The Confabulator Cafe

Author: ajunge

  • Because shut up, that’s why!

    Every time I try discussing the issue of censorship with people they always bring up the same argument: “Some things aren’t appropriate for kids!” So let’s get that out of the way right now.

    1) Yes, children should be exposed primarily to age-appropriate material.

    2) #1 is no excuse for watering down material intended for adults to that which will not confuse a five-year-old [0].

    3) Relax. The kids are going to be fine [1]. Kids are more resilient than you think.

    The correct remedy for poor, offensive, or dangerous speech is more and better speech. Particularly speech that mocks the offender mercilessly [2].

    Politician/pundit lying through where the sun don’t shine [3]? Call them out on it. Protesters showed up at your cousin’s funeral? Take pictures, Photoshop the signs to read, “I’m with stupid,” and post them to your Tumblr feed. Read one too many romance novels where the heroine falls in love with the pirate who raped her? Write your own where she grabs his cutlass [4], forces him to walk the plank, and then seduces the handsome Royal Navy lieutenant she found chained up in the orlop [5]. Because everybody has the right to make a fool of themselves in public, and the rest of us have the right to respond.

    On a more serious note, literature allows us to explore themes, situations, and perspectives we are not likely to encounter in our daily lives. It’s an antidote to provincialism. The Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay put us into the mind of a serial killer. The novel Push, by Sapphire, puts us in the shoes of a barely literate, impoverished, student living in horrific circumstances, a life that will ultimately kill her. But by reading her, seeing the world through her eyes, she becomes humanized to us. As a result, it is much more difficult to “other” real people living similar lives.

    Every year or so there’s a collective freakout about 9th graders reading Huckleberry Finn because it contains the dreaded N-word [6]. You would think this would be an excellent time to talk about language, how using language shapes thoughts and behaviors, how it can unite or divide people, how language changes over time, and the appropriateness of using other offensive words of the four-letter variety to describe people. However, for too many, it seems simpler to just not read the damn book [7].

    The problem with censorship is that it halts communication in its tracks. In its worst incarnations, it’s a form of bullying. At best it’s a form of social control. And it sells the reader short— for every troubled teen who wants to be a Dexter, there are thousands who realize they’re a Huckleberry, and that’s OK. They have their own humanity and something to contribute.

    [0] More likely, from what I’ve seen of five-year-olds, amaze and enthrall them.
    [1] As a kid in the 70s and 80s I got most of my practical sexual education the old fashioned way— by dumpster diving for porn. I also played unsupervised in the street, went swimming less than an hour after eating, and got spanked when I deserved it. I turned out just fine.
    [2] A heck of a lot more fun and productive than getting your knickers in a knot.
    [3] *cough* Rush Limbaugh */cough*
    [4] No, not that cutlass. The actual, you know, cutlass. Get your mind out of the scuppers.
    [5] Note to self: next Nanowrimo plot?
    [6] Seriously? We can’t even say the word “nigger” when we’re talking about the word “nigger?”
    [7] It amazes me that the book is viewed as racist. Well, it is, but the controversy at the time it was published was that the main characters, Huck and Jim, outsiders within their own society, were portrayed as actual, dignified people, their lack of surface respectability notwithstanding. That is still a lesson worth teaching.

  • On Building Trust With Your Words.

    All week we here at the Cafe have been discussing how to reveal character through language. Put yourself in the reader’s mind. What should the reader be told, what should the reader be allowed to infer, and what should the reader be assumed to know? A technical writer must also ask those questions, not to illuminate character, but to convey factual information.

    It comes down to trust, really, between reader and writer. You, as a writer, must create a space with your words in which trust can grow, in which the reader feels free to say to themselves, “I don’t know where this is going, but I’ll be glad to get there.” It’s a difficult challenge, and an awesome responsibility.

    The vast majority of the documents produced by my bureau are written by our techies for the benefit of other techies. It is presumed that the reader has, or can easily obtain, the necessary context to make sense of the information. For most ordinary purposes, that is true. We don’t need to explain every measurement, spell out every acronym (more than once), or describe the significance of the data. To do so would be patronizing and could actually damage the writer’s credibility.

