For a number of years, my day job included conducting ethnographic research on the writing engineers did at work. You would think writing up studies of engineers’ reports wouldn’t prepare a person very well for writing fiction and in some ways you’d be right. I’ve found very little use for bulleted lists or conclusion-up-front in a novel. But in other ways, you’d be wrong, because it turned out that what helps a writer be productive in one sphere can help them in another. Here are five things that I learned watching engineers write and then writing about what I observed.
- It’s a job
Engineers sit down and write as part of their job. They don’t usually enjoy it, but they do it anyway, and they never say they have writer’s block.
It’s frequently useful for me to remember that writing fiction is an art, but it’s also a job. To me, that means I can’t wait for the muse to inspire me before I do my work. As with all jobs, some days go better than others, but it helps me to treat drafting and revising as regular tasks at set times in set places, because when I do that, eventually my muse learns when and where to show up. So five says a week, I park myself in a chair for two hours with no internet. You’d be surprised how even the most reluctant writer brain eventually kicks into gear out of pure boredom.
- I don’t do my best work alone
Engineers work on teams because, barring exceptional genius, their joint product is usually better than what any one person can produce.
As both an academic and a fiction writer, I never published a piece without asking for beta reader response that led to revisions. Then I never had a piece published without more revision based on editorial feedback. I know some people find this difficult. They feel the words they struggled over are being tampered by reviewers and editors who just don’t understand. However, my experience is the piece is always better after I let other people push me along. Always. Every time. There may be geniuses who do their best work alone, but I’m not one of them.
- Rejection is painful and it is the norm. Find ways to get over it.
Engineers have ideas that management never enacts. They may grouse about rejection, but they keep on working.
When an academic article came back to me for revision, my immediate response was to tell myself, “That’s fine, I can do that. I’m a professional.” Then I’d be depressed for days and feel a deep inclination to bury the article in the backyard. But that was not a choice if I wanted to survive in a publish-or-perish world. So I found ways to work around my reaction. I broke the editorial letter up with one action per paragraph and printed it out. I started by doing the easy things. Add an item to the bibliography. Clarify a point. As I did each thing, I checked it off my print out and felt like I’d accomplished something. As I did the easy things, my back brain chugged along working on the three or four harder things that would be left once I’d done all the easy ones. Eventually, everything was checked off. For me, this was a way to function, and it’s turned out to be enormously useful in publishing fiction, where being rejected and trying again is the norm.
- Learn smart ways to see what feedback has to tell me
Engineers used their teammates’ feedback as springboards for their work rather than as blueprints.
When I submitted an article to a scholarly journal, the editor sent it out to reviewers who recommended accept, or reject, or revise and resubmit. If they chose the third option, they sent pages of feedback and suggestions for revision. Sometimes their suggested revisions were great, but sometimes they struck me as completely wrong for what I wanted to say. One of the most useful things I learned was that when a reviewer or editor made a suggestion, they were trying to solve some problem they perceived. Often they skipped right over explaining the problem first. But if I let their response lead me to see the problem, I could fix it in some other way and they’d be just as happy. I had to learn to see through the suggestions to what was really at stake.
- Be brave
Finally, the best engineers knew how to generate and interpret data in ways that drove their product forward in bold ways.
The best advice I ever received from a reviewer read something like this: “The writer has good material but is too timid in drawing conclusions. I urge the writer to be brave with her data.” Be brave. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve repeated that to myself not just about writing but about life. There are challenges everywhere, but the brave people have more fun.
What about you? What have you learned things about writing from your day job?
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Dorothy A. Winsor is originally from Detroit but moved to Iowa in 1995. She still blinks when she sees a cornfield outside her living room window. For about a dozen years, she taught technical writing at Iowa State University and served as the editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, but then she decided writing middle-grade and young adult fantasy was more fun.
The Wind Reader is due from Inspired Quill in fall 2018. Her previous novels include Finders Keepers (2015) and Deep as a Tomb (2016).
She lives with her husband, who engineers tractors, and has one son, the person who first introduced her to the pleasure of reading fantasy.
