My Writing Journey

How my attitude did a complete 180

I hated writing.

When I was in school — grade school, high school, and even college, I absolutely hated writing. Loathed it.

As a result, my writing sucked. I did it because I had to, not because I wanted to. I wrote just good enough to pass whatever class required it, typically with much less than perfect grades.

And yet here I am decades later, a writer. I make a living at it. I enjoy it.

WTF happened?

On writing –

Writing, to me, is one of the most laborious, time-consuming and awful methods of communicating. Fine, you say, but why this? Good question.

Because of its inherent slowness, writing causes one to think. Slowly. At about the speed of one’s pen. The experience I’ve had over the past year and a half writing letters to my fiance has shown how important the simple act of slowing down and thinking can really be. I am not a ‘quick’ person. My mind works comparatively slowly. Unfortunately my mouth can be impatient at times, and may rattle on without heed. The act of sitting down, alone, and writing my thoughts down can help me clarify, organize and generally house-keep all the things floating around in my brain.

– Personal Journal entry, June 26, 1979

Turns out I get to blame my wife, at least in part. In a long-distance relationship (if 100 miles can be considered “long distance”), we took to writing letters. My journal entry above from the year before we married notes that the process of writing forced me to slow down and think.

My first job after graduating from the University of Washington’s College of Electrical Engineering was at a small company in Seattle called International Entry Systems Inc, or IESI. They made Z-80-based data entry terminals, meaning that they would be used to collect typed data onto digital cassette tapes, and then that data would later be transmitted to data processing centers.

The company was 25 strong when I started in late 1979, but only 5 remained when I left in early 1983. (I wasn’t my fault! Honest!) There were three of us in the software department when I started, and I was the software department when I left.

Being a small company, there was plenty of opportunity to stray outside your lane. That was good, both for the company and for me, as I ended up occasionally filling roles beyond just writing software. I sometimes acted as customer technical support (perhaps another harbinger of things to come) and even ended up writing and publishing a newsletter for our customers. Yes, apparently, I started in the newsletter business nearly 50 years ago. (This was a physical newsletter. I worked with a local printer and then sent it via snail mail. Email was still a ways away.)

What was surprising, to me anyway, was that the newsletter was well received. And I enjoyed writing it.

Wait. Enjoyed? Writing? What happened?

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Fast forward a couple of years to Microsoft. One of my early roles was coordinating software development of our COBOL compiler with a fairly large customer: IBM. This was, among other things, my first foray into email. I ended up acting as a kind of liaison, in part because it turned out I could write well. Eventually, I’d be known for being able to wordsmith responses that effectively told IBM to take a flying leap, and have them thank me for it.

And I enjoyed it.

Wait. Enjoyed? Writing? Email? What the heck had happened?

♥

Honestly, it took me a long time to realize what it was that made the difference between my reaction to writing in school and my enjoyment of it in the workplace.

In school, I was required to write about things I had no interest in, for an audience that I didn’t care about. It was a task to get done as quickly as possible so I could move on to the things I felt mattered more.

When I entered the workforce, I was asked (or I simply began) to write about things I actually knew and cared about, for an audience I understood.

Writing what you know makes all the difference.

I get that in school, writing was intended to be a kind of “proof of knowledge”, or perhaps proof of understanding. It’s how we were supposed to demonstrate that we had learned something.

But there was no altering the fact that it was a poor approach to forcing us to learn about something we really didn’t care about. Not only did it leave a bad taste for the subject, but it also gave us all a very negative experience with the writing process in general. That writing sucked and was hard may have had more to do with our relationship to the subject matter we were dealing with, but the experience remained the same: writing sucked and was hard.

In my case, I credit email with being a primary mechanism for me to exercise and grow my writing skills. At Microsoft, I was a software engineer or a manager of software engineers. And while writing software was “the job”, that job was not done in isolation; no job is. There was a lot of communication with various and sundry other people, and the majority of it was written in email. (This hasn’t changed. While it may or may not be email, vast amounts of communication in the workplace are written, and in long form.)

When I left Microsoft and eventually started Ask Leo!, it was to writing that I returned. In a classic case of writing what you know, I was writing specifically to share my knowledge.

In so many ways, Ask Leo! is just a gigantic collection of frequently asked questions; a FAQ. The answers represent lots and lots of writing:

• over 22 years
• close to 6000 articles
• over 4 million words

That’s a lot of writing. Even my embracing video almost always starts with a fully written and thought-through article.

♥

I often talk about the importance of writing. It’s a critical form of communication, and the better you are at it, the more likely it is that what you have to say will be heard.

But it’s more than that, and I called it out myself nearly 50 years ago: writing requires thinking. Your teachers were right: you can’t write well about what you don’t understand. But rather than being forced to write about something we don’t care about, writing about something (or someone ) you’re interested in, or even passionate about, can help you understand it much more completely and clearly — whether someone else ever sees that writing or not.

If there’s a lesson here at all, it’s this: if you hate writing, it may not be the writing you hate at all. Perhaps it’s the association of writing with stressful situations and topics you have no interest in. Change those, and you may find it’s not nearly as bad as you remember.

Regardless of how you feel about it, writing well is a critical skill, and can make a huge difference in your life, your career, and even your relationships.