Speaker 1 00:00:10 Hello and welcome to this June episode of Small Publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host, LA Jacob. This month we will have a panel on technical writing and how it influences novel writing. Here are some things available from our sponsors available in the Dragon Gems Program from Water Dragon Publishing. This month is Storm Clouds Gather by Stephen D. Brewer. Coming up our panel discussion
Speaker 1 00:00:50 From author Michael th comes a fictionalized memoir based on the true story of a deaf woman who refuses to let challenges in life stop her from reaching her dreams of living a fulfilling life, disgusted with the Islamic government's depraved to treatment of the Jews. Zia Shirazi leaves Iran for a new life in the United States. There she receives a cochlear implant and finds true love with her soulmate who takes care of her as she battles. And finally succumbs to cancer. Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Cobo Smash words and other online booksellers or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org or indiebound.org. For more information, visit paper angel press.com/lipread. Hello and welcome to Small Publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host, LA Jacob. We will be talking about technical writing and fictional writing. How to make the transition With me, I have Stephen Ridi.
Speaker 2 00:02:06 Hi everybody.
Speaker 1 00:02:07 Vanessa McLaren. Ray. Hello, I'm Vanessa McLaren, Ray, Nancy Wood.
Speaker 3 00:02:13 Hi everyone.
Speaker 1 00:02:15 And Stephen D. Brewer. Hi, I'm Stephen D. Brewer. Thanks everybody for coming along. We are going to just have a few questions about how to translate technical writing into fictional writing and how it you were able to make that transition. So first of all, what made you decide to start writing fiction? We'll start with Stephen Ridi.
Speaker 2 00:02:40 I don't know that I ever decided to start writing fiction. I've always written fiction for as far back as I can remember. The technical writing side was something I kind of fell into by Aztec cuz my actual degree is computer science. But at the time I graduated from college, there weren't a lot of jobs for programmers. That was during the, the recession of the, the eighties. But it was a way to put those writing skills and those technical skills to use. But I've always written
Speaker 1 00:03:10 Vanessa, when did you start writing fiction?
Speaker 4 00:03:13 I started writing fiction when I was about five. I continued through elementary school, irritating all my elementary school teachers by taking every assigned essay and turning it into a story about ponies, usually ponies. So I've been writing fiction the whole time by starting writing fiction to try to get a published, I would say there was a big gap. When I was 10, my dad sent a story to children's highlights and they rejected it and so I didn't try again until I got laid off from a job in Silicon Valley <laugh>. So uh, there was a pretty long submission gap, but the writing has been going on the whole time.
Speaker 1 00:03:53 Nancy, when did you start writing fiction as opposed to technical writing or was it the other way around?
Speaker 3 00:03:59 Yeah, uh, it was the other way around. Also, I started writing fiction in elementary school and remember working on different stories with my friends at recess, I became more serious about it once I started as a a technical writer. I also fell into the technical writer profession through customer service and then tech support. And sometimes I felt like what I was writing was so confined, so structured that I wanted to experiment with other kinds of writing. So I took some courses, some short story writing classes and other writing classes and that got me back to my fiction writing and back to my imagination when I first started in the field.
Speaker 1 00:04:41 And Stephen Brewer, did you start in fiction and go into technical writing or did you do it the other way around?
Speaker 5 00:04:48 Well I think I probably started reading fiction first and then started writing fiction later. The earliest stuff that I wrote probably in high school was terrible. I mean think about uh, blow by love blow descriptions of d and d adventures. My brother was the one who really wanted to be a science fiction author. And so to a certain extent I probably didn't try and write fiction seriously when I was younger in large part because it was something that he did. And my father was a scientist and I grew up knowing that that was what I was going to do. I was gonna become a biology professor. And so that was what I devoted most of my effort to and didn't think about writing fiction seriously until much later.
Speaker 1 00:05:28 How do you feel that your experience in technical or non-fiction writing has helped you with your fiction writing?
Speaker 2 00:05:36 I think it's helped me in terms of, I think of the stories I'm writing the novels more structurally than I used to, rather than just let things happen, which I also do. Having the non-fiction background where everything is very structured and outlined and focused, having that is more of an overlay. So to make sure that you have plots that are consistent and that things move from A to B to C and that there's a solid structure to the story as opposed to just some rambling narrative that eventually ends up somewhere.
