Steve S. Saroff Writing

I often write about failable people who have been tempted and nudged to do bad things while traveling the gray and rusted border between right and wrong. Especially the ones who have created our technological world of wires and networks. And I try to show what I belive: that good still matters, and that living ethically should be a goal.

My writing is not academic. I created the world’s first commercially successful web email system -- which pushed me up against a world of corruption. Some of what happened during that maelstrom of software chaos is told in Paper Targets, a successful 'truth-stirred-with-ficiton' novel, which was an Amazon Top 100 seller for several months after its publication. But way before those true events, I had a strong fiction publication history. In my 20’s, I supported myself by writing and selling love stories, published in Redbook, and other Hearst and national magazines. When I became obsessed with launching and running software companies, I stopped sending my writing out. But I never stopped writing, and fiction has always been a steady heartbeat.

I have severe dyslexia and did not do well in school. Then my mother died when I was ten, and my father was mostly absent. I first started running away when I was 14. This was on the east coast, near D.C. I walked up the Potomac River to where I got on the Appalachian trail at Harpers Ferry and turned south. I was hungry and lonely most of the time. For the company in words, I started writing. My dyslexia became a superpower because I listened and looked at words as sounds and shapes, not as structured rules. Dyslexia has let me notice the world in ways most people don’t. In my early 20s, I lived off the short stories I was selling to magazines. Editors fixed my grammar and spelling. [Not long after I started selling fiction, I found that I also had a knack for a different type of writing: code, which is another way to deal with loneliness. And dyslexia was also an advantage for understanding code, as it helped see connections that most people missed.]

Writing has always been my way of understanding mistakes and troubles. But whenever I try to write “Just The Facts,” my words scrunch into arrogant-sounding scribbles and add depression to my burdens. So I turn to fiction, as I have been doing since I left home at 14, to figure out what happened. I think of most of my writing as “Truth Stirred With Fiction.” A bad thriller is pure plot, and a bad literary work is pure internal insight. But when plot is mixed lovingly with insight, there’s often a good story. I’m drawn to a good story; that is what I like to read, and what I also strive to tell.

I hope you enjoy some of my stories (links below), and that you will come back from time to see what else I may post here. – steve