I'd Rather Be Writing » Creativity

Asking questions is more important than finding answers — why?

Tom Johnson — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:56:23 +0000

This week, as I was riding my bike to work and listening to Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (a classic fantasy/adventure book), one of the characters — was it Bayle Domon, the pirate? for the life of me, I can’t remember, nor can I find it, but he says something like this to Rand, one of the protagonists:

Sometimes asking questions is more important than finding answers.

This sentence rang instantly true in my mind. I have been trying to figure out just why.

Asking questions seems to drive creativity. It cultivates an open mind. The questions we ask lead us to new knowledge. Questions drive us to answers we never thought to consider until we asked the question.

Of course one cannot simply ask question after question, without giving any thought to answers. Such a method seems insincere in the question-asking. But rather questions lead naturally to a consideration of answers, which lead to more questions, which lead to more answers, which lead to more questions. The two move back and forth, like a lumberjack’s saw at an old oak tree, sawing through the rings with each back and forth motion until you reach the core.

Not all the questions may be worth exploring, but for every dozen, there’s a golden one that causes us to wonder. The question moves us into an idea or answer we hadn’t yet explored. The golden question cuts through several rings at once. It takes a bit of meandering until we find the question, but once found, it holds us with wonder.

Satisfaction from questions

Is it really the answer, often unattainable, that satisfies, or is it the question itself that is the appeal?

To come back to Captain Domon, he says:

No, lad, it no be the treasure that makes for seeing the world. If you find yourself a fistful of gold, or some dead king’s jewels, all well and good, but it be the strangeness you see that pulls you to the next horizon (p.339, The Eye of the World).

In the same way, questions are ships that sail us into unfamiliar territory. It’s the strangeness of the question that compels us forward, not necessarily the answers we find.

Not every question needs a meaningful answer. Part of the mystery of life is that answers are so slippery, so frequently absent. If answers were straightforward, life would hold little interest.

Dangerous territory?

When explored in the abstract, the idea of asking questions seems benign, but as soon as you go down this path, it leads you to a mentality of questioning, and that mentality can be uncomforting. Obedience to authority, submission to the “right way” of doing things, conformity to a specific morality — all of this behavior can rattle and crumble when you start questioning everything around you. Questions can be like earthquakes, making people who thought they walked on stable ground suddenly look for shelter.

Despite discouraging environments, our very nature suggests we should question. Humans are, at the core, introspective and curious. It’s what separates us from the animals. Our intellect is not merely a cleverness to build tools, but an intellect that comes from the questions we ask. If it defines our nature, why should we shy away from asking questions?

Questions and ignorance

When we start asking questions, we often come to realize how little we know. The most mundane, taken-for-granted topic can turn upside down with the right question. What we frequently forget is how little we know. It’s only when we start asking questions that we recognize our lack of knowledge. The most basic, almost fact-like idea can seem perplexing with the right question.

Interact with any child who starts asking you questions about simple things, and it becomes apparent we don’t have answers. We don’t have answers, yet we forget that we lack the answers. It’s not until the child asks the questions that we realize we don’t have the knowledge; we have only learned to act and operate with assumptions and seemingly obvious but ultimately missing information. Our acceptance of a life without answers is a learned rather than innate behavior.

Methods of questioning

Asking questions is a good strategy, but is there a methodology to questions that would yield better insight? You can develop an Aristotelian method for asking questions, comparing and contrasting, probing definitions, looking toward analogies, asking questions about classification, and such (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric). Following a heuristic for investigation like this might provide a strategic starting point for analyzing any topic.

The journalists’s handy toolbelt of who-when-what-why-where-how questions also provides a powerfully simple way to dig into a topic. But even the random questions, the ones that seem to come from no method, often lead to interesting insights. One doesn’t need a PhD in philosophy to ask a question. A five-year-old can ask as good a question as a tenured philosophy professor.

Writing and questions

I once had a discussion with someone thinking about starting a blog. He said he had counted up all the ideas he could write about, and calculated that after 28 posts, he would run out of things to say. The secret to writing is to ask questions. As long as you can ask questions, and reflect upon answers, you can never have enough space to write all your thoughts.

Writing is merely a tool for thought. It is a way to extend fuzzy ideas into intelligent constructions, building up a framework of ideas one sentence at a time. In writing we see what we think, and in seeing, we think about what we see. The two activities build on each other.

If writing is an exercise in thought, what method does thought itself follow? If you break it down, we often think in terms of questions and answers. Questions form the basis of our thoughts. We write out the answers, and generate new questions from the words we’ve written.

Technical writers and questions

Of all professions, should not a technical writer be full of questions? We must unravel how things work, not only for us, but for users in different situations. The more questions a technical writer asks, the more thorough the documentation will be.

In Ginny Redish’s Letting Go of the Words, Ginny encourages a question-and-answer dialectic with an imagined reader. What questions might a reader have? Think of the questions, and seek out the answers. It’s a brilliant strategy, a conversational game of the mind. Questions drive content. The content leads to more questions.

Swimming in a sea of questions, the technical writer’s job is anything but boring. The technical writer explores the interface with experiments and tests, exploring by trial and error to see what answers each question holds. A technical writer is a scuba diver under water, curious about each shape and color and movement ahead, curiosity and wonder propeling the diver forward.

Of all the tools a technical writer uses — graphical tools, help authoring tools, video recording tools, page layout tools — the most powerful tool is the question.

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Guest Post: Is Technical Writing Creative?

Tom Johnson — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:05:37 +0000

The following is a guest post by Lopa Mishra, a technical writer in Mumbai, India.

Lopamudra Mishra

At a college reunion party recently, someone asked me what job I’m pursuing. On replying that I’m a writer, a friend jumped in to clarify that I’m a “technical” writer. My friend considers that technical writing has nothing to do with creativity, contrary to “plain” writing which is a highly ingenious endeavor.

To be honest, I was of the same opinion when I was still exploring the opportunities in the field of writing. But contrary to my friend, I do not hold the opinion anymore. My change of opinion has a story that I think is worth writing.

At the verge of graduation a year ago, I was facing the same ordeal as all would-be graduates face: the ordeal to decide what you want to do in life. I was about to finish five grueling years studying IT, and even after majoring in the subject I did not feel I wanted to become a software developer. I did not detest IT but felt I was not someone who could write endless lines of code. The voice within me kept whispering, “Do what you love doing most.” I loved writing but I had no idea of how to make a living out of it.

In the final year of graduation, we had a paper on Component Object Modeling or COM as we commonly call it. It was a tough paper to deal with, and the fear of flunking had set in deep. As a prudent measure I bought the book at the beginning of the semester. I was a bit scared to open the book, as it had been rumored that the author had filled the book with jargon, and the component flow diagrams were nothing but jumbles that were best left unsolved.

With great courage I opened the book and plunged into the first chapter. After two days of thorough reading, I was ready with my notes and illustrations for the chapter. When my friends learned about this, they said, “You made notes out of that complex waffle? How crooked is your brain!”

I started teaching COM to my friends, making notes, drawing simpler diagrams, and deciphering code. I had done this so many times for myself; only this time I had started teaching my friends. Did it ring a bell? Yes, it did! It was my solemn realization of what I was best at – figuring out how things work, structuring and organizing information, and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand. This called for a job that brings together all these elements, and that’s when I felt technical writing would be a job where I would fit in well.

Realizations can often put you in a state of unrelenting contemplation. My realization had now led me to another question in my mind: “Is technical writing creative?” A few people told me that it is nothing like writing a book, where you can let your mind wander into the wonderland, and that I would have to stick to specific styles and standards while writing. It would in no way be similar to what I write in my blog, and I may actually be left with no time to write any other stuff.

