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~ Feverish ravings of a middle-aged mind

Random Blather

Tag Archives: writing

Tech Writing and “Real” Writing and Their Uneasy Dance

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Huffington Post, HuffPo, tech writing, writing

Writing-writing-31277215-579-612
Image courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education

When I was a kid and grown-ups, as they almost invariably do, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I was (as my mother will tell you is my habit) rather blunt:  “I don’t know,” I would say.  I didn’t want to be an astronaut, though I wanted very much to go to the moon.  I didn’t want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a nurse.  I wanted to do something that had math in it, and science preferably, but what that was I really had no idea.  And I was quite up-front about it.  Which tended discombobulate a lot of adults.

As a result I would guess that it comes as no surprise that, even though I have been doing it for nearly a quarter of a century, I still find it difficult to come to grips with the fact that, yes, I am a writer.  Excuse me:  A Writer.  But the funny thing is that I am in a very weird, niche branch of writing called “tech writing” (about which I’ve blathered on about before), which most people have never heard of.  “I write computer manuals”, I explain, although that doesn’t even cover the half of it.  Especially now that I am a manager.

But yes, I am a writer.  I earn my daily bread by putting coherent English sentences down on metaphorical paper and making them available to the world.  But I am not a fiction writer, a literary writer, or a journalist (or even that bastard step-child of the fiction writing business:  A screenwriter), and thus people struggle with it when I tell them what I do.  And as you may guess, I struggle with it, too.

This came up for me again recently when I read another in a long line of Web posts on how the Web is making the business of being a writer so very difficult.  And I totally believe what Tim Kreider says in his article, just as I believe the very similar stories of many of my writer e-friends, particularly those who have tried to work with Huffington Post.  Being a writer now means the squeeze is on even more than ever to not get paid in exchange for “exposure”.  And as the saying goes, you can’t pay the rent of the electric bill with “exposure”.

But that’s the funny thing:  It’s different for tech writers.  On the down side, you are a wage slave to the tech industry, which is scary and uncertain in its very own ways.  But on the up side, high tech pays well.  Very well.  Writers don’t get paid anywhere near the scale of engineers, marketing folks, QA, or even IT, but tech writers still get paid well by the standards of white-collar pay.  Is it depressing to make less than a 27 year-old coder?  Absolutely.  But I still do a lot better than Mr. Kreider; my 25+ years in the industry is a huge asset in acquired knowledge, and companies like it.

Sure, a lot of companies have tried to offshore or out-source their tech writing.  Shipping it to India has been tried by any number of companies, and the results are generally pretty consistent:  Bad content that companies often have to hire native-English speakers to fix.  The ability to write graceful English sentences is difficult enough for those of us who grew up speaking it from the cradle; trying to do it as a second language is surpassingly difficult.  When you add in the additional complexity of requiring the ability to not only write well, concisely, and descriptively, but to also  have some understanding of and facility with high tech, the number of available candidates becomes pretty small.  And most of them don’t live in countries outside the English-speaking world.

(Nothing detracting from my Indian colleagues, but English is almost always their second language, and it is the rare writer for whom that doesn’t show.  How many translations of books from their original language have you read and been disappointed with?  Writing in one’s own language is hard; writing in your non-native language is really, really hard.)

And so I read pieces like Kreider’s and I squirm a bit, I must admit.  Because I am making a pretty good living at writing, even though it’s almost certainly not a type of writing that Kreider would necessarily think of as writing; it’s certainly not the type of writing he does and tries to get paid for.  And I have the luxury of writing fiction “in my spare time”, so if it doesn’t work out, or if folks don’t like it, that’s okay; it doesn’t effect the local ham&eggs issue.  When I worked for perqs and “exposure” for the tech review and news site Gear Diary, that was fine, because I really did do it for fun, and anything I got for it–free gear, tickets to SXSWi, free software to test–was a bonus for me.

But I want to be clear:  Even though I am not a “real” writer by many folks’ definition, I am firmly and absolutely committed to writers getting paid for their work, and completely support Kreider and other writers who demand it.   While tech writers, journalists, and fiction writers dance in very different circles, I think we all really do need to be dancing together on this one.

New Story: The Codex

28 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by dougom in Fiction, News

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

science fiction, short story, writing

Codex-seraphinianus-2vol
That is not the cover to my story, but it’s a durn interesting book!

