Technical Writer to Fiction Writer: Purpose, Art, and Craft
The purpose of fiction is to give the reader a powerful emotional experience.
This is short, medium and long fiction, as well as anything else in the “creative” sphere, such as poetry, music, “fine art”, photography, etc. If no emotion is invoked, the recipient will treat it as boring and likely ignore any other work you offer.
Emotion is a result, not a cause. It’s your job to make the reader sniff soda/coffee through their nose, fill their eyes with tears of joy and/or sadness, send shivers up and down their spine and make them feel like they’re involved with the story/image/song. . This task is accomplished through communication.
Communication
Communication is cause, distance and effect with duplication and understanding that produce emotion. The message can be written/spoken words, audio (music), visual, smell, or any of the other senses you can use to create an emotional response.
Art
Art is a word that sums up the quality of communication (L. Ron Hubbard)
This leads us to the conclusion that a person who has a good quality of communication can be a successful artist.
The craft of writing (or other art) involves the application of communication techniques to enable you, the artist/writer, to produce the desired emotion in your audiences. The Craft is pretty well defined now and is readily available.
art and craft
How good does your craft have to be to produce art?
The technical expertise itself is adequate to produce an emotional impact. (L. Ron Hubbard)
As tech writers, programmers, and other tech geeks, we’re heavily involved with this. The closer your work is to the end user, the higher the quality of your communication.
Technical writers, trainers, documentation specialists, etc., who deal directly with the end user already have an advantage. Part of your requirements and design phases deal with who your end users are, including the predominant gender (or not), education, and culture. The business rules your company uses and its style guides (if any) will reflect the acceptable tone that the documentation should have.
Some documents are designed to be drier than dust, often by legal requirement. Others are much more flexible, perhaps in a User Guide. Your style can be dry, loose, impersonal, personal, anything to get the job done. The more you use the quality of your communication to give your users a higher emotion (like satisfaction instead of boredom), the more effective and successful you will be.
So you already have the beginning of the art. Part of the craft is for you to deliberately try to produce a specific emotion to a much greater degree than you now do in “formal” technical writing. When you have your craft well enough under control to knowingly produce an emotional impact (hopefully whichever you choose), the better chance your art has of succeeding.
Take a look now at some of his current technical writing, programming, or whatever he has that involves a user interface. How do you produce an emotion in your target audience that makes them “happy” to use it? How could you change that emotion?