I'd Rather Be Writing » literature

The Conference Proposal I Didn’t Submit

Tom Johnson — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:38:57 +0000

According to Kindle Author, Craig Stone was a promising young novelist who, at 23, had some book deals and appeared to be on the brink of becoming the next big writer when, for whatever reason, the book deals fell through. Facing financial difficulty, he took up a job at a well-known company and lived the office life until one day he snapped. He writes,

I quit my decent job in the city working for a pretty famous company, left my home and walked away from all I had and went with a sleeping bag and a bag full of clothes to be homeless and live in a park.

I was miserable in my job and all I wanted to do was write; my philosophy being that maybe we all over-think our fears and undersell our dreams. So I simplified. I took a leap of faith and walked into the park armed with an A4 pad, a pen and no idea what tomorrow would bring. (See Kindle Author Interview: Craig Stone)

He started living in the park and planned to write about his experiences there, but as nothing eventful happened, his imagination took over and he eventually wrote The Squirrel That Dreamt of Madness.

I haven’t read his book, but I like the story of the would-be writer giving up his office cubicle life to pursue his writing dreams. I don’t know what sort of corporate job he had (it was for “a pretty famous company,” he said), so let me fill in the blanks with my own imagination. He might have been a technical writer working for EMC or IBM. He might have been documenting some miserable API, or writing instructions on how to install and configure some boring system that he himself would never actually use. He might not have been in a situation too unlike many other technical writers out there, who started out their college educations with dreamy eyes and literary ambitions, only to be sucked into corporate life for financial sustainability.

I love the story of walking away from it all to pursue your dreams. While it’s not something I’m planning to do, I am not entirely convinced that technical writing and fiction writing have to be so different from each other. Which brings me to the point of my post: the conference proposal I did not submit.

I wasn’t going to submit a proposal to the STC Summit this year because nothing in particular motivated me — except fiction. Then listening to my colleague’s enthusiasm about his proposal (something about intellectual property rights), at the last minute I decided I would submit a proposal called “Using Literary Fiction Techniques in Technical Writing.” The short description:

You wanted to be a great novelist, but you sold your soul and became a technical writer instead. Actually, technical writing is not so different from fiction writing. Fiction writers see the world through a perspective that is not their own. They get inside the heads of their characters [users] and explore their pain points and challenges [tasks]. Good technical writing does the same thing.

By literary fiction techniques, I’m not talking about incorporating dialogue into instructional procedures, or introducing character-driven scenarios into your how-to guides. I’m not talking about using flowery adjectives or elaborating with fictitious examples that go on and on.

While those could be fiction techniques, what I’m thinking about aligns more with simply getting inside your users’ heads and exploring their challenges. If I have one main failure as a technical writer, it’s that I’m not connected closely enough with my users. I don’t understand them enough — what they think, what they do, what pain points they have. I should find ways to immerse myself in their world, to walk around in their skin as much as possible. This is what good fiction writers do with their characters. They let their characters drive the plot forward (rather than manipulating the characters with the author’s motives). And what really is the difference between a character and a user, especially if you’ve developed several personas from your user research?

Asked to describe his writing process, Craig Stone says,

I am a method writer that blends the now with the impossible. If I want to write about a subject I will go and live it. My books are one foot in the here and now and one foot on the back of a confused cow chewing grass wondering where that guy came from with the PC that he is trying to plug into its ear. Sorry cow, it’s nothing personal—but I’ve got to plug it in somewhere.

He tries to live his characters’ lives. He immerses himself in the scene and environment he wants to write about. Ted Conover, one of my favorite nonfiction writers, does the same thing. He’s more of an ethnographer. To write an insider’s view of a prison, he became a guard at Sing Sing. To write about the hobos, he spent a summer riding the trains with hobos. To write about the rich in Aspen, he spent a summer living and working among them.

