Category Archives: Writing

Enforced writer’s block, or ‘Going against everything I’ve said about freewriting’

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I only get 30 minutes break in the working day where I can indulge in some creative writing, taking a break from the Technical documents that I am paid to produce. As soon as the clock starts on my break I grab my pen and pad and get to work, writing anything and everything that comes into my mind. When I first started to study Creative Writing I could no sooner freewrite on demand as I could stay at my desk through lunch, but it’s been very true that if you do it every day then you get better at it. If only that were the case with my job, but that’s another post altogether. And now I take just a few seconds before something comes out and I am well practiced at not self-editing, or stopping to think too much about whether any of it makes any sense. I just get my Virginia Woolf head on and keep producing a load of dust that I can sift through later when looking for a gem to polish up.

Today has been really sunny. I have been at my desk swiveling round on my chair every half an hour to look at the window, counting down the time until I could go outside and write. I have a big deadline for this weekend and need to be writing every minute that I have spare. But when the time came to get going I just put the pen down. I am exhausted. I have been writing so much at speed in work that I just can’t do it today to order. Not even when those orders are my own. If someone else had told me all this I would have said fine, just write about that then, write slowly, write in the tone of someone who feels like they are walking through quicksand (although I would have tried to avoid that cliche), and I would have said the end product will be a good account of a character who is shattered. But I was beyond self-discipline today.

Today I had more progress with my writing by not putting pen to paper on my lunch break than I would have had I scribbled away. I think.

I have been telling the folks in my little writing group all about freewriting recently, and how you need to push through the writer’s blocks and just keep writing regardless, writing out the silence and writing out the repeated words if they are stuck in your head until you move on to another one. However, today, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I just stared ahead into the sun and let all the words dart about wanting to get out but not being allowed to. In the end I think what happened is that they all settled their arguments with each other and found a place to go and sit still for a minute, sulking that they couldn’t come out. Then, when I got back in from my break I was ready to write in a slightly more logical way than I would have done. I’m normally quite the fan of the garbled mess that freewriting produces, and would never normally try to reign in the rearing sentences, but today I was just too tired to open the flood gates. Some emotionally draining stuff has been happening around me for a while now and I was just too tired to let it all spill out and found it easier to just keep the moat up and sit with my back against all the thoughts, and then, once a bit refreshed, let them come out one at a time.

This goes against everything I have been encouraging people to do in my little group but it worked today and I may just try it again. I think the only way I will allow myself to indulge in this absence of writing on my lunch break is if I make sure that I still write later as well.

I read a tip for writing once which said that you should always stop before you want to, so that you always want to get back to it. Perhaps I’ve just taken it a step further and not let myself start when I wanted to.

Woman in the Wind

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by Lucy Rose Williams

The church clock strikes eight, so those villagers who are awake know without checking that it is six. A cock crows. A body lies across the doorstep of the church, a line of crumb-carrying ants marches across the fedora covering its face. There is a serene, momentary quiet after the chimes cease. A figure glides past the church wall, before the silence is cracked by a baby crying.

The figure picks up speed and pushes a large navy blue coach pram over the cobblestones. The cries start to bounce along the air as the wheels speed over the lumps in the road. Her black stilettos navigate the rise and fall of the stones with ease as she strides onwards, diagonally across the middle of the square, her fitted jacket accentuating her perfect figure. She fixes her gaze at the empty bench in the far left corner, oblivious to the noises spurting out of the pram.

When she reaches the bench, she does not sit down. Instead she turns her back to the pram and fixes her stare on the green door ahead of her.

Whoever she is waiting for is testing her patience, as she fidgets and adjusts her scarf, tucking her long hair into her roll neck sweater to stop it blowing over her face. She adjusts her skirt around her thighs and checks the time.

Ten minutes pass and the crying stops. This new silence is broken only a few times by some bikes crossing the square. The green door opens and a woman with curlers in her hair, wearing a long powder blue silk dressing gown, stands in the doorway. She beckons the woman towards her but the woman shakes her head and looks away.

The woman in the doorway reaches for a long fur coat from the coat rack and a large grey fur hat. She puts the coat over her dressing gown and slips off her slippers in favour of long leather boots. She starts to button them up the sides and the woman by the bench looks at her watch.

She doesn’t make any eye contact with the lady in the fur as she approaches, and as soon as the pram has been handed over she tightens her belt up a notch around her thin cotton jacket and marches back across to the church on the opposite side of the square. She isn’t as sure-footed this time, and her cheap heels start to wobble, getting stuck every few paces. She starts to stagger and reaches a bench just in time to let it catch her weight. Her feet look narrow and birdlike, and the plastic black shoes look as though they are painted on her feet as they twist into the gaps in the cobbles. Her toes wrap around the stones like an eagle gripping on to a perch.

Her scraggy hair has come out of her roll neck sweater on one side and she tries to adjust it and wedge it back while she tightens up the rag of a scarf she found, and heaves her shoulders up and down, inhaling deep breaths of icy air, and exhaling steamy bursts. She bends forward and rummages in her pockets. She pulls out a photograph and holds it in her blueing hands. Her breathing gets faster and more frantic and she pulls off her gloves to rub her thumb over the photo. She rubs the baby’s face over and over again before collapsing forward with her head between her knees, gasping for breath.