I can never quite decide if taking time out from the two novels on which I’m working is a good thing–“Everyone needs a break now and then”–or a method of procrastination–“Why the hell aren’t you working on one of your books; how many stories can you keep in your tiny brain at the same time?”

Regardless, I find that I have been taking time out from my two novels–yes, two–to occasionally crank out a short story.  The latest entry came to me, literally, in a dream.  I dreamed the whole story, start to finish, including the title.  I woke up upon its completion, mostly because it creeped me out some, rolled over, jotted down some notes in my iPhone, went back to sleep, and then commenced work on it the next day.  It took 3 “writing units” to complete and took about a week, but on the whole it’s basically the same story as the one I dreamed.

It’ll be up to you folks to tell me if it’s any good.  In any event, it’s called The Codex and is available on WattPad.  Share and enjoy.   And if you do read it, please tell me what you think because I’m genuinely curious to find out if it’s good, or just a piece of crap.  I mean, when you dream something, it’s always hard to tell, don’t you think?

Some Writing Notes

04 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by dougom in Fiction, News

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

novels, science fiction, steampunk, urban fantasy, writing, YA fiction

640x320_3831_Paris_at_the_20th_Century_2d_dirigible_steampunk_fantasy_picture_image_digital_art
Image courtesy of Gilles Roman Soilworker Artist

I haven’t posted in a while not because I haven’t had much to say, but because life has intervened.  For example, I spent an awesome four days visiting my bff in Maryland, celebrating his 50th birthday, watching guy movies, watching sports, going to the local RenFaire and doing guy things (throwing axes, knives, throwing stars, hatchets, drinking way too much, and eating cheesecake on a stick, which I’m sure many insurance carriers have already ruled an “unacceptable health risk”), going to museums–in short, having an awesome time while reminding myself what great friends I’m lucky enough to have.

And there’s been personal nonsense of which I’m sure you have little to no interest.

But on the positive side, I’m still writing.  Not as fast as I want, but regularly, and determinedly.  I completed and posted to Wattpad a short story of my mystery solving team Tosh and Zack, “The Red-head Experiment”; surf on over and check it out if you’re interested and please, do feel free to leave comments.

I’m also plugging away on my other two novels: The science fiction/urban fantasy, and the young adult steampunk (but with a twist!) one.  The latter is the one that’s consuming me the most; I don’t know if anyone will like it or want to read it, if any agents or publishers will be interested, but I’m very much loving the story and the characters that I’m discovering.  I’m up to just under 18,000 words, the plot is clear in my head, the main characters are fun to write, and if I’m lucky maybe I’ll have another 60,000+ word novel finished by the end of the year.  (In a world I truly believe is unique–a very definite twist in the usual steampunk scenario.  Which my friend Tim calls “the eurotrash of science fiction”.)

It’s a yarn, and I do love me a good yarn.  I will never be Pynchon or Hemmingway or Poe or Dickens; if I’m lucky, I’ll be (a very very unsuccessful) Steven King, style-wise.  A writer of yarns; a teller of tales.  Ones that I hope very much folks enjoy.

It’s rough sledding sometimes, raising two “special needs” kids, holding down a fulltime job, and trying in my copious free time to be a fiction writer.  But I’m trying and, if I manage to entertain even one person (beyond my personal circle of friends), I will have succeeded.  Truly.

I’m So Sick of the SF Ghetto

24 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

literature, Margaret Atwood, writing

elon musk
Elon Musk–who I bet read tons of SF growing up

Okay, yeah, it’s a button for me, but as long-time reader of genre fiction–science fiction, fantasy, and some mystery–I do get awfully tired when I see a Writer of LitRuhChure™ (ordained so by The Literary Powers That Be) dabble his or her toes in genre and get praised to the skies for it.

The proximate cause of today’s rant is a fawning article about Margaret Atwood in The Guardian.  Atwood, who has been publishing poetry and “literary” fiction novels since the early 60s, is no stranger to genre fiction; her first foray into science fiction was “The Handmaid’s Tale” back in 1985.  But she made her bones as a writer of LitRuhChure, and the reporter in The Guardian is clearly treating her as a Real Writer who dabbles in SF, rather than a genre writer.  (Atwood, as is typical for Literary Fiction writers who do genre, tries to disavow any connection to SF.)

And frankly, I have no problem with that.  Nor do I have any problem with Atwood’s work, or with her deciding to move into SF.  Heck, the more the merrier!