To torture ourselves in a miserable existence as a technical writer, dreaming of the day when we might break free and write fiction, seems to me a bit of an illusion. The best technical/fiction writers immerse themselves in the minds of their users/characters. They get outside of themselves. This immersion is the starting point that makes your writing/manual more than a navel-gazing experience.

Once you immerse yourself among your users, the next step is to become familiar with your character’s/user’s goals and challenges. What does your user/character want to accomplish? What kinds of challenges stand in the way of the user? These then become the tasks that you write about. The end product may be vastly different, but the process of getting there is similar.

I ended up not submitting this proposal because, as much as I like the idea, it’s too theoretical for me. I haven’t immersed myself among my users, I haven’t really worked with personas, and I certainly don’t feel like I’ve managed to merge the technical and creative writing fields/genres. It would be a lofty goal to work towards, something I would hopefully solve by the time the conference rolled around.

Based on my past experience, that sort of experiment is the perfect formula for stress, because it presumes that all pieces of the puzzle will fall into place just when it’s time to show the puzzle to the audience. It’s much more practical to submit proposals on techniques and topics that I’ve already mastered and feel comfortable with (for example, quick reference guides). The only problem is, that’s a bit boring to me. It’s explanatory more than exploratory. It’s like looking backward instead of looking forward. I’d much rather have a race that I’m preparing to run, one whose path I have never run.

I decided to put this as a goal to work toward this year, to find more ways to get inside my users’ heads and let them drive the topics I write. Closing the gap with users would pose an enormous shift in my own efforts as a technical writer, and I’m guessing that the interaction and proximity to the characters will be just interesting enough to remove me from whatever factors contribute to the miserable corporate cubicle existence.

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The Common Language Everyone Speaks

Tom Johnson — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:04:03 +0000

Several weeks ago, I was reading something that caused me to worry. A line in a scriptural narrative biography tells how his father taught him in all the ways of right. As a father, I thought about what I had taught my children, and it wasn’t much. They weren’t going to become Enochs from anything I showed them. Football on Sundays, basketball during the week, too much TV, long absences at a remote job, lots of time sitting at a computer doing, from their perspective, who knows what. I’m not sure I’m teaching them much of anything.

This bothered me. As a good practice, we’ve tried rounding up the kids to read before. But each time this proved somewhat disastrous. The problem is the wide range of ages. I’m 34, Jane 32, Sally 9, Susan 5, and Spot 3. Try holding a meaningful discussion when everyone is at a different comprehension level. What Susan can grasp isn’t on the same level as Sally. And Sally is far beyond Spot, and so on, to say nothing of Jane or me.

The situation isn’t too unlike the problem with technical levels and user documentation. Power users need one kind of documentation, beginners another. It’s hard to satisfy both groups with the same content.

Or so I thought. I haven’t solved the dilemma with user documentation. But with my little family, I’ve learned that story is the common language that everyone speaks. Regardless of age, when you start telling a story, everyone listens.

So we’ve stopped reading by the line. Instead we focus on the story. I read ahead, get the details of the story down in my mind, and then narrate it to my children. Sometimes Jane tells the story. Whereas before Susan would mischeviously close my book, she now listens eagerly. Sally listens and retains the most minute detail. Spot plays quietly with barbie dolls.

When we think about writers who are gifted with language, too often the discussion revolves around articulate expression, the ability to paint vivid imagery, or some other literary talent. Despite these flourishes, the most powerful form of language is story. Story is what has meaning. The stories you tell about yourself, the stories you learn about the world around you, and the stories others tell you form your world view and shape how you understand and interpret nearly everything that happens to you.

Story and Documentation

Story, or narrative, is not a stranger to the world of documentation. As I said, story is the language everyone speaks. In a recent post on The Content Wrangler, Alan Porter says narrative is one principle we can learn from comics and apply to documentation. Alan writes,

The second fundamental of comics is the idea of narrative. Narrative should drive and guide the reader / user along on a journey. All communication is story telling [...] and in story telling your narrative must have a beginning, middle and end. Even if you use a topic based authoring approach like DITA, each topic should be a ‘story’, the reader should be guided through the information and know more at the conclusion than they did at the start.