I did not want to get into a profession that I would quit soon after joining. As much as I love writing, I had to keep in mind that I could not afford to write blogs and get paid for it. There is no end to daunting thoughts, and so having faith in my abilities, I appeared for an interview for the job of a technical writer and got through.

It has been a while since I started working as a technical writer. I am now in a position to answer the question, is technical writing creative? As a technical writer you have to present information in a manner that helps someone get it in a jiffy, and by no means can it be done without creativity. You have to think like the person who is going to use the content written by you and most likely on occasions when the user is stuck at a point when clear instructions are life savers.

Right from the design and look of the document to the illustrations, videos, and screencasts, you need to take care of every little detail that helps make the user’s life easy. You have to think of new ways to convey information if the traditional approaches do not work for the user. On many occasions, you have to make sense out of chaos, bring order to haphazard chunks of information, and organize random facts. Other times, when the document’s aim is to draw the reader’s attention, you need to design and draft engaging content for the user.

I am quite new in this industry, but I’ve realized that there is a huge learning curve here. There is a lot of opportunity to explore new technology. It also breaks the monotony as you get to learn something new in each project. In a short span of time I got the opportunity to be involved in a variety of writing projects, covering the span of software, marketing, and academics. It’s interesting to pick up and master different styles of writing. It’s fun to fidget with new applications and authoring tools, and figure out how stuff works. It helps me to face my deficiencies and motivates me to understand my thought process better. When I get my hands on an application, I also get down to the intricate details of it and discover functionality not explained by developers.

Being a technical writer has also helped me bring more discipline to my writing style, in terms of structuring and planning the content. It has helped me improve my flow of thought and make better choices between elaboration and brevity. It has also enhanced my word choice, especially in situations where I need to opt for simple words instead of complicated ones. It constantly refines my creative abilities.

Do I suffer from writer’s block? Well, it’s easier to deal with it now. Thanks to my new-found ability to churn out words at the drop of a hat! Sure, there are times when I write dribble. Sometimes the pressure at work takes a toll and the sentences are oddly formed, no matter how hard I try. At times I get engrossed in content research so much that when it comes to writing, my mind is numb. But I do not remember a time when I stared at the monitor and said, “I have nothing to write and there are absolutely no thoughts to pen down.”

Technical writing has cured me of the pandemic that writers are most worried about. Technical writing involves a lot of reading, which eliminates paucity of thoughts. It also provides the opportunity to interact with other writers and know about things they are reading and writing. This in turn generates a lot of ideas for writing. Over time I’ve realized that there is no such thing as writer’s block. You don’t need to put up a masterpiece every time. You just need to let yourself go, and allow even drivel to come up on paper. It is from this twaddle that you build your masterpiece.

To conclude, I would say that writing, whether technical or not, is a creative activity. I am happy that I get a chance to indulge in both. I believe writing fluently is a gift and I hold it close. I am living my dream of being a writer, and each day I am getting better at being the writer I always wanted to be.

Lopamudra Mishra lives in Mumbai, India. She works as a technical writer at ibruk Consulting Pvt. Ltd. Writing is both her passion and profession. Everyone who loves to read is welcome to explore her blog, lopascribes.wordpress.com.

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A Lifetime of Reading Versus a Lifetime of Writing

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:46:31 +0000

This past week I traveled to Florida to help clear out my dad’s house. He recently fell and hit his head, and now he’s in a rehabilitation center while his memory recovers. It may take him months to return to his normal self. When he does, we want him to live closer to my sister in Tampa.

I spent an entire day clearing out his office. I boxed up about 15 boxes of books, which will be donated to Salvation Army. While sorting through his library, I found about five genres of books. They could roughly be classified into five piles: literary fiction, poetry, religion, dieting, and gardening. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at what he or she reads. I had no idea my dad’s interest in religion was so pervasive. I boxed up about 14 different bibles. He’s Russian Orthodox, so there was a lot of liturgical books, prayer books, and commentary about early Christian fathers, biblical commentaries, books on transformational christianity, and so on.

The other genres were not insignificant either. Poetry alone probably comprised three boxes — Wallace Stevens, Byron Scott, William Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, Alexander Pope, and many more well-known poets. In his living room, he dedicated an entire bookshelf for Anne Dillard’s works.

Many books had bookmarks placed about 40 pages into the book, probably where he lost interest. Not every book is worth reading cover to cover.

While boxing, I set aside some books for myself, such as What the Dog Saw, a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, The Origin of Creativity (it looked interesting), John Muir’s Longest Walk, and Things I Learned About My Father in Therapy, an anthology by Heather Armstrong.

Looking at all the books in the library, I am not sure that reading deserves so much praise. Certainly, much of what we write is a response to what we read, coupled with our experiences. We need some level of information to write. But if reading is merely absorbing information, soaking it up like a sponge, at some point, reading becomes passive. The reader must do something with the information: contemplate, act, experiment, reflect, respond, try, hypothesize, write, and so on. Reading is a catalyst for action (unless it’s just a leisure activity, or something to do to fall asleep).

About six months ago, my father was up visiting me in Utah. During his stay, he was pouring through The Happiness Project, by Gretchin Ruben, and taking copious notes. Presumably, he was reading to discover ways to be happier. He wasn’t just soaking it in. He was reading to act.

In his youth, my father was an English graduate student at the University of Washington, and he planned to move to Australia and write the great American novel. But then he realized, through reading, that the great American novel had already been written, time and again. The realization took away his motivation to write.

He’s actually an excellent writer, so far as I can tell from his letters. My mother said he would often compose essays for his classes just once, with little or no edits, and get As. She was disappointed that he did not finish his PhD and become an English professor.

The market for English PhDs was just as bad in the 70s as it is today, so it’s no wonder my father pursued a different route. Instead of going the PhD route, though, he made a terrible choice: He bought a tavern, and drank himself into alcoholism. Alcoholism sort of derailed his life. He later joined AA and became sober — and has been for 30 years — but he feels alcohol was the cause of so many of his life’s problems. (Sponsor tip: Get more details on alcoholism treatment.)

While boxing up books, cleaning up notes and endless office papers, I kept wondering, why not write more? So what if the great American novel has already been written. Does that make it a vain, repetitive effort to write it again? Exactly how much time should you spend reading? Isn’t there personal value in writing, even if the writing is redundant to other writings?

My personal approach is to read moderately. I wish I were a more voracious reader, but ultimately my real goal is to write a page, or post, since I’m a blogger. I keep stacking up my posts on findability, one after the other. When I hit 100, I figure I’ll have explored the topic deeply enough to begin writing and organizing a book. All my research will be there, ready.

Reading is certainly a catalyst for thought. When I draw a blank for topics to write about, I just search twitter for #techcomm, and review the most interesting post I find. But I always want to move into the writing space, rather than just reading. When I write, it forces me to evaluate topics more rigorously. It requires me to think about what I think. It gives me space to explore, and allows me to dabble in the world of ideas.

I loaded about fifteen boxes of books into my dad’s old yellow pickup and drove several miles to the nearest Salvation Army. Though I donated the books, I did save all papers — journal entries, notes, binders, anything I could find that was a personal expression he had written. I guess books themselves, the ones you choose to keep and line your bookshelves with, are a personal expression that reflects your interests and life’s passions. But somehow they didn’t seem worth keeping.

