Ken Beckley, the retired CEO of the IU Alumni Association and Bloomington resident, recently published his second novel, “An Act of Frustration,” about one man’s dissatisfaction with a stagnant Congress.
Beckley has had many careers in his life, including a TV journalist and a marketing professional.
But being a novelist has been one of his desires for more than a decade, and after retiring from the Alumni Association, he decided to make his dream a reality.
Beckley had spent his entire professional career writing from fact, and he wanted to challenge himself by seeing if he could also write fiction.
“My professional life was that of a communicator, oral as well as written, and I always wrote from fact, whether as a journalist or in public relations or marketing,” Beckley said. “I never took a class in creative writing or read a book about how to write a novel. I just believed that, knowing how to write, I could develop fiction.”
Beckley summarized his new book as a small town hardware store owner being so frustrated with gridlocked Congress that he decides to do something about it. This man, Charlie Simpson, gets his fellow business owners to help him with a non-partisan effort to defeat their district congressman. Unexpectedly, this movement goes viral and sweeps the nation. The idea is fueled by murder, and the election results at the end are astonishing, Beckley said.
Beckley was inspired to write about an inactive Congress after hearing for years about Congress not getting any laws or bills passed in Washington, D.C. Beckley wanted to write a story about how one man could end up affecting all of United States Congress through his actions in an Indiana small town.
“I thought, ‘what if I wrote a novel that would be hopefully entertaining and certainly an enjoyable reading in which I took a scenario maybe to the extreme?’ where someone decided to do something about Congress through the 2016 elections, and it resulted in something astonishing happening,” he said.
For “An Act of Frustration,” Beckley described his writing process as beginning with an outline and then creating a routine where he works for hours at a time every morning researching the environment that his book will eventually take place in.
The novel took him a year to write and is about 100 pages long.
Beckley intended for his book to be a quick read, a “maybe a one or two night read or an airplane flight read.” However, Beckley was quick to say that he did not purposefully end the novel at 100 pages — it just felt like a natural stopping point to the story.
“I think what I enjoyed so much about this was developing this ‘what-if’ scenario,” Beckley said. “It was enjoyable developing that scenario. It’s probably pretty far fetched, but at the same time I think the pent up feelings of a lot of voters come out through Charlie Simpson.”