Alan’s assertion that “all communication is story telling” is a strong one, and much of it hinges on his definition of story. To some degree, a story must have a beginning, middle, and end, he says. He gives the following example of story from Chrome’s comic documentation:

An example of narrative in documentation

If you strip out the visuals and just leave the text, is that story? What really is story beyond simply having a beginning, middle, and end?

To rewrite the above into a more narrative form, it might look like this:

As you surf the web, much of your experience is defined by your browser. But browsers crash when they can’t load scripts or handle the heavy file sizes of websites. Rich media, in the form of video, graphics, and sound, can make your pages load slowly and freeze up your memory. Malicious scripts, worms, and other malware can pass from your browser to your computer, infecting your system with viruses. To avoid these problems, you need a stable, fast, and secure browser. That’s why we built Chrome…

To emphasize the story, I tried to highlight the challenges that you (the protagonist) face when you cruise around the web with your browser.

To be a good story, though, you need several other elements. Good stories start out with some kind of conflict, for sure. This gives the protagonist purpose. The initial conflict sometimes creates other conflicts, which then cross into each other, complicating the situation. The resolution often comes about as the protagonist changes. Without some change in the protagonist’s attitude, stories feel flat.

To make this a good story, then, I would need to talk about the effort to create Chrome, the challenges they faced, epiphanies at moments of absolute frustration, and other flashes of insight that helped make the connections and leaps necessary to build the browser.

Another Approach to Story and Documentation

Although the Chrome example works, much of documentation involves procedural steps, not background on how or why an application was made.

If story is the common language everyone speaks, and the most powerful form of language, what should the role of story be with procedural, step-by-step documentation?

Some procedural topics could actually be written like the example above, setting out the problem and explaining how to solve it through the software you’re providing. Focusing more on the problem is a good strategy. Here’s a page out of the CSS Cookbook that does exactly that:

The CSS Cookbook starts out each how-to topic by defining the problem that the solution answers

Notice how the author begins by defining the problem. The solution then provides the answer to the problem. This problem-solution format is not unique in their approach. Almost every topic in the book is set up this way.

Imagining Persona-Driven Problem Scenarios

Another way to incorporate a narrative perspective into documentation is by imagining specific use cases. Ginny Redish says to imagine not just the questions your users will have on a page, or the types of users who will come to your site, but to imagine specific users with specific problems.

For example, as you’re evaluating the content on your airline site, you may have already defined various personas for your users. But have you imagined your users with specific, real problems? John is a 34-year-old bank executive who needs to quickly cancel his flight to Hong Kong because of a family emergency. Now you have a problem that your content will attempt to answer. Sally is an impatient, scatterbrained secretary who was just thrown into her role last week and has to figure out how to set up a meeting in the new system by tomorrow morning. Again, you have both a persona and a problem.

Additionally, you can also integrate examples of actual users and common scenarios into the documentation. You could describe a typical scenario that Kate goes through to process bank statements in the system and what she does when the transactions don’t balance. This form of narrative is a technique often used in in e-learning.

The Story On and Off the Page

Although I’d like to believe otherwise, implementing story in the traditional narrative form will probably always be a challenge with technical documentation. Story thrives in the literary arts, not in manuals. However, although story might not apply to every page of instructions, every topic in your help can be an answer to a struggle the user is having.

In this sense, the user supplies the conflict and the documentation supplies the resolution. The change occurs when the user’s sense of frustration subsides with an aha! moment. Because of this, we cannot create the full story in our documentation. Instead, we’re only an actor playing a part in a larger story taking place on and off the page — the reader’s frustration with a problem, his or her turn to the help, and the resolution and change of attitude the help topic brings.

