I have mixed feelings about Christmas. People in our neighborhood have been bringing over treats all week — a chocolate pie, a peanut butter pinecone bird feeder, sparkling apple cider, brownies, rice crispies, honey, marmelade jam, Stephen’s hot cocoa, sugar cookies, and other food. They bring them with such pace and vigor you would think we were either starving or desperately in need of fattening up.

Jane has been making a list of everyone who has dropped off food so that if we do decide to make little neighborhood treats, she knows exactly who to take them to.
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Not having grown up in Utah, when it snows, my first instinct isn’t to start shoveling my driveway. So when it snowed last week, I let the snow pile up in the driveway and assumed it would eventually melt. But it didn’t melt. Several days later, it still didn’t melt. And then it snowed again.

In the course of a week, we had driven over the driveway snow more than 30 times with two cars, impacting it down. The ice hardened with a strong crust. When I drove my car into the driveway, the ice scraped the bottom of my car.

Last night I decided to finally shovel the glacier off. After 20 minutes of hard shoveling and chipping and digging, I came in exhausted and lay down on the couch. I had only finished about a third of the driveway — the easy part near the garage door.
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This week I’ve been on vacation in Florida, visiting my family and touring the theme parks — Seaworld, Disneyworld, and (soon) Busch Gardens. I used to live in Florida and would go to Busch Gardens all the time. But this week is more extreme. Our first day at Seaworld, I realized my theme park endurance was poor. The next day at Disney was much better, even with just 6 hours of sleep the night before. The second time around Seaworld (of course one day wasn’t enough) was like stopping off for a brief jaunt at the mall, except when we temporarily lost our daughter, which sent us on a roller coaster of emotions.

While walking around theme parks, I’ve been thinking about a talk Nicole Mazzarella, author of This Heavy Silence, gave last month at the BYU-I writing conference. Talking to a group of would-be writers, Nicole explained the need to “live in the moment.” She talked about the need to disconnect from whatever media is taking you away from the moment you’re in — Twitter, Facebook, email, IM — and to focus on the moment you’re in. This ability to be in the moment is as critical to writing as other time-worn advice, such as reading or reflecting.
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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.

Boagworld, a podcast on designing and developing websites, has a recent episode on innovation worth listening to whether you’re into web design or not. Paul Boag gives good tips on the importance of play and experimentation as a method for innovation. He suggests that you challenge assumptions and ask questions, that you break up your work day with short periods of play. He then quotes Clay Shirky to say that

If we all collectively watched 1% less TV we would be able to create 10,000 wikipedias.

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Being boring is sin #3 in my list of the seven deadly sins (other sins include being fake, irrelevant, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). Perhaps a more tactful way of saying something is boring is to say the writer neglects to “keep the audience’s attention.” I’m always hearing about the short attention spans of online audiences, that readers only skim your content and spend a minute per page. Because of this short attention span, you’re encouraged to keep your posts short.

I somewhat disagree. When readers complain that writing is too long, what they’re really saying is that they’re getting bored. The length isn’t so much the problem as the content. They want to click elsewhere because they’re bored. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the past couple of days I’ve been in Idaho at a pre-professional writing conference at Brigham Young University – Idaho. The purpose of the writing conference is to bring in published novelists, poets, editors, and professional writers to give students a glimpse into the careers they plan to enter.

This is my second year presenting to students about technical writing. You may remember my post last year about Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing, in which I tried to disabuse students of the idea that technical writing is nothing but boredom and drudgery. This year I focused on Seven Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. But that’s not the focus of this post. This year the conference made me reflect on the academic life I chose not to follow and evaluate whether that choice was right.

A little background. From 2002 to 2004, I taught writing courses at The American University in Cairo (in Egypt) with about 20 other composition instructors. Among those instructors, I met Josh Allen and his wife Suzy, who quickly became our best friends in Egypt. I had so much in common with Josh – both of us were composition instructors. Both of us were Mormon (the only Mormon teachers at AUC). Both of us were married and had children about the same ages. Both of us were first-timers in Egypt. Both of us shared a love of writing, literature, and the university setting. Read the rest of this entry »

I listened to a good discussion about writing from a group of Mormon writers on episode 7 of Everything Creative, an LDS sponsored podcast. Some parts of this podcast are a little lame — I hadn’t heard of any of the writers, and parts of it are churchy. But the advice is on target. Here are few notes:

• The things that get in the way of writing are also what provide substance in your writing. A writer explains how one of her friends moved to Ireland to seclude herself away to write, but while her friend’s writing had good literary execution, it lacked substance and story.
• The best advice for writing is condensed in just four word: “Tell a good story”
• The process is the purpose. In other words, rather than looking toward the end, enjoy the act of writing, because the purpose of writing is the self-discovery that takes place during the writing process, not at the end.
• Stories are what give us meaning in our lives. That’s why we return to them again and again.

In a recent User Interface Engineering Brainsparks podcast, Jared Spool interviews Ginny Redish about her book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing as Conversation, as it applies to interface design. This podcast was one of the best I’ve listened to all week. In the podcast, Ginny explains how your content should be like the answer to a user’s questions. Not styled as an FAQ, but written anticipating and responding to questions the user might have in particular situations.

Ginny says that imagining personas is key to coming up with questions for the conversation. But you can’t truly envision all the concerns, needs, and questions your users will have by imagining the user alone. She says you have to also imagine the user in a specific situation. For example, not just “John is a 35-year-old frequent flier executive who often uses the website to book his latest flights.” But rather, “John, a 35-year-old frequently flier executive who uses the website to book his latest flights, suddenly has a need to quickly cancel his flight and get a refund.” When you imagine the scenario, the conversation for the content is more apparent.

I actually tried this the other day at work for a product I’m documenting, and it did make the project more real. I had a stronger purpose, because I wasn’t just writing instructions, I was helping a user solve problems, and I was figuring out the best way to solve those problems for the specific type of situation.

Ginny also says the metaphor of the web is wrong. Typically, people create websites thinking that that a website is a filing cabinet for their documents. Instead, we should think of a website as a phone, a medium for conversation. Users call you up needing specific information and answers. You talk with them, responding to their questions.

I think Ginny is right on target with her idea of writing as conversation. On a related note, I’ve noticed that most of my blog posts are conversations with the blogs I’ve read or the podcasts I’ve listened to. Reading and listening is such a tremendous generator for ideas. What develops from engagement is response. And response is ultimately conversation. When I realized that, I began to see how critical reading and consuming content was as a means for having something to say. It’s not usual that we have something new to say, but that we have a response to something someone already said.

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.) Read the rest of this entry »