Speaker 1 00:06:09 So it helped you to learn to organize?
Speaker 2 00:06:12 Yes, I would say that. That's it.
Speaker 1 00:06:13 Vanessa?
Speaker 4 00:06:14 Well I'd say the top two ways. A lot of ways because you continue writing because you're writing, you're improving your skills in putting words together in sentences that make sense. But I would say working with others and taking critique of what you've written, the kind of technical writing I do is collaborative. So I write a beautiful paragraph and somebody comes back and says, just do this. So understanding that it's a multi-person effort and you need to listen to other people and try to accept that not everybody gets the same bits from a piece of writing that's useful because so is fiction writing to a certain extent, especially once you get it off your desk and hand it to the publisher. And secondly, learning to work with deadlines and meeting deadlines and deciding on something is done enough that it's okay that you can put it out in the world because nothing is ever a perfect technical written pieces and fiction pieces. They're like programming code. There is always a problem in it somewhere <laugh> and you're never going to find all the bugs. You just have to decide is it working? And if it's working, let's go ahead and set it loose and move on to the next thing. Otherwise you just keep cycling over and over on the same thing. I'd say those are the two main things, uh, working collaboratively and meeting deadlines.
Speaker 1 00:07:34 Nancy, how has technical writing helped you with your fiction writing?
Speaker 3 00:07:40 For me, the biggest way it helped me was understanding the discipline of it, of showing up every day, sitting in the chair, writing something whether I felt like it or not. So kind of keeping it going from day to day, not getting bogged down and oh, I don't feel like it or this isn't working, what am I gonna do? But just treating it in a weird way as a, as a job, do this and I just have to do it every day and I'm gonna get better at it. As same as technical writing. And nobody, at the time I was learning to be a technical writer, nobody was a technical writer. So you just had to figure it out on your own. And I think that that really helped me as well to figure out fiction writing, just to just do it and try different things and see what worked and what didn't work.
Speaker 1 00:08:26 Stephen Brewer?
Speaker 5 00:08:27 Yeah, that what Nancy just said resonated with me. Writing is writing the same kinds of heuristics and skills you develop associated with technical writing. Most of them are also totally applicable to fiction writing. For example, if I'm not quite sure where to get started with something, I sometimes will just start writing anything, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense or isn't particularly relevant, which is a technique I learned when I was writing my dissertation. And sometimes I'd write a whole page of, of not quite gibberish, but stuff that I knew wasn't really what I wanted to get at because once I started writing then I'd be able to keep writing. And so that was useful for me, even knowing that I was gonna throw something away. But just to get started was helpful. I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with a bunch of examples like that from doing technical writing that are just as applicable to writing fiction.
Speaker 1 00:09:17 On the reverse end of that question, what are some things that technical writing or non-fiction writing has hindered you with your fiction writing? So I'm gonna go to Stephen D. Brewer first.
Speaker 5 00:09:30 So my father was a scientist and I started out with the idea that I was going to become a scientist and all of the writing that I did when I was younger was kind of focused knowing that as a goal and as an undergraduate I took a class in philosophy and one of the things that he wanted us to do with these long expository writing pieces where we were supposed to talk about various kinds of general issues and I really struggled with that. It was hard for me to just write kind of freely without having something that was more focused and technical. And so probably the first half of the semester I hardly turned in any of those pieces. And then at some point I discovered the solution, the secret to accomplishing these assignments, which was just to write a bunch of bullshit. Once I realized that I just needed to write a bunch of bullshit and that that would work, it was like cool, this is easy. It was no problem for me. And of course I still ended up getting something like a C or a C minus in the class because I'd missed the whole first half of the semester not realizing that that was all you had to do was just write a bunch of bullshit. But uh, that turns out really useful for writing fiction, which is more or less the same thing. Right,
Speaker 1 00:10:41 <laugh>. So Nancy, what about you?
Speaker 3 00:10:44 I think it has hindered me in that I got into the habit of over detailing everything down to the N three. So when you're doing a procedure for technical writing, you've got step one and then A, B, C, D, and then maybe the five different ways you can accomplish that depending on what part of the UI the person is coming to that procedure. And some points that did carry over into my fiction writing and I found that I was overdoing it over detailing overcharacterizing over emoting. I learned the hard way how hard it is to go back and take that stuff out. Cuz once it's there it's really hard to know which pieces are more important than others and which pieces to leave in. But as I continued writing and got more fluid with it, it became more intuitive in a really weird kind of way that I can't articulate, but it just became more of a second nature figure out where the explaining was happening to just chop it out.