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NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo Start Nov 1

Tom Johnson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:47:14 +0000

Today is the start of both NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, whereas the goal of NaBloPoMo is to post every day for a month. NaBloPoMo started after NaNoWriMo, so NaNoWriMo has more of a defined purpose:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

While I don’t want to write a novel, I do want to write a collection of personal essays on technical writing. NaNoWriMo has a goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month, whereas NaBloPoMo requires only a post every day. If you miss a day with NaBloPoMo, you’re done. But with NaNoWriMo, you can catch up. Still, NaNoWriMo requires considerably more output (50,000 words) rather than just a daily post. And it’s supposed to be fiction.

Jane participated in NaBloPoMo last year and found it worthwhile. She said it got her into the writing rhythm in a good way, and ideas started to flow freely. This year I’m going to give NaBloPoMo a try. But I want to try to focus each of my posts around some kind of story.

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Great Books by Writers Who Aren't Dead Yet

Tom Johnson — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:37:46 +0000

Great Books by Writers Who Aren’t Dead Yet

My friend Josh just started this site. He’s an English professor at BYU Idaho. It’s an online book club involving discussion of excellent literary authors still alive.

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What I See — James Hall’s Essays and Florida

Tom Johnson — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:05:49 +0000

James Hall's book of essays, "Hot Damn"

On my father’s recent visit from Florida, he brought me a stack of books, one of them James Hall’s collection of essays, Hot Damn!

James Hall is a poet and crime novelist, but he once wrote essays for a newspaper for several years. This book is a collection of those essays.

The topics of Hall’s essays range widely — from adventures in Florida to experiences as a boy in a library, to buying a house, to eating Cheetos while watching sports. But one theme is consistent throughout: the celebration of life. Falling in love with something. Getting excited about an adventure or place that others might simply regard as ordinary.

I believe this attitude is something I’ve largely forgotten. Let me excerpt a few paragraphs that demonstrate his love for life, especially Florida.

In “Home at Last,” Hall explains that he turned down the Air Force Academy to attend Florida Presbyterian College — not for religious reasons, but to escape in to Florida:

I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Satin Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, the unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.

In “Florida Trifecta,” spending time near ancient ceremonial grounds, Hall writes,

As my psychic tuning fork hummed, we drank a beer together on a peak overlooking one of the assembly plazas and were quieter than we would have been almost anywhere else on earth. I no longer cared if we went over to Cabbage Key. This was fine. We could stay there all afternoon, standing shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts of our noble forebears who knew and loved this land when its waters were crystalline and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated by the noise or particulates.

In “The Names of Things,” Hall describes a walk on the seashell-full beaches of Sanibel island:

Lace murex, wentletrap, lightening whelk, junonia. The names are as exotic and various as their shapes. Cones and tulips and angel wings, baby’s ears and worms. Their bright colors litter the beach before me and crunch underfoot. With every step down the sugary sand I cringe with guilt at the possibility that I am destroying hundreds of rare specimens.

In “Winning Me Over,” Hall drives through the Everglades:

It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that I first journeyed west out Tamiami Trail and fell instantly in love with that broad and water expanse of sawgrass and anhingas and alligators. What struck me on that first trip was the way the vast and mesmerizing distances seemed to open up immediately after passing beyond the city limits of Miami. At that time I did not yet know the name of a single bird or bush or tree, and my eyes were not yet attuned to the nuances of that profoundly understated landscape, yet I sense the aching silence, a mysterious, almost sacred hush that seemed to resonate from the immense spread of sky and land.

In almost every essay, Hall’s love of life comes through:

In “Nude Woman in the Grass,” he describes the experience of being gripped by a book for the first time.
In “Dream House,” he narrates a house he fell in love with, purchased, and lived in for eight years.
In “Touchy Feely,” he celebrates the sense of touch in vivid, prolonged ways.
In “Hemingway,” he sees past the flaws that critics point out in Hemingway and values him for his character.