No, what I have a problem with is Atwood being treated as some kind of prescient genius for her latest set of SF works (that feature a lot of biotech), rather than what she is:  Another in a long line of writers who have tackled this subject in the SF genre.  But because she’s MARGARET ATWOOD, Literary Writer, suddenly the stuff she’s writing about–genetically-modified food, vat-grown meat, and the like–is amazing and forward-looking.

Look, LitCrits:  We’ve been talking about this stuff in SF for a long, long, LONG time.  Take the three things that Emma Brockes, the author of the article, seems to find so amazing:  “cross-species gene-splicing; growing meat in a petri dish; man-made pandemics”.  This post would go on forever if I started to list all the SF authors who have touched on all three of those topics, and have been doing so for, literally, decades, but just a couple of quick mentions:  Frank Herbert wrote an entire novel based on a man-made pandemic called “The White Plague”, released in 1982.  Heinlein’s “The Star Beast” mentions in passing meat-like foods grown from yeast in 1954.  And one of the earliest SF writers, Olaf Stapleton, wrote about something that sounds just like cross-species gene-splicing in his story “Last and First Men” . . . in 1930.

These are old, well-established tropes, Ms. Brockes.  I mean, really old, and really well-established.  Perhaps Atwood addresses them in unusual ways, or with more graceful prose, or with an odd twist that previous writers haven’t (although I have a hard time believing Atwood does a better job than, say, Prof. Samuel Delany), but the point is it ain’t new.  And I can only think the reason Brockes (and other litcrits) fawn over Atwood and other literary writers is because they are considered “real” writers, writers who have made their bones cranking out poetry and “literary” fiction, not dirty, low-life genre writers.

Understand that I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to SF.  Absolutely not.  I’ve got to think that Romance fans get similarly irritated when a LitRuhChure writer cranks out what is (essentially) a Romance novel, and gets kudos for their originality.  Or how fans of kink and BDSM fiction feel over the hooplah about “Fifty Shades of Gray”, which is not only not particularly original, but doesn’t reflect the BDSM and kink community in any kind of realistic way, and is not nearly as good as Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace works are.  Or how mystery fans feel when some Big Name decides to write a mystery novel, does a mediocre job (though unfamiliarity with the genre, usually) and gets lots of press for his or her attempt.  Meanwhile, writers–excellent, high-quality writers–get ignored because they have been stamped with the “Genre” label years ago.  It’s maddening.

(And don’t get me started on what William Gibson must think of Atwood’s puckish remark ‘You can imagine a lot of people wanting to get their own DNA hair.” The 73-year-old smiles, thinly. “I’m offering it as a free gift to the world.”‘  Like Gibson–and Neal Stepheson, and Arthur C. Clarke, and hell even Gene Roddenberry (where do you think the idea for flip-phones came from?), and other SF writers too numerous to count–haven’t given endless free idea-gifts to the world.  I mean, please.)

It goes in reverse too, of course.  Neal Stephenson didn’t get nearly the amount of attention for “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age” that he did for the much more “literary” novel “Cryptonomicon”, which contained no SF whatsoever.  But he broke through that barrier, and now he gets noticed, even when he writes genre novels like “Anathem” (SF) or “Reamde” (thriller).

I am continually, constantly amazed at the lack of respect SF genre writers receive in the “real” literary community.  We live in an SF world, with smartphones and the Internet and the Web and tablet computers and electric cars and gene-engineered anti-cancer therapies and tons of other tech that was inspired by kids who grew up reading SF, and decided to turn it into a reality.  The top-grossing films are almost uniformly SF or comic book movies.  And yet if you don’t write plot-less character studies about dysfunctional families that live on Long Island or are set in some rural part of the South or some damn thing, if you’re presumptuous enough to like plot-driven hard-tech SF novels, well, you’re just a loser genre writer.  No matter that your ideas will influence the next generation of inventors currently dreaming up the iPhone for the 2040s, Umberto Eco’s or Martin Amis’ or Salman Rushdie’s new novel is much more important, right?

Think I’m exaggerating?  Go to iTunes, to the iBooks store.  What books are listed first? Where are the science fiction books?  Can you even find them?  (You can, but it ain’t easy.)  So on this science fictiony platform–the World Wide Web–the users of whom are more tech-savvy than any generation in history, the keepers and architects of which almost certainly grew up reading SF–if you want to find a book in your genre, what do you get?  Lots and lots of “literary” fiction, and your favorite stuff shoved into its usual ghetto.  (The irony of this appears to completely escape most eBook publishers and sellers.)

Give me patience, O Lord.

