I am staring at a tiled ceiling praying for a surge of energy, a strike of inspiration, motivation, anything that will help me get this documentation policy written.
I know what I want to “say” and how the document will be formatted. I even know the exact process I want my engineers to follow…then why am I having such difficulty putting my hands to the black keyboard and typing away to my hearts content?
Lack of sleep is always to blame, but I write sleep deprived all the time. Perhaps I am waiting for that mysterious element, inspiration that many of us writers feel we need. I know I look for it when I have writers block, but I don’t have writers block… I know what I want to type.
Inspiration is also classified by writers as the energy surge when the words fit together just right and thoughts flow serenely from the brain through the arms and onto the medium of choice, keyboard or paper. A beautiful melody of art that is heard by only one and felt by all in the resulting product.
But, this is technical writing you are thinking, artistic prose has no place here and neither does inspiration or creativity. Oh how wrong you are my friend. For those that have never created a technical document, never edited a user manual, or process mapped a department in place of a storyline…the process is the same!
You need the same creativity and writing process, just focused on a different content and sometimes that requires more creativity…after all I am not writing for a specific group of people so much as a generic mass of people…all who feel they get a say in how you write.
For the authors out there, picture this…you are writing a new novel and as you create, your audience, perhaps that 13 year old neighbor next door, is sitting by your side; telling you what you are doing wrong, what you are doing right, and directing your story down the path of creation.
You’d need to be pretty creative to get the story right while diplomatically accepting the negative from someone who of course knows how to do your job better, after all in societal terms we are just writers, isn’t everyone?
So perhaps my block is not inspiration, but the lack of creativity, there is a dam of engineers blocking its flow as they yell at me from a cliff’s precipice…too bad I can’t hear them, yet.
