I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson » Creativity

What You Cannot Do Sitting Down

Tom Johnson — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:23:42 +0000

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.

I told her gift reciprocation is a bit ridiculous. Making sure you respond appropriately to everyone who gives you a gift misses the point (though I realize it is polite).

Sometimes during Christmas the Grinch in me comes out. The concept of Santa (initiated by Saint Nicholas?) seems a bit of a backfire, since it refocuses Christmas on commercialism. All the buying and buying, and singing the same old songs again and again, kind of wearies me.

We recently went to Temple Square, which has thousands of elaborately strung Christmas lights saturating every tree limb and branch, floating lights on fountain ponds, high school choirs singing every half hour in the Tabernacle and Assembly Hall, a full-size nativity scene with music and narration, and other eye candy.

I enjoy the spectacle now and then, despite the cold, but the choir puts me to sleep. As soon as they start singing, I’m yawning and slowly nodding my head to the side until I catch myself. In a half hour, I’m ready to go back home and watch a football game.

I have been trying to get into the Christmas mood. At work I switched to a Christmas station on Pandora and listened to it for almost two days. But after a while I changed it back to my Bob Marley (I don’t know why, but I love reggae).

Our team Christmas party has been scoped down to a brief treat-trade. I didn’t push for a special party at someone’s house, because I already have enough December socials. (Surprisingly, no one else pushed for it either.) There’s plenty to do during December — a Christmas breakfast at the Church, an Elders Quorum party, a family Christmas party, Christmas card deliveries, shopping, and on and on.

Today I was running on a treadmill in my company gym. (No, I don’t run regularly. I think the last time I’d run was about three weeks ago.) I have this little routine where I run for about 4 minutes, walk 1 minute, run for another 4, walk 1, and so on, but each time increasing the speed .1 mph.

While I was running (still on my first iteration), a guy in a wheelchair wheels into the room and starts dragging over one of the pieces of equipment. He started dragged what looked to be a sitting curling machine, but it was obviously some orthopedic device. He dragged it while sitting in his wheelchair, inch by inch, scooting it awkwardly toward the windows and door.

I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was doing with it. At first it seemed he was dragging his favorite machine over by the window so he could … work out in the light? It was a bit cold and dark in the gym (and the TV was broken). But then he started wedging it up against the door, moving it at several different angles. I watched him while running, wondering what he was up to. It was both entertaining and mysterious.

He dragged it in a jerky motion again. Because he was in a wheelchair, he couldn’t pick it up. It finally dawned on me that — yes, despite the impossibility of the task, he was actually trying to drag the machine out the narrow door onto the sidewalk outside.

I stepped off the treadmill and briskly walked over to him. Are you trying to get the machine out the door? I asked. Yes, he said. I started to help him with it. He opened the door, and I tilted the machine sideways, and then lifted it a bit and maneuvered it in a L direction to wrap it around the corner. I could barely get the machine out myself, and I’m a big guy. But since I often get conscripted into moving projects at my church, I know how to fit furniture around corners.

The machine, he explained, helps him help stand up and stretch his body. It’s the only way he can stand up. But he said he doesn’t have time to get the gym as much as he thought, so he’s taking it back home.

I wheeled the machine down the icy sidewalk and into the snow-banked parking lot over to his Jeep Cherokee, where he needed to move the machine into the back. It wouldn’t fit without some disassembly, so we ended up leaving it beside his Jeep while he went after a hex wrench in his office to take off a bar.

I told him to get me from the treadmill when he found a wrench and I would help him load it into the Jeep. But he never returned. I’m guessing someone else helped him. Or he managed to do it himself.

As I started running on the treadmill again, I thought about this man attempting to move a weight machine so difficult for him to do alone, sitting in a wheelchair. He had brought it in piece by piece and assembled it here, he explained. That’s how he’d gotten it through the door in the first place.

Last year we had a quadriplegic guy in a wheelchair, Chad Hymas, come talk to our department. Chad said he had to rely on the kindness of people every day to help him into his car and to do basic things. It’s humbling, he said, but it filled him with gratitude everyday for the generosity of people, he said. (Somehow he is able to drive — don’t ask how. He can move his arms and operate a brake a gas pedal with his palms.)

As I showered and returned back to my cube to work on some documentation, I periodically thought about the wheelchair guy, rewatching him drag the unwieldy machine by himself out the narrow door.