On Accumulating Writing Advice

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

writing

writersblock
Image courtesy of (logically enough) LeadingSmart.com’s Advice for Writers

I never planned on being a writer.  I actually never really knew what the heck I wanted to do, other than I wanted it to be something sciecey (which when I was a kid was a vague notion of someone who wore a white coat and worked in a lab).  I didn’t realize  pretty deep into my tech writing career that I was a writer until I had been doing it for so long that it was impossible to ignore.

But even though my career notions were always incredibly diffuse, without really realizing it while it was happening, I started to accumulate writing advice really early on.  Like, perhaps as early as Elementary School.  Let me explain:

I read a ton as a kid.  Neither of my parents can remember when I started to read, but both agree that I was trying to sound out words in Life and Look magazine when I was still in pre-school.  It wasn’t too deep into school before I began branching out, especially into collections of short stories.  And for whatever reason, I found the notes by the authors and editors that came with those stories almost as interesting as the stories themselves.  Where their ideas came from (“Everywhere”, basically); who had taught them when they were learning to write; what kind of things to do if you think you might have a vocation for it.

So I started picking up suggestions early.  I’m not going to burden you with all of them–I’ve been storing them up in my head for years.  But one of the first and most key pieces of advice–and it’s very much a cliche, but an important one–was hammered home to me via David Gerrold in his book on how he managed to get his first story sold professionally:  The script of “The Trouble with Tribbles” to Star Trek.  And Gerrold’s advice, echoed by many, many, many other writers, was, “Read a lot.”

It sounds silly and obvious, but the more you read, and the more different types of things you read, the more you accumulate a store of material, vocabulary, and information to draw on.  When you’re cranking along the last thing you want to do is sit there and grope for a word or concept; you want it to come out BANG so you can keep on cranking.  If it turns out to be cliched or trite, hey, rework it later.  But like playing scales and arpeggios for a pianist, a writer must read.  Stephen King used the analogy of his Uncle’s tool box, a huge monstrous thing that apparently contained every hand tool known to man, and that King was forced to lug around whenever  Uncle needed to do some work on something.  If your tool box isn’t full of your writerly tools, you’re going to end up having to hammer something with a rock, or use a spoon as a screwdriver, and that never works well.

In High School I was incredibly blessed with a teacher with whom I both connected, and who respected my nascent ability, Mr. Michael Rodriguez.  I don’t know how he was for other students, but for me, he was absolutely crucial (and I made sure to call him when I got hired for my first professional tech writing position and thanked him–we don’t thank our teachers enough, I think).  Mr. Rod had a number of pieces of advice, but the two that stuck with me the most were:  “Don’t use lame words like ‘nice’.”  When asked for substitutes, Mr. Rod peppered the student (not me) who asked:  “How was it ‘nice’?  In what way was it ‘nice’?  What made it ‘nice’ for you?”  And when the student stammered out an answer several sentences long, Mr. Rod said, “Then say that!  Don’t say ‘nice’!  It’s meaningless!”

(This follows well on the previous piece of advice, for if you have a good store of word tools in your box, you don’t have to settle for something limp like ‘nice’.)

A second key piece of advice came my way from Mr. Rod as well who, though he clearly liked me and liked what I wrote, didn’t hesitate to call me on my BS and sloppy writing.  I have a fondness for long sentences.  Like King’s Howard Lauterman in “The Stand”, the compound-complex sentence was invented with me in mind.  I digress, use parenthetical statements, am liberal with hyphenated clauses, and in many other ways abuse the poor reader’s patience.  When Mr. Rod pointed out what I am sure was a particularly egregious example of long-winded nonsense, I protested that Faulkner wrote run-on sentences; why couldn’t I?

“Mr. Moran”, he said, not brutally but certainly with no particular kindness, “You are not Faulkner.”  He might have gone on to say something about the inadvisability of high school students comparing themselves with Nobel Prize winners, but his point had been made and, truly, needed no elaboration.  (It is important to extend this to almost any famous writer; I am also not Hemmingway, Stephenson, Steinbeck, Roger Angell, Joe Haldeman, Heinlein, Asimov, A.C. Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Mailer, Woody Allen, Jean Kerr, or anyone else who has no-doubt influenced my style.  I’m Doug Moran; best to stick with that.)