    However…

    Some of our documents, arguably the most important ones, are not written for techies. They are written for the general public, or legislators, or for other members of our agency whose technical expertise lies in other areas. For these audiences, we must provide the context as elegantly and concisely as possible. We must educate them without either talking down to them or confusing them. Failure to do so can result in a loss of credibility for the entire agency, or worse, loss of funding.

    It’s not easy, building a trust relationship with someone you’ve never met, may never meet, and who may not even exist. Unlike bloggers, journalists, or novelists, it’s rare for a technical writer to develop a following, and for credibility to accrete to the byline. The relationship has to be established anew with each document. The stuff I write becomes part of the state’s permanent record [0], and it has to be right, first time, every time.

    [0] I wonder if this is what my teachers meant when they said, “This is going on your permanent record?”

  • Inspiration Given Form

    There is something truly inspirational about a hardware store.

    Wander down the aisles of any good hardware store and marvel at the vast array of objects, each specifically designed to solve a particular problem and yet infinitely repurposable. What makes this particular 7 mm bolt different than that one? What problem was the designer trying to solve? Which grease-infused wrench monkey decided that what the world needed was a screw with a five-sided slot, and why? What can be built with a 60-degree angle bracket? A 45-degree one? A 120-degree one [0]? Hardware is inspiration given form.

    In a really good hardware store, you’re allowed to wander freely, unmolested by salesguys [1], muttering to yourself, picking up objects, stuffing your basket full, and making it halfway to the checkout before turning around, putting everything back where you found it, and starting all over again. They understand the process of creative problem solving, and set up their stores accordingly [2].

    Any time I’m stuck, a trip to a hardware store goes a long way towards unstuck.

    [0] Trick question, of course. The correct answer is “flux capacitor.”
    [1] Really good hardware store managers understand that not all who wander are lost.
    [2] Really good office supply stores do the same thing.

  • Am I Supposed to Have a Character, or Be One?

    This week’s question: How do you develop your characters?

    I would like to object to the form of the question in that it involves facts not in evidence: to wit, that I am a fiction writer.

    Yes, I have on occasion committed fiction. Each November I do Nanowrimo, stringing together some 50,000 words of original— well, dreck is not too harsh— and there are a few instances of fanfic in my past (I was young and naive, all the cool kids were doing it, I didn’t inhale…). Every once in a while a stray plot bunny hops into my yard to die of neglect. But my bread and butter, quite literally, lie in non-fiction writing.
    When I write fiction, it is entirely an exploratory exercise. I’m building a world, manipulating my characters, applying my hard-won wisdom to their travails (also inflicted by myself). Sometimes it’s glorious. Often it’s a disaster. I don’t care either way, because I’m far more interested in the experience of creation than the end product.

    When klutzy, unathletic me was involved in sports, I always enjoyed learning the skills, but I never cared to compete. Other athletes couldn’t understand this at all, “What’s the point if you don’t want to be a champion?” they would wail, utterly befuddled. The point, of course, was the inward journey, the acquisition of skills, strengthening and using my body—never the score. In fact, I found scores and rankings the complete opposite of motivational. Who wants to see their name constantly at the bottom of the list?

    The same is true for having others read my fiction. I have friends who are published, and congratulations to them all. But I have no desire whatsoever to follow in their footsteps, to seek notoriety, glory, or acclaim for my work. There are those who ask, “What’s the point if you’ve not going to becomes a Big Name Author?” I have no answer except for the inside journey. I don’t need to seek anyone’s approval to keep writing. I don’t even want their approval. It would ruin the fun.

  • Self-publication for Professionals

    Everything I have ever written for money has been self-published, one way or another, but then the economics of copywriting-for-hire are not nearly the same as commercial fiction.

    The first book I ever wrote was “published” via a photocopier and a stack of three-ring binders [0].  This was back in the early 1990s, when desktop publishing was still in its infancy and producing our graphics was only one step up from Zip-a-tone [1]. After that I spent a couple of years writing responses to Requests for Proposals [2] and we thought a $10,000 color laser printer was the height of affordable sophistication. Proposals were still submitted as bound booklets, and you had to schedule at least one full day for printing, final quality control checks, reprinting, binding, and making a 3:00 Fed-Ex pickup deadline. In its way it was ghastly work, but I cut my anal-retentive copyediting teeth on it [3].