I’m not always as helpful as I should be. Several days ago, when I was shoveling snow from my driveway, my neighbor’s mother actually got stuck in her driveway. I offered to push, but she declined. Her daughter (a complete recluse) came out and added salt while the mother shoveled the rest of the snow. I watched passively, chipping away at some remaining ice in my driveway.

The experience in the gym made me rethink how to help others. I didn’t ask. I just did it.

That night I came home and decided to make some neighborhood treats — both for Jane’s reciprocation list and others. I took two of my children to the store in their pajamas and moon boots and scouted out dark and white chocolate for pretzel dipping.

With Sally’s help, we conceived a silly poem — We hope you enjoy these chocolate sticks / you can eat them lick by lick …. And then the next night we delivered the treats to a string of houses — both to people who had given us gifts, to some of our friends, and to a handful of others.

We drove in the minivan, stopping at each house. The kids would run up the snowy driveway to the doorstop, gently set the bag of chocolate pretzels down, and then knock and run. They ran as if door-ditching, and would say Go! Go! Go! when they got back in the car, urging me to drive off. The person whose house we dropped the treats off at would inevitably open the door and look out with a confused look, and then they would look down and notice the Christmas bag on their porch. Sometimes they waved as we drove off. Other times they just picked it up and brought it in.

I’m starting to like Christmas, I guess.

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Removing ice from a driveway is like …. everything

Tom Johnson — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:23:10 +0000

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.

After resting about a half hour, I returned and chipped away some more. I swung and chopped and pried and lifted and chipped in almost every direction with all my strength. I piled up the big chunks of ice on the side of the driveway.

Chipping away at a glacier covering my driveway

After this second round, I came inside and lay down on my couch again, just as exhausted, this time as thirsty as a buffalo. I gulped down two glasses of ice water and flipped on the TV. I was about to give up on the driveway, as comfortable as the couch was, but after resting 20 minutes I felt the urge to get up and start chipping away yet again at the glacier.

Little by little, I pried up big chunks of ice. I could hardly believe I was actually making progress, but the ice was loosening and revealing the gray cement below. I hit my second wind and gathered more energy with each loosened piece of ice. Digging in the shovel, I pried up large sheets of ice and flung them to the side. One big chunk, and then another, and another. Before I knew it, I finished.

Done (good enough anyway)

So much of my life is like this. Had I shoveled at the first sign of snow, I could have easily removed the snow in twenty minutes rather than nearly two hours. But more than a lesson in procrastination, seemingly impossible tasks and projects can be tackled piece by piece, if you just keep chipping away at them. When you get tired, rest a bit until you’re ready to return to it. Then keep chipping, and to your surprise, big chunks will start to loosen and separate. You carry them away and use your new-found leverage to chip away at more and more.

Drink water, rest beside your shovel, carry the larger snow chunks to your kid building a fort in the snow. But keep shoveling and shoveling. Before you know it, you’ll be done.

I know this isn’t a brilliant insight or even that interesting, but it’s a little microcosm of my life, especially with IT projects, which can seem so complicated and multifaceted at the start, but little by little they unravel and start to make sense.

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Theme Parks and External and Internal Input

Tom Johnson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:41:05 +0000

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.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that advice. But now I’m starting to understand.

Theme parks floor you with mesmerizing shows, constant music, visual stimuli, greasy food, stomach-losing rides, character-filled stories, and an overall constant stream of external input. The more external input that comes in, the less internal input you need to generate. When I’m flooded with external input, I seem to lose touch with my own thoughts and direction. In this way, theme parks are like TV, a continual escape where no internal input of my own is needed. I just follow the map, hold onto my kids, and move from show to ride to food kiosk to exhibit to show to ride until the day finishes, and then I drive home and collapse from exhaustion.

When I’m not at a theme park, when I’m living my regular life, immersed in the moments of silence so typical of writing and a quiet family life, I often feel a tendency to turn on sports, the radio, Google Talk for email or IM, Twitter, and start any other form of external input I can find.

But that external input takes me away from the moment. It disrupts my attention on what I should be doing or thinking about. Perhaps there’s more to the moment that I’m missing when I fail to focus. This isn’t a single task versus multi-task discussion, or an argument about how each disruption requires 20 minutes of downtime to refocus. I’m saying that when I put myself in situations of extreme external input, like a theme park, the amount of internally generated input is minimized. With minimal internal input, my creativity sinks, and my muse goes mute.