Speaker 1 00:11:40 Vanessa has technical writing bothered you in when it comes to fiction writing? It's
Speaker 4 00:11:45 Not so much the writing itself because a lot of that is very similar in the business I'm in trying to be direct and and making things clear. It kind of goes together. But the flip side to the collaborative side is that in my technical writing, I am never the boss. I don't own the text. It's somebody else's research. It's the A groups project and there's always somebody above me and then somebody above them and that somebody above them may come in and say, no, this whole thing, it needs to be this way and it needs to be that way. And, and by the way, I need it tomorrow because I'm taking it to a board of directors meeting and I don't really care the weather, the graphs look nice so people can make decisions that override all the hard work we've done. And you just have to bow to that.
Speaker 4 00:12:30 And that's just the way it is. So when I'm writing fiction and I say take it to my critique circle and somebody says, well, this isn't following the pattern of the hero's journey, then I have to kind of suck it in and say this is not a hero's journey, this is a sociopolitical novel, it's a biography. And uh, just because it has some sci-fi elements and the character goes on a trip doesn't mean it needs to be a hero's journey. It's a different kind of story. It is kind of hard for me as a person to push back that way. My personality works better in the technical field because, and then I'm working in a network of people and I know who the boss is <laugh>, and I know who I, I need to bow to and who I don't need to bow to. But in my writing, I'm the boss, I have to own the text.
Speaker 4 00:13:11 And if it isn't right by the story I want to tell, then I'm the one that did that and I need to stand up for it. Kind of like I would stand up for one of my kids. So I'm trying to think of the stories more as my kids who are sometimes in need of correction, <laugh> mind you. Uh, but they are my responsibility and if I need the a story to go a certain way, then I need to let it go that way and not listen when somebody else says, oh yeah, this is a really cool one, you need to put more sex in here. It's like, no, this is not a bodi striper, I'm sorry <laugh>. You need to go somewhere else to get that story. Working with other people and listening to the the things that will help me and setting aside the things that will not help, that's been a challenge because in my tech writing, if the boss says no, then that's the way you go.
Speaker 1 00:13:58 Steven Ridi.
Speaker 2 00:14:00 I think that I'm gonna have to somewhat mirror what Nancy said is I tend to put too much detail in the exposition as one editor described it as I put too much stage direction just because I'm trying to get all the details down of what the room looks like and what the colors are and the sounds are. I try to rationalize it to myself as I'm trying to put the reader in the place, but of course can be overdone and I know it's still my first drafts and a lot of that gets cut out later, but it's, I have it that I'm still struggling to break myself up in the fiction.
Speaker 1 00:14:33 We're down to our last question. How do you balance both working and writing, both in terms of time management and switching gears between the two types of writing?
Speaker 5 00:14:44 It's a real question that is time that you spend writing. One thing is almost time then that you don't have available for writing something else. I find that I only have a certain amount of writing that I can get done in a day, and if I'm spending all of that time working on technical writing, then I really have a hard time being able to spend a lot of time doing fiction writing. I just need to be in a different head space. And it's hard to do that. When I was a doctoral student, I didn't have time for any other kind of writing other than my doctoral work, but I did find that I had enough time to write a haiku every day. And so that was about the only kind of creative writing that I did the whole time I was a doctoral student and I say that not only was I a doctoral student, but I was also the full-time caregiver of our infant son at the time.
Speaker 5 00:15:30 And so I really was absolutely stretched to the max that I was working on my dissertation or I was caring for an infant. I really didn't have any other time available. And in many ways now my shift to doing more fiction writing recently is simply restructuring my priorities in life that, uh, as I'm getting older, I feel less need to commit a hundred percent of my effort to my career. So that's freeing up time that I'm choosing to devote to, to fiction writing. Some people like Glenn Cook famously was an auto worker. He had a job where he would be busy for 20 minutes and then would have kind of an enforced 10 or 15 minute switch while they were moving the next car into place on the factory line or something. And so his job didn't actually require him to think, and so he'd think about the scene that he was working on and then once he was done, he'd go and write for a little bit and then go and work and then write. And so he had a mechanism that could combine them both. But I think if you're doing technical writing, that's pretty hard to do.