Speaking of King, as part of a rave review of “Order of the Phoenix” (which is my personal favorite Harry Potter book), he made a great observation about  J.K. Rowling’s writing (probably the only person in the world  who could get away with it).  I would not call Rowling a “great” writer, but she’s certainly an excellent storyteller with a stellar imagination.  But King had a good point about what he saw as flaw in her writing:

<blockquote>As a writer, however, she is often careless (characters never just put on their clothes; they always “get dressed at top speed”) and oddly, almost sweetly, insecure.  The part of speech that indicates insecurity (“Did you really hear me? Did you really understand?”) is the adverb, and Ms. Rowling seems to have never met one she didn’t like, especially when it comes to dialogue attribution.  Harry’s godfather, Sirius, speaks “exasperatedly”; Mrs. Weasley (mother of Harry’s best friend, Ron) speaks “sharply”; Tonks (a clumsy witch with pinked-up, particolored hair) speaks “earnestly.”  As for Harry himself, he speaks quietly, automatically, nervously, slowly, quietly, and–often, given his current case of raving adolescence–ANGRILY.<blockquote>

Mr. King’s point is clear, and it applies just as strongly to the poor, struggling Mr. Moran (if not more so) than to the rich, famous, and lauded Ms. Rowling:  Don’t over-rely on adverbs.  There’s other ways to get there.

A very related piece of advice came my way via Elmore Leonard in an interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air”.  I don’t remember exactly what Leonard said, but one thing Gross made a point of asking about was the fact that Leonard never used synonyms for dialog attribution.  I.e., he didn’t go looking for other ways to say, “He said” or “she said.”  It was always “said”, and that was it; not “stated” or “gasped” or “rasped” or “shouted” or “bellowed” or “whispered” or anything else.  Just “said”, and that’s it.  Leonard’s point was that you’re wasting time and energy trying to find synonyms for “said”; “said” is a perfectly fine, solid word, and if you’ve written the rest of it properly, the reader will know whether the character is whispering or gasping or what-have-you.  Further, it gives the reader license to decide for themselves; maybe you were thinking “bellow” but the reader read it as “snarked”, and that’s actually kind of cool, don’t you think, Terry?  No need to make it blatant.  Stick to “said”, and concentrate on making sure the rest of the stuff around it is clear and understandable.

(Applying these two pieces of advice together can sometimes be a strain.  Try writing a stretch of dialog without adverbs or synonyms for “said”.  It’s harder than you might think!  But worth it, I believe.)

And finally a piece of advice that I absorbed by converse example (as it were) from my section’s Merrill Core Course teacher (“Social Change in the Third World”), Mr. Julianna Burton, a professor of liberal arts (I honestly can’t remember the discipline) at UC Santa Cruz.  I detested the course and thought it was a waste of time, a fact that shone through crystal clear in my papers for the class, I am certain.  And as teachers often do, she had her revenge in my grades.  At the time, Santa Cruz was entirely on the “narrative evaluation” standard, which meant that every instructor was supposed to give you a written evaluation rather than a letter grade.  Which is where she tossed in her opinions.  My work was fine and my papers of good quality, but my “voice” was apparently too consistent for her, and I didn’t vary it enough to suit the material.  This in spite of the fact that on the three occasions when she asked the class to vary their narrative voice–“write as if you were the narrator of this story”; “write from the point of view of an African American”; etc–I did so and still received a solid “evaluation” on my papers.

So the gist, then, was that I had too distinctive a voice and couldn’t vary it, except when I was asked, and then I could, but that wasn’t good enough.  Or something.

And the piece of advice:  A strong narrative voice is a good thing.  How many people fault Elmore Leonard for writing too much like Elmore Leonard?  This isn’t to say you shouldn’t experiment, try other voices, stretch yourself.  But saying you have too strong a narrative voice is like saying a guitarist has too distinctive a style.  You may not like my style–plenty don’t; I’m obnoxiously committed to the Oxford comma, and I use the British method of punctuation with quotations–but hell’s bells, at least I have one!

I know I’ve rambled on a bit here, and I apologize.  These are just a few of my key writing guidelines.  I have plenty more (e.g., “pithier is often better”; “try to not use the same descriptive word in a single paragraph”; “a good editor is worth her weight in gold”), of course, but honestly, not too many.  For here is one from me to anyone out there who gives a rip about my writing advice:  Don’t have too many rules.  I follow some guidelines, but I limit them.  Because if I had too many, I would never get any writing done, and that would be just as bad as cranking out crap all the time due to no guidelines at all.  So that’s one of mine for you to have.

So I’ve showed you mine; what are yours?

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