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What I’ve Learned from Lunchtime Creative Writing Workshops

Tom Johnson — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:42:52 +0000

About a month ago, one of my colleagues approached me and asked if I would be interested in having an informal creative writing workshop every now and then. Huh, I thought, maybe. I floated the idea by the other four writers in our technical writing group, and it turns out everyone was interested in participating in this, except one, who was already busy with another creative writing workshop that had even more participants.

We’ve met a couple of times, and the discussions are interesting. In the first workshop, we talked about letting characters drive the story, rather than the writer. In other words, you get inside your character’s head and decide what he or she would do. The author shouldn’t control the character’s actions in manipulative way.

This technique — letting characters drive the story, rather than the author — poses some challenges in sketching out the overall plot. If you have your entire plot mapped out, it’s unlikely that you’ve been letting characters drive the story. Often it’s not until you begin writing that you get a better sense of what the character would do or think. Actions and emotions inside a character’s head may be at odds with a detailed plot outline.

Using a pre-decided outline for story versus letting characters drive the story

As a compromise, we decided it’s good to have a general idea of where you’re going, but to work out the specifics and details along with the way. Another writer said that there are as many techniques for plot as there are writers. Some writers make a detailed outline of every twist and turn of the plot from the beginning; others don’t have any plot at all — they can just work from a general idea.

I like the technique of having a general idea but not knowing the specifics, because the magic of writing is that it clarifies thought. Often when I start writing, I end up going in a different direction than my plan. I don’t know exactly what I”m going to write until I write it.

Although it may not seem like it, approaches to technical writing should be much the same way. We should get inside our users’ heads and let them drive the topics we create, rather than driving those topics from a set of features within the application itself. The better we understand our users, the more that understanding will inform what we write.

In our second workshop, we talked about goals. My submission was up for critique during this workshop, and one of the writers asked what my main character’s goal was. I hadn’t thought what her “goal” was, but it was a poignant question that got me thinking. Another writer added that it’s interesting when an external goal forced upon the character differs from the goal the character wants. And it’s more interesting when that external goal has merit, when it’s not just a ridiculous goal forced upon the character but really has reason.

Again, the similarity to technical writing is there as well. Our users have goals, and we need to understand these goals from the start. Without a clear idea of our users’ goals, our help file will lack relevance in the same way fiction stories lack plot.

In this same workshop, one of the writers asked if how-to books on writing are helpful. Apparently this writer has 25 books on writing, and their main effect, he confessed, was that they motivated him to write, not that they taught him how. He mentioned that John Irving was in a writing workshop with Kurt Vonnegut one time when Vonnegut said he hadn’t ever taken a class or read any how-to books on writing. Many people think writing workshops and how-to books can even be damaging to your writing. This is an interesting paradox — to think that all the instruction might only worsen your ability to write.

The main reason why most people don’t publish a book, my colleague said, is because they don’t finish it. And it’s true — this is probably the most difficult part of writing, just sustaining the effort with constant motivation. It’s easy to knock out a short story now and then, but a novel can take months or years. How do you carve out a time from your life to work on such a project, which might never be published, which might never yield financial rewards, and which might only frustrate you in the end? Writing requires a lot of time and mental energy, and there’s no guarantee that your efforts will result in anything profitable.

Again, are there parallels to technical writing here? How many times have you struggled to maintain momentum in writing a gargantuan help file. Writing help content can be tedious and dry. It’s easier to get distracted into other tasks. Reading how-to books can help rejuvenate our momentum.

I know this is a blog about technical writing, not fiction, but I have a hunch that technical writers could borrow a lot of fiction techniques to supplement their technical writing efforts. Establishing the parallels and building on common techniques might be one way to convert the tedium of technical writing into a more engaging writing experience.

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My Problem with Fiction, and How I Tried to Resolve It

Tom Johnson — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 06:40:50 +0000

I’ve been somewhat bothered by the fact that I don’t read much fiction. For someone who has a degree in creative writing, this is a bit troubling. My degree is in nonfiction creative writing, but still, you would think that I read a novel a week or more.

Not really. Not too long after my MFA, I went through a burnout phase. During my 3 years at Columbia, I wrote a lot of stories and essays. They were all a type of literary writing. I spent countless hours editing them and then sent them off to various literary journals. The responses took months and were abysmal. I think I only published 1 or 2 of that whole lot.

Meanwhile, I was feeling pressures for employment. I applied for dozens of teaching positions, but nothing came of it except, by some small miracle, a two-year teaching job in Egypt. But that job wasn’t taking me anywhere careerwise, and the pay wasn’t much either.

At some point, I stopped reading fiction because I felt it wasn’t getting me anywhere. While I love story, it didn’t help me get a better job, or bring in money, and holing myself up somewhere to read was isolating from family duties.

During this time I focused more on tech and on books that would add value to my career than on fiction or even narrative nonfiction.

Years passed like this. I guess I found that I could do without fiction. Movies fill the escapism void, and travel excursions.

Last month I kind of fell into a bad habit. After work and general busyness, I’d feel exhausted in the evening. Too tired to do anything, and ready to relax and be entertained, I’d watch spy shows (like MI-5), or cop shows (like Rookie Blue), or even South/North Korean espionage melodramas with subtitles (like Iris).

The problem is that rather than going to sleep when tired, the shows would keep me up for another hour or two at night. Then I’d be exhausted in the morning. The need for some passive, mindless entertainment at around 10 pm lasted until midnight. By mid week I was exhausted and sometimes grumpy. I knew I needed to change.

My daughter recommended that instead of television, I choose a favorite book to read. It should be a book I like, with a story that is a treat to read, one that I might look forward to and prefer to television. I knew she was right.

My bookshelf. It's a mix of fiction and nonfiction (but mostly nonfiction).

The next few nights, rather than watching television, I pulled out a copy of Dispensation, an anthology of short stories with Mormon themes that Shannon gave me for Christmas. I read Brady Udall’s “Buckeye the Elder” and remembered how I used to love fiction. Then I read Brian Evanstan’s “Care of the Estate.” And before I knew it, I was hooked. I started reading more and more short stories in the anthology, and then expanded to The Atlantic to read stories in their fiction edition. I downloaded Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander from Audible and listened to nearly all of it while working on my basement. I downloaded Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and listened to that in every spare moment. I realized how much I liked fiction. Why had I been avoiding it for so long?

And then I got to thinking about writing short stories myself. I’m creative, I can make up a story on the spot for my kids. Why not try my hand at fiction? Maybe I had a hidden talent I could surface.

I began brainstorming a plot. But this story, being fiction, had to follow one rule. According to an essay by Bret Johnson in The Atlantic, you shouldn’t write what you know (see “Don’t Write What You Know”). It’s the biggest mistake rookies make. Why shouldn’t you write what you know? Because if you do, writing becomes an act of explanation rather than exploration. In contrast, if you get inside someone’s head, and imagine or explore what they would think, feel, say, and do, then you’re operating in another mode: discovery. And in that mode, your prose comes alive.

I was totally convinced by this argument. In fact, I started to think that perhaps I had gotten the nonfiction/fiction dichotomy wrong all these years. Rather than pursuing nonfiction, I should have pursued fiction. I should have been exploring the minds of my characters, specifically minds unlike my own.

With this idea, I began to conceptualize a story, to lay down the basic plot. I would write about a repressed housewife who takes a “vacation” while her husband tends to the kids at home. Instead of vacationing, the woman applies for a job at a temp agency and ends up, unbeknownst to her husband, filling her husband’s job during his leave of absence. The manager likes her work so much he decides to let the husband go and hires the woman full time. This sets the man into jealousy and rage with his wife and employer and … then I’m not sure what happens.