My Other Life

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My Other  Life (published in ISTC newsletter March 2012)

Chatting online to victims of bullying, and taking someone with Asperger’s Syndrome out for lunch seems to bear no relation to writing manuals and bulletins for an engineering company. On the surface it seems as though my life outside work bears no relation to the work that I do during the day, and that the Third Sector is a million miles away from the engineering and manufacturing industry.

It was not until completing the Certificate in Technical Communication Skills with the ISTC, and however, that I realised, on closer inspection at the communication skills involved, that there is a great deal of overlap between the two facets of my life.

My full time job is as a Technical Author for a semiconductor fabrication equipment manufacturer. I am responsible for the distilling of bulletins and manuals for customers and internal support staff. Being relatively new to this line of work I rely on communicating with the SMEs (subject-matter experts) for content clarification.

In order to create manuals and bulletins we currently use Adobe Framemaker and Acrobat, with the graphics created by two in-house technical illustrators,  using Photoshop, IsoDraw, and CorelDraw. For online sharing of documents  we use Sharepoint.

I work in a team of 5 and our role as a Technical Publications department is to provide support not only to the customer but also to the internal customer support team and the customer support staff out in the field, as both customer and support staff are required to provide support and maintenance of the of the tool at the customer site. As a result, the intended audience is always forefront in my mind with any communication, and the content of relevant documentation amended accordingly.

In order to achieve the best possible results, the company were keen for myself and another Technical Author in the department to train with the ISTC, and we recently both passed the Certificate in Technical Communication Skills. As a result have enrolled on the second part of the course, the Diploma in Technical and Commercial Authorship, which we hope to complete in the next 12 months.

During our study we learnt about the six Cs of communication and how communication must be:

Clear, Concise, Constructive,  Correct, Courteous, Complete.

Other communication skills involved in my role include the understanding  of how people absorb information, and the ability to grasp complex issues and distil them into good operational instructions,  and having a consistent approach to all communication. A closer look at my work outside of Technical Authoring will highlight how transferable these communication skills are. Other than my job at SPTS Technologies, I work part time in the evenings for Bullies Out and volunteer on the weekends for The National Autistic Society.

 

Bullies Out

I started volunteering with this antibullying charity as on online mentor in 2008, and have since spent two evening shifts a week chatting to victims of bullying in the designated chat room. The issues that we as mentors are required to deal with often include talking online to children who are considering suicide or who are in hospital recovering from suicide attempts. When communicating with depressed or suicidal individuals it is imperative to be clear in what you say, and concise in your message. It is definitely essential to be courteous and constructive, as well as being correct, proving all the necessary information about further help that they could get and organisations they could contact.

Often we need to research police and social worker contact details, and various procedures such as how to report various domestic abuse claims, and this information has to be gathered and distilled quickly and accurately while the child is online. There are many rules about data protection  that have to be adhered to and ethical considerations, so the mentors must constantly think about what they are communicating and the different audiences, whether it be the child or their foster carer. Confidentiality  is also factor, which is also a consideration  for a lot of the documentation produced as a Technical Author, where other customers’ details are concerned.

As well as continuing to mentor, I have recently been appointed as the Online Mentor Manager, which involves managing the scheme as a whole and maintaining communication pathways between the mentors and the CEO of the charity. The main aspect of the role is to monitor the chat room, and each evening I request summaries of the session from each mentor who was online, collate this information, decide what is relevant to and produce a summary to circulate to the rest of the charity staff so that they can be kept up to date with what issues were discussed. This requires a concise and consistent approach, and to collate writing from all different styles into one concise summary. Another main part of the role involves writing procedures for new mentors to follow and compiling  case studies for training.

National Autistic Society

My other role for charity is as a befriender for the National Autistic Society, which involves meeting with a girl who has Aspergers every week and to help them with their social skills. Communicating with a person on the Autistic Spectrum requires clarity above anything else, and the aim is to be concise and not ambiguous. It is a good idea to use Simplified English where possible, and not to be overly verbose.

The girl I meet with struggles with long sentences and with sentences that include metaphors, similes or ambiguous words, or if the sentence goes off track at all.  She benefits from a consistent approach and courteous communication that is positive and constructive.

In order to help with my volunteer work I completed an Introduction to Counselling module with The Open University, and the overlaps between counselling and technical communicating are many. Above all, the communication must be clear and concise, with the communication tailored to the situation.

I hope that both aspects of my life will continue to assist the other, with constant reflection of the communication techniques required.

Hi Ho Hi Ho It’s off to CBT I go

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At some point before 4pm today I have to call someone back to arrange an appointment. The person I have to call back is a counsellor that my work have arranged for me, and the appointment is for some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I would quite happily keep all of this stigma filled information to myself, and embark on journey number ‘whoknows’ into the world of putting my brain back on track, but what is the point in passionately spouting off about

CUTTING THE TIES

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(PUBLISHED IN SEVENTH QUARRY, SUMMER ISSUE 2012)

Smelling the age you loved the most
With half of each other in your hands,
The ink is pushed along by empty fingers
Across a path to you and your eyes.
The grass is waiting with nothing in between
As you choose between left and right.
There is the phrase from a million mouths
Making myriad hopes.
I want to light up your face
But I would be smudging what has started to form.