“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” — Dickens

There’s so much atmosphere in those seven words. They reach out to the reader with an earthy simplicity and economy that is nothing like austerity. I suspect that an entire Master’s Thesis could be written about that single sentence, but my unhallowed hands shall not. It’s enough for me to say that Mr. Dickens (or his shade) is welcome in my home at any time.

Having grown up reading and re-reading Tolkien (I even made it through The Silmarillion…once), I have never been able to shake the notion that “blog” is somehow related to “balrog”, or at least is something that balrogs say as they’re stalking frightened Elves through the starlit darkness. “Blog! Blahhhhhhg!” But there it is: the word for the thing that every artist and author should have on the Internet. Blog.

I have always enjoyed writing. Typography, too. I couldn’t resist adding the drop cap in the first paragraph. But most of my writing for the last four decades has been technical: I would build a system (alone or with a team), then someone else would take it over for the rest of its life. To make that happen sucessfully, someone had to write down how the system functioned, and I cut my not-quite-literary teeth hammering on those sentences until their meaning was clear and unambiguous. The most-valued praise I received was never from managers or supervisors, but from peers who inherited software that I had documented. “Wow! This isn’t like the usual junk we get.” Not great prose, perhaps, but the very best of meanings.

Technical writing isn’t story-telling in the classical sense. There are no characters. No dialog. No plot (apart from the described behaviors–“Chickens go in. Pies come out.”) But done well, technical writing has style. For the reader to absorb the ideas, the writer has to express them in a way that’s both engaging and readable. The writing must be concise, because wordiness distracts the reader. At the same time, the writing cannot afford to be austere, because the goal is to communicate. The writer must place enough handholds for the reader to make an easy climb to comprehension. It’s very different from writing for academic journals (which I have also done), where months of work must be compressed into no more than two sheets of highlights, and any reader who isn’t an expert might spend days filling in the gaps.

So there’s my gap, now, leaping from technical writing to story-telling. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of fiction (sff, mystery, detective, literary, historical, adventure, humor, coming-of-age, … I originally listed some of my favorite authors here, but in the context of my own writing, it felt too much like name-droppery.) Most of what I read was good, because I had gravitated towards classics. A handful of books were awful, but instructive in different ways. The good stuff I sometimes read over and over. Maybe I absorbed enough that I’ll be able to find the right note on which to end one chapter and start a new one.