    (more…)

  • On Setting the “Scene” in Technical Writing

    All writing is persuasive writing—first you must persuade the reader to keep reading, if for no other reason than to justify your labor. You must persuade those who paid for your work that their money has not been wasted, and you must persuade your inevitable critics that you have sufficient credibility to make your argument. A fiction writer might have five pages to make their case. A technical writer is lucky to have five paragraphs to cover the same territory; more likely, five sentences. Nobody is reading your work for fun, so you have to set your scene quickly, directly, and elegantly.

    Who, what, when, where, why, and how? Who is involved, what is the situation, when did it start, where can it be found, why do we care, and how bad is it? There are potentially carcinogenic fracking chemicals in drinking water in Pennsylvania. The city council needs to know more about backyard chicken raising before changing an ordinance. Congratulations, you have just purchased our software! In the case of Smith vs. Jones, the defendant requests a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff has not suffered damages. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, … a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

    As far as the mechanics goes, just say it straight out, using clear, direct language that commands the reader’s assent. Don’t imply, don’t infer, don’t force the reader to come to their own conclusions. Imagine that they are busy people who want to be told what to think, preferably somewhere on the first page.

    Note: this is for non-fiction writing. In fiction, half the fun is in implying things. However, setting up a red herring in a policy document? Ninety percent of your audience will come to the wrong conclusion.

  • Bad Influences

    If I had to name the single most influential… influence on my preferred writing style, it would have to be the denizens of the Usenet newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery [0].

    I was in IT for about ten years, herding Linux boxen and generally trying to make myself useful to people who had no fsking clue what I did, but had a vague idea that it was All Terribly Important. On the one hand, it was a great job being as that you got paid to websurf seven-and-a-half hours a day [1] and about half an hour of actual, productive typing [2]. Eventually, as the remains of the burst tech bubble finally stopped deflating and I was unable to find a permanent paying job that would support me in the lifestyle to which I would like to have become accustomed [3], I made a sideways career move into library science and somehow ended up as a quasi-historian.

    Alt.sysadmin.recovery was the online watering hole where bunches of professionally very clever, professionally very geeky people [5] went to bitch about their jobs. All subcultures develop their own ways of doing things— jargons, inside jokes, and unique communications styles— as a way to separate the sheeple from the sacrificial goats [6], and the Scary Devil Monastery formed theirs out of a self-deprecating blend of gallows humor, unbridled cynicism, science fiction and Monty Python references, a love of all things Pratchett, snarky and illustrative footnotes [7], a withering contempt for anyone with an IQ demonstrably below body temperature [8], and a philosophy that there are days when the most productive thing to do is to kick back with a fermented beverage of choice and just watch the lunatic parade pass by [9].

    The style is esoteric and harsh for non-initiates. Needless to say, it gets toned down in my professional writing to avoid frightening Those Who Sign The Paychecks. But it does make writing that difficult first draft ever so much more fun.

    [0] For a sample of asr back in the day, try <a href=”http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html”>here</a>, or <a href=”http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Posts.html”>here</a>.

    [1] Justified as Googling error messages. Whatever your obscure error message was, somebody else on the Internet was already out there bitching about it. And misery does love company.

    [2] Because before you fix the syntax error in sendmail.cf, you first have to understand sendmail.cf.

    [3] One with such luxuries [4] as rent paid and actual food on the table that didn’t come out of a dumpster.

    [4] Needless to say, in those days broadband internet was not a luxury, but life’s blood itself.

    [5] Much like myself.

    [6] In asr lore, the only way to properly diagnose a misbehaving SCSI chain.

    [7] Ahem.

    [8] That is to say, just about everybody.

    [9] From a high location. While holding a high-powered rifle with an extended magazine and laser sights.

  • Complicated + Ugly = Wrong.

    I’m a technical writer. I get assignments, with requirements and (horrors!) deadlines. The content and general format are usually specified. But the way I present the information is up to me.

    There’s a rule of thumb in computer programming. If an algorithm is complicated and ugly, it’s wrong. The same rule applies to technical writing. If what you are writing makes no sense, then you need to simplify. Hard concepts require short choppy sentences. Don’t worry about style. Worry about communicating.