Excited about the possibility of writing this story, I shared it with my wife over some cake at a posh dessert shop – “The Chocolate” in Orem. The Chocolate is a house with a lot of different rooms, painted in green and black and decorated with mirrors and flowers and trendy artwork. We sat on zebra cloth chairs. I tried to explain the plot to my wife, how it would proceed, and how it would eventually end.

As I was explaining the plot, I realized how shallow and simple it sounded. I heard my own voice and thought, this sounds dumb. I would need to put a lot more thought and development into the story. I only had the bare bones of a few of the actions, and creating a real story would require much more work. Real work. More research, more brainstorming, and lots of writing and rewriting and more writing. I estimated that to write one decent short story, I would need to dedicate at least 40 hours to the task, maybe more.

My wife explained that I’d need to show rather than tell. But her generally quiet reaction slowed my eagerness, and I began to think through this idea for fiction. After spending 40+ hours on a short story, what would I do with it? Send it to a small literary journal, where it would be added to their slush pile and reviewed quarterly? Would it end up in an online literary e-zine read by a handful of wannabe writers, published by some spare-time hack on his Blogspot website?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that writing fiction would be a lot of work. I’d need to research the characters, the psychology, the environment. I’d need to write and rewrite and rewrite. And all for what? For the chance of publishing in some obscure literary journal?

There wouldn’t be any immediate reward, no immediate comments. No praise. No career advancement. No speaking invitations. No advertising perks. The work would reside in a place few would read, and yield little results.

Worst of all, I realized how simple and undeveloped my story sounded. This effort? Not really worth it. There was no twist, no cleverness in the story. It would either be predictable or manipulative.

With that, I decided to put the brakes on fiction reading. If I were to pour my soul into something, it should be nonfiction, the personal essay, my favorite format. I know what it takes to write a good personal essay. It requires research, and brainstorming, and a lot of writing and rewriting and sometimes throwing it all away to start over. Somehow it never occurred to me that writing fiction followed a similar process.

More than anything, I was befuddled about what to make of the advice — don’t write what you know. In nonfiction, if you don’t know the topic you’re writing about, your essay is going to stink. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ll shift to writing a naval-gazing memoir — the sure sign of death. Without intellectual substance, the essay devolves into an over-dramatized retelling of your life.

Yet strangely, this exploratory mode that Bret Johnston describes is exactly the thing I like about personal essays. You don’t start out knowing everything. The very purpose is to explore a topic, to essay an idea and see where it takes you, or to find out what something truly is. It’s the same mode that fiction writers slip into when imagining a character, but with nonfiction, you’re navigating a world of ideas. You’re following a conceptual path to see where ideas intersect and cross. You’re looking at an idea from all perspectives, trying to find a way through.

Bret explains,

In early versions of some stories, my impulse was to try to record how certain events in my life had played out, but by the third draft, I was prohibitively bored. I knew how, in real life, the stories ended, and I had a pretty firm idea of what they “meant,” so the story could not surprise me, or prorivde an opportunity for wonder. I was writing to explain, not to discover.

He then switches from explaining to exploring, and it liberates his writing. It makes the writing process adventurous and interesting to both himself and readers.

Although Bret’s advice seems geared toward fiction, nonfiction essays actually follow exactly the same philosophy. If you’re writing what you already know, there’s no natural drive forward. The nonfiction essayist is just as much interested in charting unexplored territory as fiction writers. For example, when I started this essay, I had no idea how it would play out, where I would end, and how I would resolve my problem with fiction. Only as I come near the end do I realize that this principle — don’t write what you know — runs just as seamless through nonfiction as fiction. Both aim to explore the unknown. This gives me hope that the great divide I’ve constructed in my mind between the two genres is really much thinner than I had previously imagined.

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Presentations Versus Conversations

Tom Johnson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:34:40 +0000

Recently I listened to Moira Gunn interview Steve Rosenbaum about content curation in her podcast, Tech Nation. I heard Steve present on a similar topic at Confab. Interestingly, I found the podcast, which was a conversation between Moira and Steve, more interesting, fluid, and natural than Steve’s Confab presentation.

Steve’s presentation at Confab was great. But all presentations, by nature, have a different rhythm and organization than conversations. In a presentation, you usually have a deck of slides that you move through sequentially, following a predefined structure to your ideas.

In contrast, conversations are more spontaneous. At times you may pursue tangents, or skip around to topics that you might have originally thought to delay until later. Order is decided at the moment, based on the interviewer’s questions, his or her responses, and the level of perceived interest. Overall, I think conversations allow for more discovery and excitement based on the unplanned direction of the conversation.

In addition to presentation and conversation formats, other formats blend the two. Last Friday I participated in a MindTouch webinar that was a hybrid between a presentation and a conversation. Scott Abel is the host of a series of webinars by MindTouch. Before the webinar, he asked me to send him a slidedeck of my presentation. He then selected out the slides he wanted to discuss, and modified them a bit. He also inserted some of his own slides. About 15 minutes before the webinar, he sent me a PDF of the slides, but I hardly glanced at half of them before the webinar began.

During the webinar, we moved through the topic in a conversational way. Scott used the slides to move the conversation forward when it lagged. Sometimes this worked well, as the next slide provided a great segue to explore a new angle on the topic. Other times I realized that I already discussed the information on the next slide, or the slide took us backwards instead of forwards in the conversation. Regardless, the slides gave a sense of structure to what might otherwise be a loosely focused conversation touching a lot of different points somewhat randomly.

Regardless, I admit I prefer conversations more than presentations. Many presentations, particularly at conferences, can often lack engagement. In contrast, the conversation format puts the listener as a player in the topic game. You have some control about the direction and momentum, rather than just being a spectator.

At South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), a lot of times the formats are panel discussions. A presenter may give a 20 minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of question and answers. I haven’t been to SXSW, but in listening to the recordings, these sessions are appealing hybrids of conversation presentations.

Preparing for a conversation to take place during a presentation is a somewhat risky move for a presenter. At the STC Summit, I presented for 30 minutes, and then opened up a question and answer session. It went all right, but the Q&A component was multi-directional, since it’s a conversation with a crowd rather than an individual.

The crowd conversation doesn’t work as well as a one-on-one conversation because the crowd’s questions are much more random. The questions don’t have the same focus and flow as the questions that a skilled interviewer might follow. A skilled interviewer will pick up with your response and build on that response with a new question. The conversation has a direction it’s heading, even if neither person knows exactly where it will end up. In contrast, the crowd Q&A is a start and stop motion, with no sense of forward momentum or progress building on the responses.

Having a conversation in front of an audience is another approach, somewhat like listening to a live podcast. The limitation here is that the interviewer’s questions may not represent the crowd’s questions.

Overall, what’s the best format for delivering information to a group? A conversation, a presentation, or a hybrid of the two? I’m not sure. Conference season has ended, so I don’t have any upcoming presentations I’m planning. But when I need to give another presentation, I think I’ll move toward a short presentation followed by a conversation. The job of the presentation should set up the fuel and momentum of the conversation. The presentation should naturally start the conversation.

I doubt this format will catch on for most conferences, though. It requires too much on-the-spot performance and risk. It’s much easier to bank on your own presentation content, load up your PowerPoint with 50+ slides, and sail your way across the harbor — even if your audience remains on the shore.