Speaker 1 00:16:33 Nancy, what do you think?
Speaker 3 00:16:35 When I was working full-time and commuting, I would get up early and try to get in a half an hour, an hour of writing before the day started, before the kids got up and everything like go, got going in the household. Now when I look back on that, it's just amazing how that really felt like a very flourishing time. It felt very creative and very uh, like I was doing really good writing. And it's interesting and I look back at that and I wonder, was it that way? Because I had such a limited amount of time, it's, I haven't quite figured that out yet. So having that kind of enforced limited time helped me structure my time better for creative writing.
Speaker 1 00:17:20 So Vanessa, how do you handle balance between technical writing and fictional writing?
Speaker 4 00:17:27 Before I became an independent contractor, that is before my great layoff, I basically could not do the writing because my heart and soul, body and mind was sold to the company I work for except for the fragments of time I had left over for raising the family, et cetera, et cetera. Right now what I have to cope with is that I am what, uh, us old programmers call a batch processor and what modern mental health people call a person who has a problem with hyperfocus. So switching gears, changing tasks is really hard for me. When I first got the, my current tech writing job, the difficult part was he didn't provide me a computer to work on. So I had my writing computer and that was it. So I had to be able to switch back and forth between the jobs that I was being paid for and trying to do writing.
Speaker 4 00:18:16 And since I, I'm a hyper focuser, if I started on one thing, I would kind of come to hours later and realize that I hadn't done any work on the other thing, the greatest spoon my current employer did for me was finally get me a computer and now I keep one in one room and one in the other room and I physically get up and move from one to the other. And that creates a moment of time where I am changing mindsets and going from one thing to the other and creates a safe space for when I'm writing that I can close the door and the family will leave me alone. And that's very handy. Time management is still kind of tricky, so I try to put things on the calendar to schedule blocks in advance helps me remember to show up for things. But the day job is erratic, so sometimes I just have to throw away the schedule because something needs to get done and a client needs a report delivered. Just have to flex on that. They're really kind of related, all trying to switch between the two jobs. It's not so much the balance, but the task of shifting.
Speaker 1 00:19:19 So Steven, I'll leave the last word to you. How do you balance the technical writing with the fictional writing?
Speaker 2 00:19:26 So for me, partly just because of the structure of the day job, it's during the day, it's the the technical writing, non-fiction writing. And then once I log off that computer, at the end of the day it's, hey, my time and it's fiction writing time. It does take some time to kind of mentally switch gears into that different mode. And also during November, during NaNoWriMo, I actually will do both ends of the day. Otherwise there's no way I could get the words count. So I'll do, you know, like a 500, 800 words in the morning and then go to work and then do the rest at night. But the other thing in terms of switching gears, what I'm doing by fiction writing is I don't mentally structure it. I guess that's the best way to think about whatever comes out, gets put on the page. I just let the characters do their things and let the accents happen and just rather than trying to keep it to the very structured presentation format of the technical writing half just kind of just let it go. Or my nonfiction is definitely plotter and my fiction tends to be very much handsome.
Speaker 1 00:20:30 I really appreciate all four of you attending this panel discussion. Thank you very much. Stephen Viki, Vanessa Lone Ray, Nancy Wood, and Stephen D. Brewer.
Speaker 2 00:20:42 Thank you. It was fun. Thank
Speaker 1 00:20:44 You. Thank you. Thank
Speaker 4 00:20:45 You. Thanks.
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Speaker 1 00:22:46 Thanks again to our panel members, Stephen Ridi, Stephen D. Brewer, Nancy Wood, and Vanessa McLaren Ray. Next month we will have author Vanessa McLaren Ray talking about the importance of critique groups and having others read your work before sending it out into the world. We plan on publishing new episodes every second Wednesday of the month. Please watch out for new episodes around that time. For our August episode, we plan on having and ask the author, producer, publisher, editor, we need your questions. Go to S p B U podcast.com and filled out the form available on that page. Music is provided by Melody Loops. If you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our website at S p B u-podcast.com. Tweet us at S P B U dash podcast and like us on Facebook at s pbu dash podcast. This podcast was recorded at, edited by yours truly, LA Jacob. This month's episode was sponsored by Paper Angel Press and its imprints Water Dragon Publishing and Unruly Voices. You can hear our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you soon.
