Member-only story
ABOUT ME — LARRY SHERRER
Learning to Write
I was 25 years old, fresh out of Vietnam and the Army. I felt compelled to share that war experience with the world. What I’d just survived was horrific, and unique; the first helicopter war, a jungle war, and in my case, as a helicopter pilot, a commuter war. The compulsion to share was born of a yet unrealized need for catharsis. A little PTSD they said.
I needed to write my first novel, but I didn’t know how to do that. I hadn’t written much beyond a few letters home and papers for college.
So, in my youthful hubris, I set my sights high. My two favorite authors at the time were Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. I challenged myself to write an historical fiction novel that would be the Catch-22 of Vietnam, though as Vonnegut might have written it. Ha!
My first step was to buy four steno pads from the drugstore. I knew enough to begin in pencil.
Over the years, the story I wanted to tell evolved from that stack of steno pads, transcribed first with a typewriter, and eventually into bits and bytes on a computer.
While I labored to write, I worked as an elementary school teacher in Australia and California, as a helicopter instructor pilot in Oakland, California, and as a technical writer for several of the biggest high-tech companies on the west…