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What Does It Mean to Be Innovative?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:04:25 +0000

Last week while attending the STC Summit, I learned that MindTouch named my blog, I’d Rather Be Writing, the most innovative blog in technical communication. In their post, 2011 Technical Communication Innovation Award Winners, they write,

This honor is bestowed upon long-time technical documentation professional Tom Johnson for creating some of the best — and most innovative — original content about the ﬁeld of technical communication (and related disciplines) on his ultra-popular blog, I’d Rather Be Writing.

Johnson creates top quality content. It’s thoughtful, well-researched, consistent, and available in a variety of formats. Whether it’s a podcast interview, a book review, a collaborative post, or a how-to article, Johnson does it right. He’s open to new ideas, not afraid of change, and willing to challenge his readers, service providers, and the industry itself to think in new and innovative ways. Always a great read!

It’s cool to receive an award about being innovative. Thanks MindTouch! Over the last several days I’ve been mulling over exactly what it means to be innovative.

Metrics for Innovation

It’s interesting to compare MindTouch’s list of innovators to their list of the most influential technical communicators, published last year. In their influencers list, they carefully spelled out their metrics for measuring influence:

Our Most Influential Blogger (MIB) formula consists of a weighted average across a range of metrics including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technorati Authority, and Twitter Followers.

When it comes to innovation, why isn’t there a list of comparable metrics to measure the degree of innovation? Innovation is typically defined as providing new and useful ideas and approaches. But who decides what is new or useful? As such, innovation is harder to evaluate than influence.

The challenge is not without solutions, though. According to Katie Delahaye Paine in Measure What Matters, when it comes to social media, the metric that matters most is relationships. Measuring relationships seems just as tough as measuring innovation. Paine explains that one way you can measure relationships is by having a sample of your audience respond to some standard questions from the Grunig Relationship Survey. Your sample audience would answer whether they agree the following:

I am happy with this organization.

Whenever this organization makes an important decision, I know it will be concerned about people like me.

This organization can be relied on to keep its promises.

I believe that this organization takes the opinions of people like me into account when making decisions.

I feel very confident about this organization’s skills. (p.58)

You could score their level of agreement on a scale from 1 to 5, and then use this score for establishing a metric for measuring relationships. (By the way, these questions are only a selection.)

Could we measure innovation by asking similar questions? Here are some questions that I could use to sample my audience.

Posts on I’d Rather Be Writing often explore ideas I hadn’t considered before.
After reading I’d Rather Be Writing, it sometimes changes the way I think about what I do.
I look forward to posts from I’d Rather Be Writing because I know they will present a different spin on topics.
What I learn from I’d Rather Be Writing makes me a more effective technical communicator.
The ideas from I’d Rather Be Writing are useful and improve the way I do things.

I could survey a group of people about whether they agree or disagree with these statements, along with maybe 20 other blogs, and then compare the scores. That of course would be time consuming and costly, but it would provide a way to measure innovation.

What I Do That’s Innovative

Whether or not I am actually more innovative in comparison to other technical communicators remains to be proven. However, I have tried a variety of things on my blog: podcasts, screencasts, WordPress training/consulting, videocasts, video interviews, audio interviews, series posts, curation-type posts, book reviews, guest posts, presentation recordings, sponsors posts, collaborative posts, and more.

These are merely formats, though. I like to think that my text posts are where the most innovation happens, because that’s where I challenge assumptions. A good text post gets me thinking hard about a subject, and in writing about it, I often change how I think about it. This is the beauty of writing: it’s a catalyst for thought. Almost every post that explores a topic with depth gets you thinking critically, challenging traditional ideas, uncovering assumptions, and looking from different perspectives.

Last year I wrote a post titled Being Contrarian, in which I spelled out the disagreeing mindset. A couple years ago I pointed out the difference between knowledge posts and creative posts. I favor posts where writers explore an idea rather than just explaining what they already know. Almost all the posts I enjoy writing are creative, contrarian posts. No doubt this is why some see my blog as innovative.

Future Directions: Story

Now that I’ve rambled on about innovation for a while, I want to outline my future directions. Although I’m interested in a lot of different topics (from findability to visual illustration to screencasting to content strategy), what moves me most is story. Story structures everything with meaning and relevance.

By story I don’t mean that I want to tell more workplace stories with increasing transparency. Nor do the stories I tell even need to be anecdotal. At the heart of a story is a conflict that drives action. In an essay, the action is mental action, and the conflict is a question you’re wrestling with. A recent post by Dinah Lenney gets to the core of what I mean. Lenney writes,

Here’s a story about one of those times that made all the difference: I was in the middle of getting my MFA in a low residency program – also, I should add, in the throes of despair about my work – and I went to a reading at a gallery in Santa Monica. At some point in the evening I found myself standing in front of a painting, and beside me was one of my mentors, a fine writer named Jim Krusoe. “How’s the writing?” Jim asked. Come to find out, talking in a gallery is a little like talking in a car; something about not having to look a person in the eye (and this is maybe a bit like writing, too) makes all kinds of confession possible. And so, when Jim asked, “How’s the writing?,” I was honest with him. “What writing? Fuck writing,” I said. “I’m never writing anything again.” Then Jim asked, “What question are you trying to answer?” (Against Knowing)

Lenney goes on to explain that not knowing is what makes writing interesting. When you don’t know, you’re pursuing the answer to some question. You’re wrestling with uncertainty about something. Along the exploration, you stumble across a discovery that is transformative. This basic structure that Lenney describes, wrestling with a question, is story — at least in the nonfiction genre. It’s the essay in the most literal sense of the word, as Montaigne used it, to “try” or “attempt.”

That direction, wrestling with a question, attempting to find answers despite uncertainty, is what drives my writing. It’s what prompts me to explore new directions. I think overall it’s what makes me innovative.

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I am perhaps finishing my basement, someday

Tom Johnson — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:39:20 +0000

My wife wants to finish our basement so badly that she registered for a local eight-week course on how to finish your basement. As the first class approached, she realized how difficult it would be for me to nurse the baby while she learned about framing, plumbing, electricity, and so forth. So I agreed to go instead.

I had been putting off finishing my basement for a long time — two years now — because it’s costly and I never seem to have the time. Additionally, I’m not a handyman so I really have no idea what I’m doing.

After attending the first class, I was so excited to throw myself headlong into the project, I immediately bought a framing gun and compressor. The store clerk explained how to put on the couplings. I also bought more than $300 worth of framing lumber and neatly stacked it into my basement.

The instructor explained that I could google or youtube any topic and find abundant instruction online. He was right. We live in an era of complete do-it-yourselfism. If you search youtube for videos on how to frame your basement, you could watch them endlessly.

The week after the first basement class, I spent a good amount of time clearing out all the junk from my basement. You need a clean working space to build. I also drew the blueprints of what I plan to build. Other than once replacing a radiator in my car, this is the largest project I’ve ever tackled.

The basement diagram I drew as I prepared to finish my basement.

Monday I took President’s day off and planned to do the framing, but I realized I don’t understand the process well enough. Does the vapor barrier go on the inside or outside of the insulation? Should I use polystyrene foam? What about those hairline cracks in my walls that have water stains around them? Is that something to worry about, even though I dug out the window wells and pretty much fixed the water penetration problem? Do I need to do a moisture test with a piece of plastic covering those cracks for a couple of days? What are the actual city codes for vapor barriers? Should I remove the existing insulation, which only covers half the wall? Why would it only cover half the wall? Newer homes have the insulation covering the entire wall, so have the city codes changed, and am I now responsible for the new codes? Does the vapor barrier have to be continuous, or can I tape an addition to the existing half wall?

