Fred, revisited

[muninnhuginn]

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate! (but not that intimate ;-D)
3. You will update your lj with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

alitalf asked, and the ravens cawed :

What was the main motivation for you becoming a tech writer?

Needing a job.

No, it's not that simple. But it's certainly true that had I not followed up the advert for the software documentation course in 1989, my prospects wouldn't have been good. The temporary office work I'd been doing was mostly going to dry up as the construction projects they were based at were completed. West Cumbria wasn't, and isn't, the place to be a non-driving Arts graduate with minimal work experience.

However, I don't think that's the complete answer either. When I set off to my software documentation course interview, I had with me my Filofax. In the back of it I had filed my rewrite of the instructions that came with the organiser software I used (on the PCW), because that way I could:

1. Find it when I wanted to print out and insert new pages
2. Understand the instructions when I'd found them.

Before I'd ever known about the job, let alone the course, I'd been writing my own, customised docs.

I'd also started to seriously look at how other training/reference materials worked. I'd been teaching my mother--reluctant, technology-averse--to use the afore-mentioned PCW. She'd followed some instructions (not mine!) for starting out and had lost all her first session's work in the course of the second session: she'd followed them instructions to the letter, including formatting her floppy disc at the beginning of the second session, because she hadn't been told:

• only to format once, not each time you use the disk
• why (crucial for her learning) one formatted floppy disks.

 I was already engaged in the kind of analysis of audience and user need--and producing, or amending, instructions accordingly--that I'd eventually be paid to do.

So much for the "tech." side of the equation.

As for the writing side of things, there are probably still "poems" and "songs" I wrote when I was three or so hanging around at the Aged P's place. I don't remember the time when I didn't write or at least engage with words--even if only at the level of editing Ceefax pages (or whatever) for clarity and brevity.

So, maybe the answer is that for both the activity of writing and the type of writing, I always had an inclination. Financial need and an opportunity to train in something that meshed with the inclinations got me into the specific area of work. And I enjoy playing with gadgets and breaking (in) new software.

[As an aside, if you were to ask me why I chose to learn to play the flute, I'd be similarly baffled about finding the answer. Again, I just always did.] 

What would you most like to achieve in the future?

Short term: finish a couple of jumpers and some socks. (After last week's bad sock days, I need not only to replace my boots and darn the heels of three pairs of socks, but also knot some more.) Acquire chicken number three.

Short to medium term: something close to self-sufficiency in veg. 

Medium term: The BSc. Paying work--on something like my own terms.

Long term: complete one of the novels. Keep up with the one good sonnet per decade of my life rate of poetry.

Apart from Tolkien, what book(s) / writer(s) have had the greatest influence on you?

Gosh, what a question. How long have you got? (How long have I got?)

Apparently, when I was little I asked for the same story every night for months. It's called "The Witch of Willow Wood" (ooh, lovely shiny alliterative title: no wonder I liked it) and is in the Twinkle annual from 1970-something (1972 or so). If I thought hard about it, I'd probably be able to reconstruct most of the story, but I shan't, except to note that it had a witch (and I really ought to do the "witchy influences" post sometime) and her cat, and a princess and prince, and magic. That's therefore the first influence. Evidently, overdosing on fairy stories at an early age leads one into reading fantasysf with guns 'n' spaceships.

At junior school, I read an anthology of stories (don't know any details about it at all) which included a story about a spaceman stuck on a planet of huge flying insectlike aliens. It was the first time I'd knowingly read sf. I've not stopped since.

Henry Treece was my favourite author of historical fiction. Rosemary Sutcliffe and Mary Renault are undoubtedly better writers, but Treece did Vikings and made me weep. Still do. I came to his poetry much later: a dark, brooding delight.

I read Watership Down when it first came out in paperback (I went halves over its cost with my dad). It was, in a way, the introduction to literature rather than just stories and books. Why? Well, it was big, for a start, big enough to have parts as well as chapters. But it was the literary trappings--the footnotes (I'm sure it has at least one) and the epigraphs (some in languages I still can't read) at the beginnings of chapters--that hooked me as much as the story. I don't think I can write fiction without the necessary quote (either in the title or as an epigraph [even if it's hidden from any reader]). Actually, it was also the book that first introduced me to the "obligatory epic fantasy map" at the beginning. I read most of Shardik soon after and rather enjoyed the gruesome bits (There's a scene where the cage containing the bear rolls out of control down a hill and crushes lots of unnamed peons that I recall being particularly, um, good.)

[It's just after this that my class teacher read us The Hobbit one year and embarked on LOTR the next. We'd got as far as the shortcut to mushrooms (yeugh! I'd've said then) when I moved house and changed school. A year later, with a combination of book tokens and saved-up pocket money, I bought my own copies. I finished the three volumes in a fortnight and religiously reread every year or so until my late teens. I'm not sure what the influences are and how affected me.... My Tolkiens were part of the pile of books I found I couldn't live without a few weeks after I'd started at college, along with Donaldson and Owen.]