Hall also has a good dose of wit and sarcasm, and the essays are far from any kind of inspirational writing. But in almost every essay, there’s an aesthetic component that uplifts me. The way he sees an experience, or describes a place or person, has an element of rapture with life.

I think remarkable literary writers have this same celebration of life inside them. Think of Walt Whitman, who, in Song of Myself, wrote passages like,

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

Finding this attitude isn’t about looking on the positive side, or avoiding negative gossip or criticism. It’s about looking in to the ordinary and seeing something moving and alive. It’s about learning to marvel at what others regard as plain.

Perhaps Hall’s essays resonated so strongly with me because of my time in Florida. Hall moved from Kentucky to Florida, and then spent the next thirty years of his life there. I must admit that I never viewed Florida as a literary paradise. It’s hot, muggy, and subject to urban sprawl like any other place. But that’s not what Hall sees. Whether he’s picking up sun-bleached shells on a beach, or staring out into the ocean for several days straight, or going into an old diner where they plaster the walls with dollar bills, he’s jazzed about the experience. He celebrates the life that happens all around him.

As I think back on my four years in Florida, it was a literary goldmine. All too frequently I dismissed my surroundings as mundane, as unworthwhile. And yet, it seems no matter where I live, the landscape is just as ordinary as it always is. Hall taught me to stop looking other places and instead look right where I am. To look into the ordinary and see something more. And with that something more, embrace it.

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Transitioning from Literary Studies to Technical Communication

Tom Johnson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:03:37 +0000

Last night, unable to sleep at about 4 a.m., either because I went to bed early or because I simply couldn’t sleep, I grabbed my BlackBerry, on its usual place on my nightstand, and began to read through my email and feeds, as I am accustomed to do, lying half-conscious on my pillow, when I saw this intriguing question from Harold Motley about whether the transition from literary studies to technical communication was fairly common, or rather difficult.

Harold writes,

I’ve just recently came across your website and I find your posts and podcasts very informative and interesting. I’m currently a third year undergraduate student studying English, philosophy and professional writing. In exploring possible post-undergraduate paths and careers, I have been extensively researching the careers of law and technical communication.

My strongest skill is writing; and most of the writing I do is through the form of papers, essays etc. in which I analyze text and form arguments. In addition to applying to law school I am also looking for other careers in which I can apply my strength and interest in writing.

I have looked at M.A. programs in Technical Communication and found a few in Chicago (where I live) and I was just wondering how beneficial this degree would be if I were to pursue a career in technical communication.

I do not have much technical knowledge aside from the standard programs like those in Microsoft Office. Would this hinder a successful transition into technical communication, or is the technical knowledge something I would acquire through grad school?

I’m planning on taking a technical writing class and another on writing & the Web, which I think would act as a good intro into technical communication. Is the transition from literary studies to technical communication fairly common, or is it rather difficult? Also, what’s your opinion on a M.A. in Technical Communication and Information Design vs. a M.A. in Information Architecture?

I greatly appreciate any feedback you can give.

Harold

To summarize, you’re debating between a career as a technical communicator or a lawyer, and you feel an inclination to pursue a masters program in technical communication because your strength is writing. If you pursue this route, you want to know whether you should get an advanced degree in some technical communication/information design/information architecture field.

First, let me say that I have no idea how to advise you. And according to Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer, the blogosphere has too many examples of people expounding on things — often from anecdotal evidence — without having any expertise in the subject.

In that spirit, I direct you to the excellent post Scott Nesbitt wrote yesterday, which is amazingly and coincidentally relevant to your question. Responding to the question of whether would-be technical writers should take courses, Scott writes,

If you want to [take courses in technical writing], fine. I’ve never taken a formal technical writing course and I’ve done OK. That’s not quite true; in the late 90s, I did start to do a certificate program in information design and finished about half of the required courses.