One problem with do-it-yourselfism is that there are so many youtube videos online, they present conflicting methods and advice. Read enough of it and it can become paralyzing. Although sometimes I follow an impulsive behavior and try to learn from doing even as I screw up, I realize that unless I do this right, I could end up redoing everything, or getting mold, or not passing code. I could spend weeks learning this stuff. For a one-time job, it hardly seems worth it.

I am being very cautious, but sometimes my behavior gets neurotic. For example, when I initially ordered the framing lumber, at least a third of it had little mildewy spots. I googled mildew/mold on framing lumber, and I ended up taking it all back to the lumber yard and hand-picking every piece of wood. The lumber yard man said, You’re not building a piano with this stuff. I took my time picking through the lumber yard piles.

I would much rather bury my nose in WordPress projects or something computer-related, but honestly, there’s a lot I don’t know about WordPress too. Try building a theme from scratch or a plugin — there’s quite a bit to it. You can quickly run up against the same intimidating wall of how-to.

My mother-in-law feels strongly that I should finish the basement myself, in part because she’s very handy at this stuff herself (she once cut her own skylights on a whim). But the question of whether to finish a basement oneself or to hire out feeds into a larger issue of buy versus build, specialist versus generalist, one role versus multiple roles?

Do-it-yourself is everywhere, because information is everywhere. But everything is also more specialized and technical. It does make sense many times to do it yourself by studying it out through the scattered information you find online, but although the information is available, the tasks are also often more technical, more specialized, more expert, and more involved. For example, you can find information on how to change your headlamp bulb on a 2003 Nissan Altima. The only problem is that you have to take off your entire front bumper to do it.

I tend to lean towards the “do one thing really well” philosophy, since it’s usually more rewarding to be an expert than to be someone who is always struggling to understand. But sometimes you have to develop multiple skills because you can’t get anyone else to do it for you. For example, I spent about two days drawing the following illustrations to liven up a page of text in a help file.

My foray into Illustrator

I bet a graphic designer could have done all this in one afternoon. But alas, I do not have a graphic designer sitting next to me with a billing code and spare time. And similarly, I do not have $25k to finish my basement.

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“Don’t know how you do it all”: Some Thoughts on Productivity

Tom Johnson — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:06:00 +0000

In my post on technical writing resolutions, Marcia Johnston commented, “Inspiring. Bravo, Tom, and good luck. Don’t know how you do it all.”

I get that last remark a lot, actually. I don’t feel it’s deserved. I don’t do it all … not at all. I let so many important activities slip through the cracks. But let me indulge in a fantasy where that remark is actually true. How do I “do it all” — even just a little?

First, a little background. I started thinking about this issue while reading Clay Shirky’s book on Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues that we have a surplus of free time, but we often waste this time watching television. In fact, if we were to change our TV habits just 1% and devote them toward a productive endeavor, rather than slumping in front of the TV, we could create 100 new Wikipedias each year.

I’m not going to say that my secret is not watching television, because I’m guilty of TV sloth too. For example, tonight I admit I was checking to see if the new episode of V had been posted to Hulu yet.

But Shirky goes deeper than merely slamming TV as a timesink. He compares the situation to a gin-drinking phase that accompanied industrialization. As lives changed from farms to factories, the shift broke social structures; people turned to gin for escape and coping.

TV is a coping mechanism for a greater underlying problem.

In the same way, I think after eight hours of typing and clicking in an office cubicle, with very little drama, interaction, or significance, we’re inclined to seek some escape and excitement through larger-than-life Hollywood media. In other words, TV isn’t the problem, just as gin wasn’t the problem. TV is just our coping mechanism to deal with the real problem.

And what exactly is the real problem, besides the humdrum boredrum of an office life?

I’m not sure. But last summer my wife tried an interesting experiment that shed light on the issue: an electricity fast. Forty days without electricity (mostly). For me, this meant I gave up television and light. I couldn’t quite tear myself from my laptop, though my wife did do it (and has never really been addicted since).

During those 40 days of candlelight and living in the basement, with our kids stretched out in sleeping bags on the floor, I woke up earlier than ever. For the first time in years, I was up at 6 am every morning.

But as the electricity fast neared its end, I grew grumpy for television. I seemed to need it, those moments of escape in front of the television. Even a couple of hours of World Cup soccer, listening to the vuvuzelas blowing and the spanish announcer saying “goal, goal, goal” in a flat voice on a poorly rendered Internet stream seemed to provide the relief I needed.

But relief from what? I’m not sure. Could not this grumpiness have been relieved in some other way, before television? Surely this problem is not symptomatic solely of 21st century society.

Let’s flip back a couple of millennia. What did the ancient Greeks do for escape? They flourished with unparalleled cultural and human achievement in every field, from philosophy to science, art, mathematics, and more. Some feel it was their political democracy, the first on the scene, that contributed to this achievement. But the Greeks also spent a lot of time playing athletic games naked in their gymnasiums and shouting at overly melodramatic soap-opera theater. In other words, they had their entertainment too, but they still managed achievement.

It’s clear that if you survey world cultures, cultures without television aren’t necessarily productive and brilliant societies. If you take away mindless TV, people find another mindless activity to fill the gap.

Given this conundrum, and the impressive hours of TV watching in America, we still have plenty of achievement to boast about. The amount of technical innovation and Internet entrepreneurship are mind-boggling. Both the masses and elite write about a million new posts a day on blogs. Information is expanding so much that in one year alone, you could fill 237 billion Kindles. And yet even despite this, many of us still drink away our time on hulu, netflix, and youtube — morally flagellating ourselves for our sloth as we slouch.

For me, while I would be more productive, perhaps, by banning television, I don’t think it’s the principal cause that dilutes human achievement, nor my achievement. Include or exclude TV from the productivity equation and the outcome is mostly the same.

What’s the real cause behind the failure to do it all? Precisely lack of cause.

Without a cause, time isn’t so meaningful. And with surplus time and no purpose, we will easily trade it away for mindless TV. What allowed me to write about 150 posts last year is the inner drive to write. I feel it as a compulsion. The topic doesn’t matter — just write. I’m honing my craft, preparing for something more, something in the future. Exactly what, I don’t know yet. But one day it will hit me. I’ll find myself in a certain situation and just know — that all the promptings to keep writing, something every day, wasn’t a vain imagination without purpose. It was carefully leading me toward a meaningful end. That is my secret.

Others may have similar causes that push them toward productivity — a cause to create art, or to build a family, or to understand engines, or maybe even to perfect la dolce far niente (the joy of doing nothing). It doesn’t matter. What matters is having a cause.

I still watch television. Embarrassingly, I recently made it through three seasons of Prison Break. And I keep up with Nikita, and Fringe, and Burn Notice. I’m sure my time could be better spent. But usually after a bit of relief, I navigate away from the mindless entertainment and focus on something that matters.

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My Review of the Old Testament (really)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:49:08 +0000

The Old Testament is not something one typically reviews in a blog post, but I’ve been reading it for the past year, and I want to write down some of my thoughts about the text. This is, after all, a blog about writing.

Where does one even begin? Let’s start with purposes, in other words, why I was even reading the Old Testament. In our house we have regular family scripture study and chose to focus on the Old Testament this year. But just try reading aloud King James verses to a 4, 6, and 9 year old — you’ll quickly find they’re occupied in other matters. So I tried leveraging the most powerful attention technique I know: story. I would read a bit in the Old Testament until I came across an interesting story. Then I would tell the story in my own words while my children sometimes listened.

Many times this worked; other times it failed. One fortunate result was that I flew through the book of Leviticus, which is where I always seemed to get bogged down previously.

