From Skyscrapers to Stardust: How Commercial Real Estate Prepared Me to Write the Stories I Was Meant to Tell

If you told me thirteen years ago that commercial real estate would become the perfect training ground for writing fantasy novels, I would have laughed. Because that’s what I was supposed to do. I wore my suits and pretended to fit into the “man’s world” to feel successful. But the inner child within me would have sparkled, begging for your statement to be true. And here we are.

CRE was never “creative” in the traditional sense. There’s competition in all directions, negotiations, and pressure, wrapped in backstabbing suits, hidden from most of the world. I spent long hours inside glass towers where entire streets, malls, and skylines shifted based on decisions made in silence. As a trained actor, I furthered my study of human interactions and learned how to read a room before anyone said a word. Watching power dynamics unfold before me was and is still my Roman Empire.

But here’s the thing no one tells you when you step into its world… Commercial real estate is fantasy storytelling.

Every lease, every development, and every market report is a story of what people believe about the future. We build physical myths, and grow them by faith, predicted stability, and human ambition, and then write it all in Times New Roman for printers to spit out pages for signing. If you look closely enough, every strip mall and shopping avenue is a mirror of collective imagination. And the best brokers are the creative ones.

That’s where I learned world-building.

When you’ve walked through new developments in construction hats under exposed ceilings, or closed a deal knowing it will reshape a city block for a decade, you start to understand scale, consequence, and legacy. Those same muscles power my writing today. I’ve just shifted to a different medium.

A medium that I’ve quietly worked on since I was young. For a dream I’ve always had that no commission could replace. For me to be a writer, an author. A global storyteller bringing people together through art and creation.

The discipline that CRE demanded with the unglamorous persistence, the forecasting, the abstracting of leases and line-editing, and the constant reading of human behavior, became the foundation for my craft. In real estate, I learned structure. In fiction, I found freedom within it.

I learned that negotiation is just another form of character work and that there’s always a story to each side. Observing what each side was willing to risk was fun for me. And the tales each told were never the same. I learned that markets rise and fall like kingdoms. And I learned that everything — even the most immovable building — is temporary unless there’s a vision powerful enough to sustain it. And I also learned that one narrative that reigned could have the most epic plot twist! [“Retail is dead from COVID”… Ha!]

Writing The Seventh Sister, my debut novel, feels full circle. My days at Rutgers, where I assisted teachers in explaining how to write to my peers and won writing awards and scholarships, along with my time at UCLA studying film production, feel more purposeful now. Every step, every fall, every rise—all of it—has led me to the natural next evolution of what I’ve always done: creating with passion, building worlds, defining order, and testing what happens when we break it.

The general themes in my book are that “sound is a mystical power,” “creation demands love,” and “there’s no I in team,” which I know most humans, especially brokers, can relate to. But there’s depth into the threads of creation and how the universe sustains, built into the strong female-driven narrative. But the ultimate mission? Balance. The one thing every single human struggles with. It’s about women persisting in a man’s world. It’s about using your voice when even you are afraid to hear it.

Both fields I’ve chosen demand courage. Both demand an ability to see what doesn’t yet exist and then fight for it. And both fields encompass rejection, revision, and uncertainty.

Luckily, one thrives on diverse voices. The other needs work in this area. [cough, cough]

I’ve spent years helping shape the physical world. Now, I’m reshaping the mythic one.

And maybe that’s the real through line between business and art… We’re all architects of belief.
Some of us just build it in different materials.

Feel free to follow my journey as I seek traditional publishing with a dream of releasing on *7/7/2027*

@N.K.Sherman

Lastly, if you’ve made it this far in reading this, then hello there! — and please do react to this post. Comment, share. Anything to amplify the sound I am trying to create via my keyboard. Because there’s no I in team!

Thank you, thank you.

Noelle