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September 1st, 2009 | Posted in Creativity, Technical Writing 15 Comments »
In previous posts, I’ve explored whether technical writing is boring. Penelope Trunk’s latest post, All advice on how to manage creative people is awful, made me see the topic of workplace boredom in a different light.
Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that “people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative.” Creativity, then, is an important factor in personal happiness and fulfillment. Most of us know that. But here’s how you measure the degree of creativity in your work. Penelope says,
How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.
For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.
In other words, one measure of creativity at your job is whether you’re solving challenging problems all day. If you’re not presented with these problems, then most likely you’re talking on the phone instead. (Keeping yourself busy with e-mail, Twitter, IM, and other online chatter is the equivalent of talking on the phone.)
Most people consider writing to be a creative endeavor, and in some situations, it certainly is. But creativity is not just associated with writing, art, and the humanities. Penelope broadens creativity to include problem solving too.
In many ways, even though technical writing involves writing, the writing can be less creative than coding a program or creating a user interface. Technical writing can even be less creative than designing the look and feel of the online help that will house the writing. Many times writing procedural information is not creative at all, in fact. Sure, there’s a need to figure out how the application works, but once you’ve done that, merely transcribing how to do tasks in the system can make you start yawning. There are no more problems to solve. It’s mere knowledge transfer. When knowledge transfer is what you spend your day doing, technical writing loses the power of creative fulfillment.
On the flip side, because technical writing poses numerous technical challenges outside of writing, with solutions not always apparent or easy, technical writing can also be engaging. The technical side of our profession is actually what engages me more than the writing, even though I was initially attracted to the idea of writing.
I’ve been thinking about this unexpected reversal a lot lately because I’ve noticed how consuming I find technical challenges in contrast to writing. I’m drawn to problem solving with web issues, especially WordPress sites, to an almost addictive degree. When I’m working on a WordPress project, it consumes me entirely. I can easily sit at the computer for an entire afternoon or evening working on problem after problem, ignoring everything else. Building websites often includes an almost endless supply of problems to solve.
Changing how something looks is only one part of the game. Finding the additional functionality you need, figuring out the best way to organize the content, designing the navigation with usability in mind, configuring new plugins — all of these questions and problems provide engagement with the mind. For me, coming up with solutions is a creative act that surpasses the writing of technical procedures.
Fortunately, writing only takes up a small part of the technical writer’s day, as Shanghai tech writer notes. Once you’ve finished the writing layer of a project, there are countless other technical issues to address, everything from single sourcing the content to designing the online help skin to figuring out relationship tables in Flare. I used to think these tasks were ancillary to the core task of the written content. But now I realize that as far as engagement goes, it’s the other way around. The technical challenges are the rewarding, creative part.
Tags: boredom, boring, busyness, career, creative fulfillment, Creativity, email, engagement, Twitter
I agree – I get serious satisfaction as a web designer/developer from learning how to do something technically challenging. Finding new ways to better serve my clients and their website visitors often finds me poking around through various web application sites looking at tools I haven’t yet had an opportunity to use. That’s really fun for me, the problem-solving aspect of development.
Good post!
Most technical writers enjoy the job because they have the type of mind that needs to find out how things work. It’s a small step from needing to find out how things work to needing to *get* things to work – and, in my experience, a lot of tech writers enjoy spending hours and hours tinkering around with software to get it to work just how they want it to work.
Like WordPress, Flare presents a challenge to the tech writer. It gives tech writers (perfectionists by nature) 80% of what they want with minimal effort, but to get that other 20% you have to put your Power User hat on and go into problem-solving mode.
If you like completing puzzles, then spending time problem-solving an authoring tool can be great fun and very rewarding when things go well and you figure things out and you manage to bend an authoring tool to your will. However, this can be a bit of a drug and you’ve got to watch you don’t start *looking* for problems to solve and things to play with, rather than getting on with the business of producing documentation deliverables.
I just read that comment through AFTER posting it.
“Most technical writers enjoy …”
I haven’t met all technical writers, so I’m mystified as to how I can claim to know what most of them enjoy.
Change that to:
“Most technical writers I know enjoy …”
Must remember to read my comments before hitting Submit.
The drive for problem-solving can be a blessing and a curse. Some corporate environments are invested in the status quo, and people who want to solve problems are regarded as trouble-makers. I’m still blown away when I hear people say, “But we’ve always done it that way,” as if that’s a ringing endorsement of mediocrity and inefficiency. Tact and diplomacy can be an important part of the tech writer’s job as well.
I love puzzles, crosswords, logic problems etc, I am lucky enough to work as a programer;
I remember times when I wasn’t so lucky and the comments made about the amount of time spent on email, cell phone etc are very true to life.
The best part of my job is when I’m given a task that I have little no understanding of and I have to actively seek the answer and problem solve. It’s programming in flash, and I thoroughly enjoy the challenge.
Yes, rarely very few Technical Writers(TW) enjoy their work. This is because they became TW by chance not by choice I believe.
Problem solving is one of the key feature a TW should possess. Believe me the moment you see things works fine in an authoring tool, the kind of happiness we get cannot be explained in words. Isn’t Tom..?
ANother nice psot Tom, thanks.
Reading through the comments above makes me realise that the main downside to being a Documentation Manager rather than a full-time, at-the-coalface tech writer, is that you miss out on most of that creative, go-figure-it-out fun.
[...] Creativity in the Workplace I’m not a technical writer, but I can relate to this post. “In other words, one measure of creativity at your job is whether you’re solving challenging problems all day. If you’re not presented with these problems, then most likely you’re talking on the phone instead. (Keeping yourself busy with e-mail, Twitter, IM, and other online chatter is the equivalent of talking on the phone.)” [...]
It makes some sort of abstract sense to me, but I just don’t experience the actual writing as boring at all…
For example: “… need to figure out how the application works, but once you’ve done that, merely transcribing how to do tasks in the system can make you start yawning. There are no more problems to solve.”
I’m afraid that’s true. If I was yawning while transcribing the tasks, I couldn’t blame the user for yawning when he reads my writing.
The way I see it, figuring out the app is only the first step. But then my real job starts: Putting myself in the user’s shoes to show him how to use the app right and to his benefit. How the app is only the means to an end. How the app connects the user to a noble ideal behind it or at least to an efficient process.
And this is just as much a problem-solving aspect to me: Am I finding the most concise, most elegant, most efficient way to tell my readers how to get the most out of the app? Sometimes it takes the fourth iteration of the same re-used procedure to find yet a better way of putting it.
To me, that’s all about finding “the best way to organize the content, designing the navigation (through my text) with usability in mind.”
That’s why technical writing is my Creative Passion. More in my guest post on DMN Communications: http://www.dmncommunications.com/weblog/?p=1330
Kai, I enjoyed your guest post and left a comment on it. I think the key to making technical writing interesting is to approach it from a problem-solving mindset. As long as I’m solving problems rather than just writing instructions, it does make the work more engaging.
Tom, thank you for your comment. I agree it’s that problem-solving attitude that keeps me on my toes and in the “flow”, whether the problem waiting to be solved is explaining the application or addressing the users’ benefits.
You explained all the things well but i need to know that what kind of activities can be challenging because i m doing content writing along with i managing a team of 12 people at work, i think that keeps me much busy at workplace and if i get some time i start blogging like i m doing right now, so is it what you called challenging.
I think this is a good post as i am a programmer i felt boring after doing some work.
[...] discussion about the creativity in technical writing continues, see Tom Johnson’s post “Creativity in the Workplace” and the [...]