While this method does work for children, it had an interesting effect on me too. As I tried to get the details straight in my head, I ended up understanding and reflecting on these Old Testament stories much more myself.

The first five books of the Old Testament through Chronicles are quite interesting and full of story. After that, when you get into what are referred to as the Prophets, the stories thin out. You get a lot of prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem, the scattering of Israel, constant comparisons of idolatry to adultery, prophecies about a future renewal and gathering, hints of a coming Messiah, and ultimate destruction and judgment in the last days.

Although the prophets are at times interesting, by and large these sections lack story, and we ended up covering a lot more territory in less time. After all, how many ways can you relate how Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, or explain why it was destroyed, to children? Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel discuss this topic at length in ancient poetic forms, with heightening parallelisms.

I think many people will criticize my focus on story. This is fine — I admit my bias here. During these sections, we held less scripture study, and I felt less like I understood the text. I did listen to quite a few podcasts from the Covenant Theological Seminary’s Worldwide Classroom on the Old Testament, which were insightful. Wikipedia entries on each of the books of the Bible are also packed full of information. Still, the prophets make so many cultural and location-based references, coupled with prophetic idioms, it’s hard to always understand what they’re saying. Usually they’re just repeating the same idea from different angles and metaphors. (That’s what I mean by heightening parallelisms.)

I have a few random thoughts that don’t necessarily cohere intelligently here. But let’s start with a basic summary.

Summary

Israel typically refers to the Hebrews, and in the Old Testament, all of the Israelites are sometimes referred to as if just one single person. The story of Israel is as follows: Yahweh (or YHWH, or Jehovah, or God) makes a covenant to Abraham that if he will worship him, and turn away from other gods, he will bless him with innumerable posterity and lead him to the promised land. Abraham’s acceptance of Yahweh as the only God initiates monotheism, which is completely new to the world at the time. (Worship of multiple gods is pretty much the norm everywhere.)

Abraham fathers Isaac, Isaac fathers Jacob (renamed Israel), and Jacob fathers Joseph along with 11 other sons, who become the 12 tribes of Israel. Joseph is sold by his brothers into Egypt, where he becomes one of the region’s leaders. Famine ravishes the land, and soon Israel and his family come to Egypt for food, where they remain, provisioned in a place by Joseph. However, after time the Israelites become enslaved to the Egyptians.

Yahweh raises up Moses to deliver the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. After their escape, they travel across the Red Sea and through the wilderness for 40 years. The next leader, Joshua, takes them into the promised land (Canaan) where he begins a dreadful slaughter of Canaanite cities, including the famous attack on Jericho that involved merely circling the city and shouting to bring down the walls.

After a system of judges, Israel desires a king, so they choose Saul. Saul leads the people, but becomes mad in obsession for praise in competition with David. David succeeds Saul and becomes the most well-known and beloved king in Israel’s history. Despite a stumble with an adulterous relationship, he maintains a united Israel, has success in battle, writes a ton of psalms, and seems to enjoy music and dance (something I think Puritans later downplay). His son Solomon succeeds David, has 1,000 wives/concubines, and becomes so wise that he writes 1,000 proverbs. People all over, even the Queen of Sheba, come to see his wealth and glory.

After Solomon, it’s pretty much all downhill for the Israelites. With Solomon’s successor, the kingdom gets divided into north and south areas. Ten tribes form the northern kingdom, referred to (confusingly) as Israel, sometimes as Ephraim; later their capital becomes Samaria. The southern kingdom is referred to as Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. Most of the history in Chronicles and Kings involves Judah, not Israel.

After Solomon, we read about a succession of king after king after king. Some are righteous; most aren’t. They frequently turn back to idolatry. Prophets warn them about upcoming destruction and captivity if they don’t change their ways.

Around 722 BCE, the Assyrians carry away most of the northern kingdom. In fact, in the Assyrian conquest, the Israelites aren’t merely enslaved or driven out but are rather assimilated into Assyrian culture. Not too many years later, Judah is first besieged and later decimated by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The last king, Zedekiah, is brought to Babylon along with his sons. There the Babylonian king (Nebuchadnezzar) blinds Zedekiah and kills his sons (except for Mulek, whom Mormons believe escapes and eventually travels to America).

After burning the city, destroying the temple, and crumbling the city walls, Nebuchadnezzar carries away all the elite from Jerusalem (about 20,000 people) back to Babylon and leaves only farmers and peasants in the land. After the Jews spend some 70 years in captivity, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquers Babylon. The Persians have a different philosophy, allowing conquered people to remain somewhat independent under the umbrella of Persian rule.

Around 521 BCE, Cyrus allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Some years after the return, Zerubbabel rebuilds the temple and Nehemiah rebuilds city walls. The second temple, as it’s called, is completed around 516 BC and stands for more than 400 years (until Herod, the same one who slaughters all the babies at the beginning of the New Testament, renovates and expands the temple in 19 BCE).

Malachi, the last prophet in the Old Testament, dates to around 450 BCE. There’s nothing that spans these 450 years to the time of Christ, so there’s a bit of a gap and mystery left for the reader to put together. During this time, the Greeks rule, and then split into a couple of different empires (Ptolemy and Seleucid); then the Maccabees revolt and gain Jewish autonomy for a season until the Romans take over.

That’s the basic story. Now for a few observations:

Exodus and Archeology

There’s a scholarly trend to dismiss the Exodus and instead assert that the Israelites were actually a lower class of Canaanites who revolted, and then wrote the story of Exodus to leverage a history that would unite their people. Israel Finkelstein is one of the proponents behind this idea (see The Bible Unearthed), and much of it stems from a lack of archeological evidence of an exodus out of Egypt.

Although it seems like an interesting alternative, given the complete saturation of the exodus story throughout the entirety of the Old Testament — it’s told and retold dozens of times by various prophets and scribes across hundreds of years — I don’t think one can dismiss the exodus story without dismissing the rest of the books as well. The idea that the Israelites concocted the out-of-Egypt story to unify and rally their people doesn’t make sense given the rigidly ethical nature of their beliefs.

Idolatry and Adultery

One of the constant parallels in the Old Testament is that of idolatry and adultery. One prophet, Hosea, is even commanded to marry a prostitute to represent Israel’s infidelity in worshiping idols (it’s compared to a married woman having other lovers). In fact, not only is this a constant comparison, but Yahweh is anything but a cool-headed, low-maintenance type of god. He’s sometimes as jealous and upset as a cuckold husband. Idol worship seems to be the activity that makes him irate.

But while his anger flares up, and prophets threaten with destruction, you also see the opposite: a constantly forgiving god, one who intimately cares and desires to build a relationship with his people, one who continues in a long-suffering way to work with a stubborn people. At one point, in Micah, he says “O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee? testify against me. For I brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of servants;” (Micah 6:3-4). You can hear the pleading. This sense of deep feeling for the people contrasts and balances out some of the anger and destruction.

Scattering and Gathering

Another constant theme is the scattering and gathering of Israel. With empires like the Assyrians and Persians and Greeks and Romans, who conquered so much of the region, it’s no surprise that scattering would be inevitable. The gathering, however, could be a bit clearer. At times the gathering seems to refer to an immediate time after captivity in Babylon. But this rebuilding of the temple and return to Jerusalem is only briefly touched upon, and doesn’t fit the heralded and much anticipated day of rejoicing when people scattered among all nations will return back to their land. In fact, after Israel’s captivity in Babylon, many of the Jews didn’t want to return to Jerusalem, which was burned and destroyed. Many made their way elsewhere, such as Egypt, or Elephantine Island.

