Ask the Author: Tom Osenton
Answered Questions (5)
Tom Osenton
I don't believe in writer's block. If you write every day, thoughts will come - sometimes 200 words, sometimes 2,000. Productivity is extremely important to the process - it's both quantity and quality. If you are holding out just for quality, you are procrastinating.
Tom Osenton
Discovery. Learning about yourself and the world around you as you write. For the first draft of my novel, I laid down 150,000 words in five months and only then realized that my book was about "blame" and how it drove my family's dynamics when I was a kid. I discovered that by writing - by getting it out of my head and onto the page. To me that's the best thing about being a writer.
Tom Osenton
Write every day - seven days a week, 365 days a year - even if it's just 100 words and 30 minutes of writing. Do it every day. So much of writing is about the work, the output. My mentor was Donald M. Murray - a Pulitzer Prize winner - whose mantra was inspired by Homer - Nulla Dies Sine Linea - Never a day without a line.
Tom Osenton
In the final editing stages of The Trouble with Faith, my first novel.
Tom Osenton
I just completed my first novel - The Trouble With Faith - inspired by family-of-origin - and the impact on a family of growing up with a disabled sibling. Curiosity has always driven my need to write - to better understand the world around me. My first efforts were non-fiction titles - a natural extension of challenges that I faced in the real world workplace as a manager of businesses that were rapidly changing because they were naturally maturing. I wanted to know why GM couldn't just sell more cars every year in perpetuity - why they hit the top in 2000. That question alone inspired my research for The Death of Demand (Financial Times Prentice Hall) and helped answer the question for me that growth in perpetuity is not possible - that at some point saturation is reached and one of three things happen at companies: (1) Embrace cost-cutting which gains in importance in terms of generating earnings when revenue ultimately slows; (2) Buy growth through mergers & acquisitions as Jack Welsh did for ten years in the 1990s after GE hit the wall; or (3) Encourage Discontinuous Innovation - the creation of new categories of products as Jobs did at Apple did with the iPhone. Game-changing products that essentially replace those that already exist. Few have been able to successfully pull off #3.
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