I read both Animal Farm and 1984 in my final year at primary school (along with H G Wells' science fiction and John Wyndham; I'd discovered Asimov and A C Clarke by then too). I'd read enough history to "get" the politics in each of them, but it was the images of horror, the boot stamping on the man's face forever bit (I'm paraphrasing) that stuck. And I've always had a soft spot for O'Brien. I came back to 1984 several times before I studied (but didn't answer on) it for 'O' level. I've come back to it since partly in conjunction with some thoughts on, of all things, medieval romance.

My head of English at secondary school introduced me to Mervyn Peake. After part of the school was burned downed, he also supplied me with fire-damaged copies of appropriately the first two volumes; I searched out the third volume myself. It's this final volume, raw and with a feeling of incompleteness, that I hold most dear. There are scenes in that novel like hard crystals embedded in my mind--images of cruelty and suffering.

Stephen Donaldson's my own fault and I'm unrepentant. It came as a kind of antithesis to Tolkien and had thick volumes with black spines which looked good in the bookshelf. And it had words, ever so many, poetic words: "ichor", the irreplaceable "clench".... They are too big to reread often, but I would if I could.

The Goshawk stunned me. I loved White's Arthuriana, especially The Book of Merlin, but there's something about the closeted (catastrophic?) drama of The Goshawk that grips. I'd probably never have tried falconry if I hadn't read this.

Wilfred Owen is the first of the WW1 writers (he's also the first poet I whose work I read as a body of work, a very different experience to reading anthologised examples, especially with a poet with a particular, specialised subject matter) I read and I could at one time recite most, if not all, of the major poems. They are, despite their subject matter, sublimely beautiful. Sensuous (a good example is "Arms and the Boy"). Also angry, satirical (in Sassoonesque mode). And consonantal rhyming. "Strange Meeting" is one of the handful of poems I nurture in my memory to be brought out often without recourse to books.

The Awakening is one of those books I bought and read having listened to in on Book at Bedtime (Radio 4 is one of the major influences on my taste and experience in so many ways). The final scene of Edna swimming out into the sea--suicide in defeat or triumphant escape from the stifling constraints of her existence, I'm not sure which--stuck. It's a lovely, if disturbing and sad, book.

Frankenstein. epistolary narrative. Nested narrative. The hubris of science. And, in the shape of the monster and his narrative, one of the most human and humane creatures I've ever read about. I've yet to see a movie adaptation that didn't traduce its vision entirely. I live in hope.

Philip Larkin I read at school and came back to at university. I even wrote a dissertation on it: 5,000 words (or it may even have been 3,500 and I'm not good at brevity) whose argument I later saw condensed (refined?) into one sentence by Seamus Heaney, thereby explaining why he's the poet and I'm not. I could, again, at one point recite almost all his published works. I find him melancholic, but bracing. I have one of his sonnets, early, lyrical, imprinted in my brain.

I think, even more than the longer works I read, it's the short lyric poems from the Middle Ages that hooked me and have stayed with me. Get me drunk enough and I'll even sing "Mirie it is while sumer ilast" with appaling pronunciation. And macaronic lyrics: who could resist?

How to Write Better Software Documentation, if I could only recommend one book on tech. comms, would be the one. It crosses the line between craft and art. I don't have a copy, only its invaluable checklists.

I first read Brain Patten in my twenties and go back regularly. I find more to appreciate on each visit. They're grown-up and world weary, but still lyrical and sometimes hopeful. I don't have any by heart, tho' if I did it'd be "A Small Dragon" or "The Likelihood".

Neuromancer was the first cyberpunk novel I read. I loved the pace, the style. Still do. I could have chosen others, but just because of its title with all the ways it can be read, and its sound, I've always treasured Neuromancer. There's that first sentence, too:

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Superb.

In summary:

• "The Witch of Willow Wood"
• Watership Down
• Henry Treece
• 1984
• Gormenghast trilogy
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
• The Goshawk
• Wilfred Owen's poems
• The Awakening
• Frankenstein
• Philip Larkin's poems
• Medieval English Lyrics (Faber)
• How to Write Better Software Documentation
• Brain Patten's poems
• Neuromancer.

If schools, shops, etc were equivalent, what is most important for you in choosing somewhere to live?

Shops? Internet access and delivery services will do fine for most things, bar milk and fresh veg. (and I amend the order for the latter online and have it delivered too).

Schools? Only the default option, not necessarily the only one.

The actual constraints are:

• employment
• piano teacher.

So, if M could take his work with him and we could clone the piano teacher, I wouldn't live where I do.

What I'd like would be isolation, sea (to the west, roughly), hills (to the east, mainly), being north of Lancaster, plenty of land for livestock and vegetables.

Alternatively, if condemned to urban life: plenty of land for livestock and vegetables, ability to walk or get public transport to all appointments, an extra room or two.

Cambridge being how it is, the former is probably more affordable than the latter.

How did you first encounter LJ?

Hah! At last! An easy one to answer. the_magician told me about it and provided me with the invite code. It's all his fault, and very grateful I am too ;-)

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

> it was the literary trappings--the footnotes
...
> The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I wonder how long it will be before Neuromancer needs a footnote to explain that when it was written, TV transmissions were analogue and tuning to an unused one gave noisy grey, not a solid blue or green.