But this is a balancing act, because external input is often the stimuli that generates internal reflection and analysis. I’m still putting together my thoughts on internal and external input. For now, I’m starting to be acutely aware of the difference. Can you help clarify what I’m trying to say?

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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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Forms of Play

Tom Johnson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:01:05 +0000

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.

Paul says we often think of TV as our only way of relaxing, but really, it’s not the case. When you’re tired, you can turn to other activities, such as golf, reading, or experimenting with your website. Your relaxation can be a form of play. Relaxation doesn’t have to consist of television.

Although this seems like an obvious point, it’s something I’ve somewhat forgotten. Have you ever come home on Friday night exhausted and sleep-deprived from working the whole week, with the thought that you just want to sit down in front of a good movie? It’s easy to slip into the mindset that turning to media is our only way to relax, but actually, a lot of other activities can fulfill our need to decompress and deactivate in a more productive way. I sometimes play on a WordPress site, experiment with a new plugin, write a post, play basketball, or count the tiles in my ceiling (just kidding). I find that even when my brain is tired, it still has energy for these forms of play.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging: Sin #3, Being Boring

Tom Johnson — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:00:28 +0000

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.

What Is Boring?

To better understand what defines boring, let’s look at a random article from the Technical Communication Journal – a journal that is known for being a bit on the dry side. As an academic journal, the authors perhaps feel constrained by scholarly conventions. These conventions involve omitting personal experiences, avoiding the use of “I,” backpedaling from straightforward speech, and taking as long as possible to get to the point. Here’s a passage in the August 2009 issue from an article about mentoring:

In our survey, we asked participants to explain any “risks” (Society for Technical Communication 2002), “constraints,” or “difficulties” they may have encountered in their mentoring relationships; however, we allowed respondents to interpret these terms as they wished. Their responses, which were lengthy and covered multiple issues, indicated that they defined these terms in a broad sense. Three readers (two of the authors of this paper and a graduate student) analyzed the responses independently and parsed each response to the questions into individual comments—the length of which was determined by topic rather than by grammatical unit. To ensure the reliability of these divisions, all three readers had to agree on the length of the resulting comments. As a result of the divisions, there were 267 comments.

Realizing we may have biased the responses with our example (“a student who asks her mentor for a letter of recommendation when she has performed poorly in the eyes of the mentor”), we tagged any comment that related to that example as a “metacomment” and excluded these responses from our analysis. We also tagged participants’ comments that were unrelated to the issue (such as comments about mentoring in general or comments about the questionnaire) as metacomments. That left us with 208 comments to categorize.

The readers then tried to categorize the comments using an existing taxonomy, Eby and Allen’s (2002) multilevel taxonomy of protégé’s’ negative mentoring experiences (see Appendix B), that we had revised to reflect a mentor’s perspective. For example, we took Eby’s category, Lack of Mentor Expertise, and changed it to Lack of Protege Expertise. We felt the taxonomy might be a valuable tool for organizing the results. We soon discovered, however, that the majority of the comments from our survey did not correspond to Eby and Allen’s taxonomy.

Although some of the comments fit into some of the categories (29%), most of the comments (71%) did not fit into any of the five categories in the Eby-Allen taxonomy of negative mentoring experiences. Therefore, the readers took the remaining comments and grouped them by topic and created a new taxonomy (as described in our Results section) to better reflect the academic mentor’s perspective. (p.250).

Are you bored yet? What exactly is it about this article that makes it boring? The authors do focus a lot on the process instead of the point. This may be a required academic convention for journal articles, but if so, perhaps it could be moved to some footnotes or an appendix. It’s the equivalent of describing the writing process. Can you imagine a post that contains the following?

First I made a series of notes on a piece of paper. The paper was 8.5 x 11 and purchased at Staples at a discount. The fact that the paper was purchased at a discount did not bias the way we used the paper. We made our notes in a dual column format, with pros in one column and cons in the other column. In my notes, pros is synonymous with advantages, while cons aligns itself with disadvantages, though it also included negative connotations. As I began to make notes, I also compiled a brief bibliography on the topic. Readings included both websites, blogs, and articles. STC publications were given priority as well as articles submitted to tc.eserver.org. With each reading, I added notes on index cards, which I then taxonomized into a hierarchical structure sorted first by author and then by date. The index cards were lined and initially encased in thin plastic.

It’s dreadful writing like this that partly discouraged me from academia. In addition to emphasizing seemingly unnecessary details, the writing omits any personal experiences.