Essentially, I’m a street-trained technical writer and technologist. I learned the basics of tech writing from a textbook that I bought at my alma mater’s bookstore in the early 1990s. I put what I learned from that volume into practice by writing manuals for myself and for a community environmental group with which I volunteered. I critiqued those manuals, and others that I read. I wrote articles for technology publications. I taught myself HTML, graphics conversion, various computer skills, UNIX, and even tried to get a handle on SGML.

But a big part of my development as a technical communicator was the two years that I spent working at a financial software firm. Long hours, a mix of applications running on Windows and OpenVMS, and a lot of developers with a low tolerance for ignorance honed various skills.

That’s not to say a technical writing course won’t be useful. I just never saw the need for one. (“Becoming a Technical Communicator”)

Rather than putting all your effort into a technical writing course, Scott recommends you acquire technical knowledge related to whatever it is you’re documenting:

Aside from basic computer skills, you should have (or plan to acquire) a good level of technical knowledge. At the very least, you should have a cursory knowledge of the key technologies you will or may be working with, of programming and scripting languages, and more.

I echo what Scott says — if you need to know Java, or HTML, or some other technology, learn it. It may be more valuable to you than an academic degree.

Scott also brings up the importance of acquiring technical knowledge to gain respect from other team members. (Note: If respect is important to you, be sure to read this guest post: Technical Writing Careers – The Raw, Unvarnished Truth.)

About applying to law school — when I was in college, I had a similar dilemma as you. I didn’t know whether I should pursue law or writing. My father supported me in either direction, but he thought fondly of the idea of my “sallying forth to battle the evils of the world through law,” or something to that effect.

I decided, for reasons I can’t remember, to go in the direction of writing instead. A few years later, while I was getting an MFA in creative writing, I became friends with a Columbia law student. Often at his house there would be dozens of law books lying around — half read, with bookmarks in various places. I realized, looking at his reading, that I never had an interest in law and could care less about this or that legal decision. I looked back to my deliberation between law and writing as foolishness.

So my advice to you on careers is this: What kinds of books do you have lying around your house? What are your real interests? Are you looking into law because you find law interesting, or because it’s one of those classic careers that everyone considers?

Now granted, it’s unlikely that you have a bunch of technical writing manuals lying around your house. (If so, you are weird.) Most likely you have literary texts here and there. You should know that technical writing is not the same as literary analysis, but it is still writing. As a technical writer, the kind of content people pay you to write is not creatively fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging — it can bend your mind in exhausting ways.

A 250 page manual for a complicated product may be more difficult to write than a master’s thesis. It may require a massive amount of deductive and inductive logic, as you try to figure out how the product works. You may spend months interviewing subject matter experts, asking them hundreds of questions about how the product functions, and then hundreds more to clarify their cryptic answers.

Once you accumulate a massive jumble of information, you’ll rack your brain trying to organize and arrange the content in a way that fits the vocabulary and behavior of your audience. You’ll shape and craft the manual, analyzing how each topic fits into the whole. You’ll shave words and phrases to increase the conciseness, rearrange one paragraph with another, deliberate over word choice and semantics, and consult various style manuals to ensure proper word choice, formatting, and punctuation.

As you near the end, you’ll go through the tedious editorial process, reviewing the printed manual with a red pen, circling, crossing out, writing notes, and then inputting your edits. Once you finish, you’ll feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment and breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Does this sound like a familiar process to you? It should.

Much like a scholarly essay on literature, almost no one will read it, except a select handful of people whom you will never meet. But you’ll still feel a lasting reward knowing that you conquered a monster and helped people come closer to the application truth, similar to how a literary scholar unfolds a book to show how the text really functions.

In brief, yes, your preparation in literary studies will prepare you well for the analytical and exhausting challenges of technical writing.

As to the question of which masters program I recommend, again, follow your interests. However, I see a lot more jobs for technical writers than I do for information architects or information designers. Given the state of the economy, you might not want to confine your specialty to a small niche that sounds cool, but in the end isn’t marketable.

Here are some other posts on the subject:

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photo from Flickr