Writing and the Man
I am not a technology writer, and don't expect I will ever be. However, I was a technical writer for many years (about 10), and in my early days of trying to be a writer, I was torn between choosing a journalist's path toward a professional writing career, and choosing a technologist's path.
My first foray into technical writing followed a couple of years as a non-destructive testing technologist (I was certified in Ultrasonics and Radiography in 1975). At DeHavilland Aircraft, I applied for and obtained the position of Technical Writer primarily because of my NDT experience: DeHavilland needed an NDT manual for the DASH-7, and I was obviously qualified to write the manual, having been involved a great deal in the NDT work on that aircraft during its early production and test flight stages.
The timing (1977) aligned with my declining conviction that I was going to be a fiction writer. It is better, I reasoned, to be earning money as a technical writer than earning nothing as an unpublished fiction writer. At around this same time, I was taking creative writing courses at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, and my instructors recognized I had a talent for editing.
I was losing my taste for DeHavilland in 1979, and applied for a position as editor at Canadian Aviation Magazine (which later became Aviation & Aerospace Magazine). I was actually accepted, but turned the position down. I lost confidence that I could do the job. (I also applied and was accepted for a position as editor for a DeHavilland marketing magazine - I can't remember the name of it - and turned that down as well.) So people were telling me I was a good editor, but I wasn't ready to be an editor.
I left DeHavilland, spent a year working on a novel before going back to university, where, having lost my love of technical writing, thought I'd try the journalism track at Carleton's School of Journalism - which I also gave up on after falling in love with Philosophy.
The thing about all these experiences was that they all went toward improving my writing, even if I didn't know it at the time. My early science fiction attempts failed because of my inability to actually tell a story. Well, that's something that comes more naturally to some than others, just as editing does. I could see why I wasn't getting acceptances, but I was also impatient, and while I had polished my writing over the years, still didn't have the required drive to persist at it long enough, in the face of constant rejection, to break into print.
I returned to technical writing after university (I needed the money) and was successful at it. But here's the thing: You don't tell a story when you are a technical writer or an academic. You don't really report, either. So while the technical writing field (not technology writer) allows you to think you might actually be getting some place in terms of a writing career, it is singularly and diametrically opposed to the process and type of communication creative writing requires. It is virtually impossible to segue from a technical writing career into a creative writing one.
Having said that, there are certain skills that you do pick up on - writing to deadlines is still important, for instance, as is proofreading your work and checking your facts - but generally speaking, you only learn creative things like writing dialog, or telling a story, or constructing a plot by learning to observe what you live, learning to write what you observe, and reading the observations of others.
So I think I've come to learn that the essential lesson in all of this is simple: DO, then WRITE.
My first foray into technical writing followed a couple of years as a non-destructive testing technologist (I was certified in Ultrasonics and Radiography in 1975). At DeHavilland Aircraft, I applied for and obtained the position of Technical Writer primarily because of my NDT experience: DeHavilland needed an NDT manual for the DASH-7, and I was obviously qualified to write the manual, having been involved a great deal in the NDT work on that aircraft during its early production and test flight stages.
The timing (1977) aligned with my declining conviction that I was going to be a fiction writer. It is better, I reasoned, to be earning money as a technical writer than earning nothing as an unpublished fiction writer. At around this same time, I was taking creative writing courses at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, and my instructors recognized I had a talent for editing.
I was losing my taste for DeHavilland in 1979, and applied for a position as editor at Canadian Aviation Magazine (which later became Aviation & Aerospace Magazine). I was actually accepted, but turned the position down. I lost confidence that I could do the job. (I also applied and was accepted for a position as editor for a DeHavilland marketing magazine - I can't remember the name of it - and turned that down as well.) So people were telling me I was a good editor, but I wasn't ready to be an editor.
I left DeHavilland, spent a year working on a novel before going back to university, where, having lost my love of technical writing, thought I'd try the journalism track at Carleton's School of Journalism - which I also gave up on after falling in love with Philosophy.
The thing about all these experiences was that they all went toward improving my writing, even if I didn't know it at the time. My early science fiction attempts failed because of my inability to actually tell a story. Well, that's something that comes more naturally to some than others, just as editing does. I could see why I wasn't getting acceptances, but I was also impatient, and while I had polished my writing over the years, still didn't have the required drive to persist at it long enough, in the face of constant rejection, to break into print.
I returned to technical writing after university (I needed the money) and was successful at it. But here's the thing: You don't tell a story when you are a technical writer or an academic. You don't really report, either. So while the technical writing field (not technology writer) allows you to think you might actually be getting some place in terms of a writing career, it is singularly and diametrically opposed to the process and type of communication creative writing requires. It is virtually impossible to segue from a technical writing career into a creative writing one.
Having said that, there are certain skills that you do pick up on - writing to deadlines is still important, for instance, as is proofreading your work and checking your facts - but generally speaking, you only learn creative things like writing dialog, or telling a story, or constructing a plot by learning to observe what you live, learning to write what you observe, and reading the observations of others.
So I think I've come to learn that the essential lesson in all of this is simple: DO, then WRITE.
Are you writing memoirs now?
ReplyDeleteReflecting on lessons learned helps you understand what the lessons actually were, even if you didn't know them at the time.
ReplyDeleteOne of the hardest things to learn about creative writing is that 90% of it has to do with one's life relationships. Learning to be honest about those relationship aspects of your life is difficult, and being reflective without being self-indulgent is something very difficult as well.
All this is a long-winded way of saying, "No, I'm not writing memoirs. But I am reflecting on where I once was, and on what I learned about it."