I suppose I expose my biases here, but good writing mixes the personal and professional. In other words, good essays have a balance of personal experiences and ideas. You may only be a “narrative presence,” as Ted Conover explains, but don’t completely omit the personal if you want your ideas to come alive. The experiences you bring to the topic not only give the essay a engaging spin, personal experiences also usually bring in story, which is essential.

Story

Your writing will ultimately bore readers unless you can hook them with story. Story is the sine qua non of writing — without it, chances are what you’re writing will be lifeless.

When I refer to story, I’m not talking about Cinderella or Huck Finn narratives. Any time someone or something struggles to overcome a problem, that’s a story. The problem could be purely conceptual, such as a philosophical idea you struggle against. Better stories have characters (perhaps the character is you) that experience a change to overcome the problem, but that change isn’t always necessary. A bare bones story simply needs conflict. However you tackle it, when you approach your posts from the perspective of story, the writing gains propulsion and keeps the reader engaged.

A while ago, I read a chapter in a book — Ivan Tors’ 1979 memoir, My Life in the Wild — that provides somewhat of an example with the power of story. Tors is probably an author no one has ever heard of. And rightly so — his prose is pretty bad and unenlightening. I bought the novel at a thrift store looking for some cheap adventure nonfiction. However, in his chapter “In Cold Sweat,” he nails the story technique.

Ivan is an animal expert accompanying a video documentary team in Kenya. On an outing to observe migrations of animals from the dry Serengeti to Lake Victoria, his jeep’s water pump gives way, stranding him miles from camp. As he starts walking back to camp, he realizes something is following him. He writes,

As soon as I began my long walk, I heard the yellow grass rustling behind me. I turned and looked. There was an enormous female lion following me, just sauntering behind me. I knew that I must not run or I might provoke an attack. When a 500-pound body pounces on a human back, something is bound to give. I knew what I had to do. I must disregard her and do nothing that would excite her, but I could not help thinking about my friend who was killed by a lion, and this did not do much for my morale.

At this point, Tors has our attention. The conflict is clear: he is stranded in a hot desert with a lion surreptitiously following him. Because the reader is somewhat hooked, Tors can move us in whatever direction he wants now. He can launch into exposition about the behavioral patterns of lions, and we will still remain attentive because of the story. And this is exactly what he does. Tors explains,

Lions have formed the habit, during the many millions of years of successful existence, of surprising their prey. This means stalking them from behind against the wind and jumping on their backs when an attack is least suspected — usually breaking the back of the prey. Antelopes, for their part, have learned that frontal attack is unlikely and that spotting al ion and not running is the safest tactic. If an antelope herd sees a lion, they usually turn toward the lion and stare him down. The lion, thus discovered, becomes confused, and then disappears to try his luck on another herd of antelopes that perhaps will remain unaware of his presence.

Were it not for the story, this exposition about the behavior of lions would quickly tire us out. Likewise, if we were only fed details about the experience, without the information of the lion’s behavior, the story wouldn’t be as engaging. It’s the combination of personal experiences and ideas narrated against a conflict that makes writing interesting. (I scanned the “In Cold Sweat” chapter and converted it to PDF format here if you want to read it.)

You may object that I’m comparing apples to oranges with my examples. Clearly the Technical Communication Journal’s articles follow one style, and Tors’ literary memoir another. However, regardless of genre, if you follow the story, mixing personal with professional, you can usually keep the reader’s attention page after page.

For example, an article on mentoring could perhaps begin with an anecdote about a mentoring relationship that went sour, which then prompted the author to survey other academic mentors as to whether their mentoring relationships were also strained and why. A 17 page article on mentoring could be peppered throughout with personal experiences and reflections from different mentors about the root causes that destroyed their mentoring relationships.

I recognize that this is not the academic way, that injecting the personal element presents the possibility of bias and of conclusions drawn from anecdotes rather than empirical research. While I recognize this, I think you can’t omit the personal without suffering the consequences: with few exceptions, the reader will get bored. The personal element plays an especially critical role with blogs, since many readers value the honesty and transparency that comes from personal exposure.

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Choosing Between Academic and Corporate Life: Did I Make the Wrong Choice?

Tom Johnson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:59:33 +0000

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Length: 15 min.

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.

After a couple of years at AUC, I questioned whether teaching was my vocation. Grading was drudgery, composition syllabi were a bit dull, and my job seemed to have little future. I looked ahead at several options: I could remain a composition instructor, continuing with roughly the same pay and lifestyle, with little prospects of advancement, only to find that at age 40 I had no real career. I could get a PhD in literature and try to move up the academic scale as a professor. As a professor, I would need to publish scholarly essays regularly. Or I could reject both of those options and follow a prompting I kept feeling – to be the writer rather than teach writing.