    Recently I was asked to help update a program manual. The previous version was, in a word, awful. The original author wrote it ten years ago, and he was good at writing regulations— which showed in spades. This book could be prescribed as a cure for insomnia, except we were worried about side effects. The whole project got dumped on my desk with the terse order, “Make it better.”
    That manual was complicated. It was ugly. It was oh, so wrong, on so, so many levels.

    So I simplified it. I reorganized it into three sections; one for program participants, one for their technical experts, and one for their lawyers. I translated the language from Government-ese to English, added color, “chunked” the information by employing sidebars and call-outs, and modernized the typography and layout. I alternated blocks of technical information with narrative case studies and success stories and added so many graphics the darned thing almost reads like a comic book. I excised the former subtext of regulatory doom and gloom and replaced it with a pep talk. I prepared to defend to the death my decision to use the second person, “you,” when referring to the reader rather than the bureaucratic and distant word “party.”

    Then I printed it out, lovingly swaddled it in my best binder clip, and sent it out to the higher-ups for their review and criticism. Sometimes you just have to let your babies go out into the world and face the slings and arrows.

    My bosses loved it. (Except for that one typo I missed.) It has all the required program and regulatory information, but unlike the previous version it is readable. Helpful. Simple. Elegant. And right.

    (By the way, this is the fourth draft of this blog entry. I started the first three with what I thought was a perfect beginning, after which things got very complicated and very ugly very fast. My “perfect beginning” turned out to be perfectly wrong.)

  • On Writing First Drafts

    Call me a traditionalist, but for a difficult first draft, it has to be paper. A pencil, perhaps a nice fountain pen. The creative part of writing, pinning down that first draft, is a tactile, sensory experience. There’s the resistance of graphite across the page, the sound of paper rustling, the concreteness of pages stacking up one on top of another. The wrong sensations can easily derail the process; paper that is too smooth, or doesn’t soak up ink well, or a pen that skips, or an eraser that is old and hard and smudges rather than wipes clean.

    A first draft is when I don’t know what I’m going to write, haven’t yet pinned down the thoughts that have been skipping across my mind, given them body and gravitas and forced them to pose on the page. First drafts are about exploring the topic, organizing ideas, trying things out. It’s harder to delete something written down. It exists, even if I decide it no longer is needed. Pages in the recycling bin are a testament that my time has not been wholly wasted.

    Paper breaks through writer’s block. With paper, if the hand is moving, then progress is being made. Writing in longhand slows down my thinking, allows me to craft sentences, put in more meaning than just the bare bones of the facts. Paper is where the poetry begins to dance. Paper is where my subconscious mind, which is way smarter than I am, finds its own voice.

  • Books Worth Re-reading

    “This is the worst story I know about hocuses. And it’s true.”

    This is the first line of Sarah Monette’s Melusine, the first of four books [0] in her Labyrinth series, a decadent tale of magic, murder, betrayal, and unearned loyalty, all limned in exquisite pain.
    Lois McMaster Bujold once remarked that she develops plots by imagining the worst thing that could happen to her characters, and then making it happen. Monette took that idea to another level, delivering us two brothers. Felix, a powerful wizard of the ruling class, and his younger half-brother Mildmay, the most notorious cat burglar in the city.

    What draws me to this story is the way Monette reveals her characters to us not only through their actions and circumstances, but also through their flinches, their scars, their past traumas, and their vulnerabilities. Each backstory slowly unfolds through hints and subtle references. Each new scene is rich with symbolism and meaning for the characters, and through them, for us. The reader is drawn into each brother’s viewpoint in turn, until by the end of the first book you weep when they weep, despair when they despair, feel their shame and rages and relief as if is your own. Felix’s descent into madness and visions; Mildmay’s isolation from those around him; half understood motivations stemming from fully realized fears.

    It sounds depressing, but it isn’t. Their journey isn’t so much to Fight the Bad Guy, although there is that, too, as it is to conquer their own heartbreaks. We’ve all been there, it’s part of being human. That raw, unfiltered, unbowed humanity is what makes the books compelling enough to read and re-read over again.

    [0] The others are The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis.