to a publisher. Shockingly, I heard back relatively quickly! But it wasn’t good news.
Aram was too long for them to even touch. I should split the book in half or maybe write a little more and make it a trilogy. They might as well have told me to split one of my children in half – it was nearly that painful of a thought. But they did give me one piece of advice I took to heart. If I put Aram on hold and submitted another novel first – one that fit all their parameters – then they might consider Aram once I was an established author.
And so that’s what I did. I began writing My Girlfriend Tried to Eat ME, a YA dystopian novel that would hopefully check off all the right boxes. I followed much the same process as I did with Aram, and after a few years, I finished up a nice manuscript.
Only … I started to realize that my writing skills had improved in the years since I’d started. And if I’d improved, that meant that Aram – especially the early chapters of Aram – probably sounded a lot more more childish than I wanted them to. Maybe childish is the wrong word – but I just knew that they weren’t anywhere near the same quality as my more recent writing. I needed help. I needed an editor.
I looked into hiring an editor and found that there was no way I could afford one. There are many different types of editors and their prices vary from really expensive to astronomically expensive – at least for somebody like me who was doing this on the side and raising a large family. I never actually hoped to make any income from my novels – I thought of them more as ticking off a bucket list item early and leaving something fun for my family and friends to enjoy. Once I’d acknowledged that fact, I didn’t want to submit my manuscripts to publishers anymore. So I began to look into self-publishing.
Almost on a whim, I asked all my co-workers if any of them had ever published a novel, and if any had ever hired an editor. One of them connected me with their sister, Rebekah Fowles, who was interested in becoming an editor – and had all the necessary skills if not the necessary experience. Rebekah was much more affordable and very skilled and knowledgeable. We made an agreement that seemed almost too good to be true, and she began editing Aram.
After reading my manuscript, she told me something difficult to hear. She said that Aram was a good book, but it wasn’t a great book. It needed a handful of things to make it great. I won’t list them all, but one of them was that I needed to add a fourth part to the book (my main idea for a sequel) and trim a lot from the beginning.
I remember taking a big breath after hearing everything she wanted me to change. There was a moment where I almost said no. I nearly decided to stop there and just go ahead with the publishing as-is. But some part of me wanted to do this right. I wanted to have something amazing to give to my friends and family. And I realized that with the help of Rebekah, I might even be able to publish it to a larger audience.
I did the work. Probably not every single thing Rebekah asked me to do, but most of what she asked for. Covid-19 had hit and had taken the train away from me as I now worked from home, so I had to become very creative about when I wrote. But write I did. I wanted this so badly that I wrote in nearly all my free time. My wife had to gently remind me that I was still a father. And so I slowed down some, but I still wrote often. I even took a weekend trip where I essentially wrote for 3 days straight (not sure I recommend that – it was exhausting but also exhilarating).
Before long, I found an artist I liked and hired them for the cover art. And in late 2020, I self-published my first novel, Aram! After that, I used all my new-found knowledge and put My Girlfriend Tried to Eat Me through a rigorous self-editing process. I tried submitting the new manuscript to a dozen or so publishing agencies. Half of them guaranteed I’d hear back from them within six months, with good or bad news. The other half did not indicate anything.
Six months came and went, and I did not hear back from a single one, and so I self-published My Girlfriend Tried to Eat Me in 2021.
It’s been a long journey, but one I’m proud to say I finished!
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I wouldn’t call the road smooth. My biggest challenges in the beginning were my lack of knowledge, limited time, and imposter syndrome.
Later on, my biggest challenges were being patient, tearing apart and changing my manuscript, and Covid-19 (because I lost my usual place and time of writing).
Accomplishing a task as large as publishing a novel is probably never easy, but each challenge can be overcome with effort!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Writing novels is only a part-time hobby. I work as a Software Engineering Manager for Deseret Digital Media. We create and maintain a lot of web-based products, but the most well-known is KSL.com. I’ve worked for DDM for eleven years and have spent the better part of the past six years working on various parts of the cars section of KSL Classifieds.
I’m most proud of the work my team has done on the KSL Cars search page. We took an old, clunky experience and streamlined it into something that both looks amazing and also performs incredibly well. A person used to have to wait 5-7 seconds in between each click for the page to reload before they could change another search option. In web time, that’s an eternity – especially when the pages stop all interactions while you wait! Now, they can select any number of options without waiting, and the results usually come back in under a second or two.
Believe it or not, writing software is a lot like writing a novel! Both require working with an enormous amount of content that all relates together intricately, and both require a large degree of creativity!
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
It’s really hard to boil success down to a single characteristic. Writing a novel takes ingenuity, patience, humility, determination, collaboration, creativity, passion, and more.
Perhaps desire is the most important characteristic that helped me see this through. If you have enough desire for something, you’ll make it happen. Excuses are easy, especially this one: “I don’t have enough time”. But the truth is, if you want something badly enough, you’ll make the time and you’ll acquire the skills and characteristics you need to finish.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://author.spencerdickson.com