I chose the last option. After two years, I ended my teaching career at AUC and moved to Florida, where I turned to professional writing, first becoming a copywriter and then a technical writer.

My colleague Josh took a different route. He left AUC at the same time I did, but he applied for a teaching position at BYU-Idaho, which recognized his MFA as an acceptable degree for teaching literature classes. He moved to Rexburg, Idaho, a small town that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the college, and started his four-classes-a-semester schedule, comfortably settling into a spacious home with a garage the size of an airplane hangar.

Every morning Josh wakes up early for his 8 a.m. classes, starts discussions about classic works such as My Antonia or The Catcher in the Rye or some novel by Henry James. He has one or two technical writing or composition classes a semester. He meets with students, reads at length in his office, and lives the academic life.

The life of an academic seems rich to me. Not materially rich, but intellectually rich. Dozens of books line your shelves, you’re immersed in constant learning, you’re surrounded by ambitious, dreamy-eyed students who haven’t yet become jaded. You have summers off, during which you can bury yourself in the novel or short story collection you’re writing. Even during the semester, your schedule is flexible enough to come home in the afternoons.

Being at this writing conference, surrounded by academics discussing recent books they’ve read, listening to a poet read his work, hearing a novelist discuss how she adds energy to her fiction, how she gets inside her characters’ heads to imagine how they would act in certain situations, made me remember my creative writing days at Columbia’s School of the Arts as both a student and graduate instructor.

As a student, I spent much of my time reading and writing, cut off from the world around me. I had freedom to roam the lost books in the library, to open a blank page and fill it with everything and nothing. I rarely looked at a clock. I could latch onto an idea and pursue it wherever it would take me. Every week I wrote dozens of pages. Our classes met in workshop settings, where we talked about narrative structures and character significance and arc.

I also taught composition courses to college freshmen and had freedom to assign my own essay prompts. I would spin controversial ideas for students to write about and then respond to their essays with copious feedback. Sometimes I assigned essays as prompts.

I could have continued in that academic setting, perhaps pursuing a PhD and turning to others publications. I could have looked for a job at a small liberal arts school somewhere.

Instead, I chose to become a technical writer. I figuratively turned in my university library card and stopped trying to publish creative works. I now wake up in the morning and drive to work, parking my car outside a shiny high-tech looking building. After riding the elevator to the third floor, I make my way to a cubicle where I dock my laptop, read and respond to emails in Microsoft Outlook, and work on help materials for a handful of software applications. I devote my time writing for users whom I will rarely meet.

Did I choose the wrong route? Should I instead have pursued a teaching position in a small college in a sleepy nowhere town? Should I be waking up in the morning reading Henry James novels and preparing notes for an 8:00 a.m. lecture?

I talked with Josh about company life versus academic life, and which one was better. Josh had previously spent a few years as a contract technical writer before teaching, but he found that documenting software all day left him with a sense of emptiness. It provided no thought-provoking discussions; it lacked immersion in good literature. The whole endeavor felt a bit worthless. It was just a job for a paycheck, with no intellectual engagement or inspiration.

He had just returned from teaching a class on My Antonia when I met up with him. He had been discussing “the search for the American Dream” and how the idea plays out in Willa Cather’s plots.

Josh has a sharp mind and can extract and analyze reasoning from any subject you bring to him. As we walked around the gardens of BYU Idaho’s campus, he asked what appeal the company life has for me. Why would anyone choose to work in a company rather than burying themselves in the classics and academic discussions? What value does the company life have for me?

Talking with Josh about academic versus corporate life while sitting in BYU Idaho's gardens

Honestly, I didn’t know. It troubled me. As I slept that night, I tried to figure out what had propelled me to move away from academia into the corporate sphere. Did I make the wrong choice?

The next day we talked some more. I began to see an argument forming, but it wasn’t entirely clear. It wasn’t until I listened to a Book Lust podcast with Michael Perry, a nonfiction writer, that I began to understand. In an interview about his creative works, Nancy Pearl asks Perry:

You’ve now written four books and they’re all about your life and your experiences in the world …. Talk about how that all came about.