I suppose that this gathering and renewal will take place far in the future. But given the flipping back and forth and ambiguous timeline, it’s no wonder there was so much confusion when Christ arrives on the scene and doesn’t usher in the judgment and reckoning and rule that so many prophets foretell.

Isaiah’s Depth

Isaiah is one of the few books that, despite its cryptic prose, dives deep into major themes, from the coming messiah to the millennium, the scattering and return — he’s interesting. He’s worth returning to, particularly because he’s one of the few prophets that includes unmistakable predictions about a future messiah. Many other books include types and shadows, but their references seem to require interpretation.

Missing Discussions?

The world of the Old Testament seems to lack discussion about so many concepts I wanted to see. There’s no mention of proselytism (why?), the concept of being chosen remains unquestioned despite its eyebrow raising preferentialism, the ordinances of animal sacrifice seem barbaric, there’s little theological elaboration (even with Job as he wrestles with the question of evil), and almost nothing on the resurrection.

So much effort focuses on the condemnation of idolatry. The main thrust of the Old Testament seems to build trust and faith, to cast aside other gods, to put aside alliances with other nations, to honor the sabbath, to help the poor and needy, to perform sacrifices and honor feasts, to maintain fidelity, to heed prophetic warning, and so on.

In a family of mostly women (I have four daughters and no sons), every time a female figure played prominently in a story, the kids would perk up and listen attentively. It’s unfortunate that beyond a few notable women (Eve, Leah, Deborah, Ruth, Esther, etc), there aren’t many stories of women in the Old Testament. I wish there were a few stories of mothers, or at least something with a strong female protagonist. (Interestingly, despite the absence of female protagonists in the Bible, sociological studies of religion (see American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us) find that women are more religious than men.

Foundational Work

Despite the unfamiliar language and the sometimes uncomfortable stories (such as giving your virgin daughters to an angry mob rather than a visitor in your house), the Old Testament is a foundational work that makes many other things understandable. I can’t say I’ve always enjoyed reading the Old Testament, especially when the prophets keep circling back to destruction and captivity, but there is a sense of ancient importance to the writings. I know the books aren’t something one reads in a few months of study — they rather require a “lifetime of study,” as Dr. Gregory Perry says in one of his lectures. But reading the Old Testament is rewarding and at times enlightening. Studying it, even cursorily, I feel that it has been a huge foundation stone in my education.

Chronology

One challenge I struggled with was chronology. When I finished 2 Kings and realized that Chronicles was Kings all over again but a bit different, emphasizing different details and perspectives, I grew quite frustrated. But really chronology only gets more non-linear as the book progresses. We have this idea at page 1184 will be the end, page 700 will be somewhere near the middle, and 400 near the beginning. But it doesn’t really work that way. The books are grouped into the law, the writings, and the prophets. Although David is the author of many psalms, and Solomon of proverbs, and Isaiah is a prophet during Hezekiah’s time, none of these books appears together nor is integrated into a linear timeline. Esther relates a story of captivity that doesn’t take place for quite a while; Job and Jonah don’t seem to have any specific date at all.

Anciently, before the invention of book, we know the scribes kept scrolls. At some point, according to Dale Martin of Yale (see his lectures on iTunes University), scribes tired of unraveling scrolls every time they wanted to compare books and verses with each other. One scribe got the bright idea of chopping up the scrolls into pages and binding them together into a “codex,” or book. As a result, rather than a basket of scrolls, you suddenly have a format that imposes a sequential ordering of selected books. Martin asserts that the codex initiated the idea of a canon. But I think the codex also imposes a sense of chronology to the books. This same assumption wouldn’t be so prevalent with a basket of scrolls, which would be in no particular order.

What Comes Next?

The book ends abruptly, leaving about a 500 year gap between the Old and New Testament. About this time, my wife and kids were really into the Maccabeats’ song “Candelight,” so I did some reading about the Maccabees and Greeks, which take place in this 500 year span, to better understand the history of what happens during this time.

In a nutshell, the Greeks take over around mid-fourth century BCE through Alexander the Great and other military victories over the Persians. After Alexander the Great dies, some of his conquered lands fall into the hands of his officers. From here the empire splits into the Ptolemy and Seleucid kingdoms. After a handful of leaders in the Seleucid empire, a nasty king named Antiochas Epiphanes comes to power and, after a scuffle with appointed leaders and assassinations and priestly bribes, Antiochas outlaws Judaism, making it illegal to read the Torah or practice circumcision. He slaughters pigs on the temple’s altar and and includes Zeus as a god in the temple.

Antiochas’ rule is too much to bear. At about 165 BCE, the Maccabee family begins a revolt in guerrilla warfare style that leads to the reestablishment of autonomy for Judah. The Maccabees, a family with five sons who act as military leaders, basically lead a conquest in retaking conquered cities (reading Maccabees reminds me of Joshua’s march against Canaan).

The Allure of the Greeks

The text I used to fill in this gap, The Lost 500 Years, notes that at the time of the Maccabean revolt, many Jews felt divided. Some felt that violent resistance wasn’t the answer; others refused to fight on the sabbath; others found the Greek culture and way of life alluring.

This last point hooked me. The Greeks are basically the foundation of western culture. Not only did the Greeks give us the Olympic Games, but also theater (which led to cinema and TV); they implemented the first democracy (the parliament is modeled after this, to some extent). They gave birth to an intellectual culture in philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) and science (Archimedes, Parminedes) and mathematics (Pythagorus) and history (Herodotus) and literature (Euripedes; and much earlier, Homer) and military strategy (Alexander the Great) — these would have a lasting impact on culture and civilization for millenia to come. In fact, in Greeks: Crucible of Civilization (on Netflix) the filmmaker asserts that even at the end of Greek’s physical empire, Socrates started a new empire: the empire of the mind.

Comparing this intellectual and cultural flourish to the writings of the Old Testament, it’s easy to see how alluring the Greeks were. Never mind their worship of Athena and other gods, their innovative and free thinking endeavors are fascinating. After hundreds of years of admonitions about idolatry and monotheism, sabbaths and sacrifice, it’s refreshing to step into Greek culture, where intellectual inquiry, theater and art, philosophy and science, democracy and rhetoric, are encouraged and developed. By comparison, the last thousand years of Israelite history seems to cycle between righteous kings who purify the temple and break the idols, and bad kings who worship idols and lead the people astray.

One would perhaps hope that such cultures might be reversed — that the flourishing, intellectual culture that expands in so many areas of human interest and achievement would be the Israelites, rather than the Greeks. Why is one culture so plain while another ignites with human innovation? In short, I can see why many Jews exposed to Greek culture and ideas might be mixed about joining the Maccabees in their revolt.

This may seem like an insignificant objection, but it has stuck in my mind for the past few days. Yesterday in a meeting at work, someone pulled up a wiki page with the following quote:

Every discovery in science and art, that is really true and useful to mankind, has been given by direct revelation from God. … We should take advantage of all these great discoveries … and give to our children the benefit of every branch of useful knowledge, to prepare them to step forward and efficiently do their part in the great work” — Brigham Young

In other words, Mormons see the Greeks advancement in art and science, the Renaissance, as well as all the technological advancements of today, as revelation. This is an interesting idea, which almost seems to be an example of an underlying Greek idea that fuses with biblical tradition. Or maybe the Greeks were recipients of what Israel could have experienced had they stayed the course — who knows.

Now that the year is over, I won’t be reading the Old Testament much. I plan to return to my topic of findability and explore that with more depth. At times, however, I can’t help but be pulled in by history.

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photo from Wikipedia