WRITERS BLOCK: Technically speaking

I read a great statement online the other day. “The difference between creative writing and technical writing is the spelling.”

It made me think of my first technical writing job. I worked in the communications department of a large local company. At the time, I was finishing up my creative writing degree and my head was full of perfect poetic lines, descriptive scenes and clever dialogs. After a few months into the position, after completing PR pieces, writing letters, and even editing technical manuals for broken Web pages, correct grammar and spelling, I wondered when I’d finally get to the creative stuff. Sadly, over the next 10 months I was slowly growing to hate the work. I had convinced myself that technical writing was just not a true art form and was obviously not for a creative-minded type such as myself.

Technically speaking, I was right back then. At first glance technical writing appears to be so organized and rigid that it appears to be the antithesis of all that is creative. At best, it seems ordinary, at its worst useless and dull. It tells us how to do something, like putting together a new bookshelf. (You know the kind with the capital letter labels on each solitary piece of wood, along with all the screws and dowels in a convenient, plastic bag for easy-to-assemble use?) Technical writing doesn’t transport us to another place the way a novel creates a new world or the way poetry tugs at our emotions (or our “heartstrings,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson). Neither does technical writing take us to the scene of local renovations being made in downtown Plymouth, Wilkes-Barre and Scranton or show us the truth behind crime like in the depths of cold, hard journalism. Instead, these corporate writers meticulously, maybe even mathematically, decipher corporate jargon and spit out easy-to-understand tech manuals, business proposals, grant applications, manual procedures, PR pieces and corporate e-mails. You can’t squeeze an ounce of creativity out of these writing styles, like you can’t survive on a raft lost at sea by drinking ocean water.

Now dear reader, I do not mean to demean the importance of the technical writer in my last statement, but I do wonder if these technical writers are really any less creative than their “creative writer” or “journalist” counterparts. So, to begin my search, what does it mean to be creative?

According to mirriam-webster.com, creative means, “1. marked by the ability or power to create; 2. Having the quality of something created rather than imitated.” To break the word creative down, we have the word create, which means, “to produce through imaginative skill, to bring into existence, to invest in a new form.” Obviously, the creative writer (especially the fiction writer) fits this criteria, since they have the ability to create an alternate reality that is initiated by the reader when they use their imagination as they read. However, the technical writer also creates.

The technical writer uses his or her skills to essentially translate an entire language for the reader. Through carefully calculated and properly chosen words, these writers show that there’s something inventive and imaginative in creating simplicity and comprehension from the complexities of linguistics in manuals and proposals. Furthermore, technical writers can also use their imaginations and talents to produce creative product descriptions, first-person-perspective-based healthful living newsletters, colorful brochures and even industry-related internal Web articles.

Words can be so finicky. And when they demand proper attention and usage, only a truly creative writer can hone them to say the right thing at the perfect time. Because writers have a better grasp of language, structure and the intuitiveness of the impact of using particular linguistics, they can plant words in strange new combinations to bring the reader to a new awareness. To do this, writers use everything in their arsenals from fiction to poetry to journalism to technical writing. While creative writers works tirelessly using their technical side when they tap into their expansive research skills and editing work to produce entire worlds full of marvelous plots and characters in their novels, and journalists transcribe pages of notes and interviews and infuse them with story and scene, technical writers use the confines of finely structured formatting to create and inspire higher levels of their reader’s comprehension.

So technically speaking, all writing is creative, even technical writing.

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