Fiction Writing for Accountants

A Career Change Suggestion

If you are a skilled accountant displaced by the vicissitudes of modern corporate ethics and are looking for a new career, you should consider becoming a professional fiction writer. Your accounting skills can be a valuable tool to help you manage the details of creative writing, and since standard accounting practice seems to have strayed a bit toward the creative side, you may find that writing fiction comes as naturally to you as preparing a quarterly report for stockholders.

Start with an idea:

"The CEO stole the last bag of money from the pension fund."

Now, use a simple spreadsheet to enrich the description of each object and action. Like ledger entries in your former career, the items entered do not have to be real. You can make them up.

Consider any object to be a ledger entry divided into five columns: feel, taste, appearance, smell, and sound. Our imaginary bag of money may feel firm and crinkly; it may taste bitter and slightly unclean; it may smell like an old sock; it may look like an off-white, lumpy, canvas pillow; and it may sound like a dead body when it is dropped on a hardwood floor. The bag of money is a ledger entry with five columns, and the sum of the five columns equals a thorough description of the bag of money.

Each action is an entry with six columns: who, what, where, when, why, and how. "The CEO" would be entered in the "who" column, and "stole the last bag of money" would be entered in the "what" column. With a little imagination, you can fill the remaining columns. "The Park Avenue luxury penthouse" could be entered under "where"; "on a dark and stormy night" could be entered under "when"; "to deprive the pension fund of every last dime" could be entered under "why"; and "like a slimy weasel" could be entered under "how".

If you used all of the ledger entries listed above to create part of a piece of writing, the resulting passage might read as follows:

"On a dark and stormy night, the bag of money lay like a lumpy, off-white canvas pillow on the dining room table in the Park Avenue luxury penthouse. It smelled like an old sock. Like a slimy weasel, the CEO grabbed the firm, crinkly bag of money, realizing his ambition at last to deprive the pension fund of every last dime. The bag slipped out of his hand and hit the floor like a dead body. He picked it up and held it in his pointy teeth as he buttoned his raincoat. His nose wrinkled at the slightly unclean taste."

See? You’re a writer already. However, the preceding passage is excessively wordy because too many descriptive terms are included. Compare this to a tax return in which the accountant must fabricate several large deductions. Just as too many imaginary deductions may attract the attention of an IRS auditor, too many descriptions in a piece of fiction can draw the attention of the reader away from the story. As in a tax return, you must look at the document from the point of view of your audience and eliminate those items that seem "over the top".

An edited version of the passage above might read as follows:

"On a dark and stormy night, the bag of money lay on the dining room table in the Park Avenue condominium. Like a slimy weasel, the CEO grabbed the bag, realizing at last his ambition to deprive the pension fund of every last dime. The bag slipped out of his hand and hit the floor like a dead body. He picked it up, and held it in his teeth as he buttoned his raincoat. His nose wrinkled at the slightly unclean taste."

As in the preparation of financial reports, where awkward terms and phrases like "loss" and "financial instability" must be eliminated, you must edit your fiction to make it more pleasing to the reader. For example, in our creation above, the simple word, "bag", easily replaced the awkward, though descriptive, phrase, "firm, crinkly bag". The phrase, "On a dark and stormy night" is a cliché and should be replaced with something more interesting, such as, “Outside, thunder rumbled in a sulky undertone as sporadic lightning flashes played among the skyscrapers.”

If, like Kenneth Lay or L. Dennis Kozlowski, you are accustomed to living on the edge, you might feel inclined to take advantage of metaphors and similes. Metaphors are devices that describe an action or thing by saying it is actually something else. In accounting, this is defined as fraud. For example, an accountant who deliberately describes a three-billion-dollar expense as a three-billion-dollar asset is probably committing some kind of felony. However, a writer who refers to a bag of money as the last hope for a comfortable retirement for thousands of employees is guilty only of being creative.

Like metaphors, similes use one object to describe another; however, instead of saying an object is something else, the simile describes an object as being like something else. Although an accountant who asserted that a Park Avenue luxury penthouse was like a legitimate use of company funds might not be guilty of fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission would probably not look kindly upon the comparison. On the other hand, if you wrote that a bag of money hit the floor like a soft cover edition of Who’s Who in American Business, no one would even raise an eyebrow.

If we applied the powers of metaphor and simile, avoided the "dark and stormy night" cliché as described above, and tried to avoid awkward phraseology, the money-grabbing piece we created earlier might read like this:

"Outside, thunder rumbled in a sulky undertone as sporadic lightning flashes played among the skyscrapers. Inside the Park Avenue luxury penthouse, the last hope for a secure retirement for thousands of employees was embodied in a bag of money that lay on the polished black marble surface of the dining room table. The bag lay like an off-white, limbless corpse upon a slab, an allegory to the dismembered pension fund, framed by the reflections of Monet masterpieces purchased with company funds that lined the walls like flowers at a funeral. The CEO, a slimy weasel with a long nose and no chin, grabbed the moneybag with his hairy paw. Surprised by the weight of the bag, he lost his grasp, and the bag thudded down upon the polished hardwood floor like a soft-cover edition of Business Ethics 101. The weasel picked up the money and held it in his teeth as he buttoned his leather raincoat. Through the fabric of the bag, he caught a hint of the unclean flavor of ill-gotten wealth and wrinkled his rodent-like nose."

The above passage is the result of basic accounting techniques combined with the creative application of writing techniques. Descriptive elements were listed and categorized in a spreadsheet. These elements were then transformed like debt service on a WorldCom financial statement into metaphor, simile, and descriptive phraseology.

So now you're a writer. After suffering under the stifling yoke of accounting with its merciless burdens of accuracy and veracity, you will doubtless revel in the freedom to fabricate, euphemize, and fictionalize without fear of reprisal from state and federal agencies. You will have at last found your calling and will be able to turn your back on years wasted reporting simple numerical facts, during which your creative urges were so unfairly repressed.

Congratulations.