Words on a page

If writers were like magicians, I’d probably be blackballed from whatever organization I’d belonged to for what I’m about to write.

After speaking at a conference last year, I was talking to one of the people who attended my session about creating minimalist documentation. Although he wasn’t a writer, he had to create documentation. During our chat, he mentioned that writing was difficult and that he always had a hard time getting what he wanted to say, in the way he wanted to say it, on paper.

I told him that writing is hard, even for people who do it professionally. But the secret of good writing isn’t simply being good with stringing words together. The secret is editing.

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It doesn’t matter what your high school English teacher said. It doesn’t matter what your university composition instructor said. And it definitely doesn’t matter what Microsoft Word’s grammar checker tells you.

When writing, there are times when you need to break the rules.

Shocking. Perhaps even sacrilegious. But why do it? There are a number of reasons. I tend to break the rules for three reasons:

1. Your writing will sound (or at least seem) more conversational.
2. A piece of writing that breaks the rules, and does the job properly, is often more memorable and has a bit more impact than a properly-formed sentence.
3. Shock value. if someone is expecting a so-called proper constructions and don’t get them, they’ll either be surprised, or (I hope) intrigued enough to keep reading.

Here are some of my thoughts about this.

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That’s something I’m not always keen on. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sharing. It’s just that things can go badly.

I prefer to use a wiki or Google Docs to collaborate. But not everyone I work with thinks like me, or is comfortable with the range of tools that I’m comfortable with.

And to be honest, email doesn’t really work. Too many bad things can happen to attachments:

• They can get stripped from messages
• They can get corrupted
• It’s easy to get confused about the current version of a file if multiple revisions are floating around

Whenever possible, I try to get editors and clients to work with an online file sharing service. These services are cheap, efficient, and easy to use.

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Quit. It’s a four-letter word, and one that’s often treated like one of the worst of them. There’s a stigma attached to quitting. It implies failure, and all the perceptual baggage that goes along with failure.

But there are times when you’ve just got to cut your losses. What are those situations? Here are three situations, taken from my own experiences.

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There are people who have a very simplistic image of the writing process: start at the beginning and then work your way through to the end. Often, the process flows just like that. But not always.

There are times when I find myself able to quickly write the beginning and end of a piece, then work on the parts in between. Or, as I described in a previous post, I assemble a bunch of what seem like disparate paragraphs into a cohesive whole.

There are times, though, when I just can’t get a handle on the introduction and the conclusion to what I’m writing. I have a topic, theme, and angle. But the beginning and end just aren’t coming out in the way that I want them to. I know more than a couple of writers who’d just stop work until they could craft the intro. When you’re facing a deadline that’s not always an option.

Why not start from the middle instead?

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