Michael responds:

The reason the books are as they are, is that I was always living and working in a “real” place while I was writing. So when I had the opportunity to write books, I just wrote about what was around me. And part of that was being on the local volunteer fire department with my brothers and my mom, and being a resident in a small northern Wisconsin town, and now that I have a little family and we’ve moved to a farm and we’re raising our own food or most of it. I guess for me, if I’m going to write creative nonfiction essay style work, if there’s going to be any veracity to that work, it comes from actually living it.

In other words, living and experiencing the world gives you content for your writing. It gives you substance to write about in a natural way.

This substance is exactly what I lacked as a grad student in a creative writing program at Columbia. We had time to write, time to read, but no substance in our writing. Our essays ended up exhausting our personal experiences. Our lives seemed all we had to write about. I ended up writing missionary stories about my two years in Venezuela. Another student wrote about her dying mother with cancer, another about her stint as a nurse in a psychiatric ward, another about her sordid affairs with married men, another about her past relationship with a rich guy in Soho.

While the essays had all the literary devices of narrative fiction, the writing lacked substance and information. It was too navel-gazing and self-centered. It was hard to get outside of our lives, trapped in the cloister of the university. It was almost as if our lives had been paused the minute we entered the writing program. We could only look back on what had taken place before.

I listened to another podcast with writers who explained the same problem. One of the writers had a good friend who moved to Ireland so she could write. In Ireland, she hunkered down in solitude and wrote and wrote and wrote, but her writing lacked substance. The sentences were highly refined and polished, but boring. Those same events that seem to take us away from our writing are also what give us substance in our writing, or so the writers on the podcast explained.

A writer needs to be immersed in the world to have something to write about. You can only experience and learn so much from within the walls of a classroom. This is one reason I like Ted Conover so much. Conover goes out into the world and lives and writes about it. For example, he spends a summer riding the rails with hoboes (Rolling Nowhere). Or he moves to Aspen to live among the rich (Whiteout). Or he becomes a prison guard at Sing Sing (Newjack). His living in the world, almost like a social anthropologist, provides him with material to write about.

Conover explains,

I feel a writer’s real job is to be out there with people who are strange to you.

Could he have written any of his books while being cloistered in the university? His work is nonfiction, but even fiction writers can’t imagine everything sitting in a library.

As much as I like Ted Conover’s immersive method, it seems a bit difficult for me. I can’t simply uproot and immerse myself in an unfamiliar setting. But entering the field of technical writing (rather than remaining in the university) has given me substance to write about. Immersion in projects within a corporate setting brings up all kinds of issues to write about — wikis, content strategy, community, DITA, usability, print versus online formats, quick reference guides, single sourcing, help authoring tools, the STC, presenting at conferences, context-sensitive help, podcasting, and so on.

If you were to take away my experiences in the company setting, the thoughts and problems and ideas and situations that arise from being involved projects, you would also take away all the substance from my writing. I would be in the same situation I was in grad school, twiddling my thumbs looking for content from random personal experiences to string together. Having a career in the world gives me a framework of content to write about, which I can approach from a literary perspective. I can take a topic that might otherwise be dull and make a story out of it. I can approach an issue as a literary essay, mixing personal experience with information and reflection. The result won’t be navel-gazing and insubstantial.

I’m not saying that academics can’t venture out into the real world. Nor am I saying that being a technical writer is the equivalent of an anthropological experience like Conover’s. I am saying that perhaps for a literary writer, it’s better to avoid the cloister — in whatever form, not just a university. Venturing into the world gives you something to write about.

You can make other arguments about the value of company life over academic life. For example, living in the world allows you to carry out the ideas of the classroom. Or the world allows you to prove and evaluate what you read in the library. Or the world gives you an opportunity to serve others with the knowledge you acquire in the university. But for me, as a writer, it comes down to having substance to write about, and that substance isn’t always apparent inside the classroom.

Some subjects will always remain at the university, I imagine. Arcane philosophical discussions, abstract discussions about the American Dream, or transformations of identity through the writing process in John Barth’s novels (my undergraduate thesis). But I am happy to leave those ideas in the classrooms. An idea that only has merit inside a classroom, that emerges from an assigned text, may be refreshing, but it is not the substance of my life.

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“Tell me a story” — Advice from Writers

Tom Johnson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:13:42 +0000

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.

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Writing as Conversation — Brainsparks Podcast with Ginny Redish

Tom Johnson — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 15:51:02 +0000

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.

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Creativity in the Workplace

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:57:05 +0000

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,

Mirowskfinds that people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative

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.

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.