First – apologies to all for my absence the last week or so. The day job got a little crazy, but it did give me the idea for this article.
The other day, Alicia and I discussed using the principles of fiction writing in non-fiction writing. I’m not talking about travel articles or that sort of thing, but in term papers and business writing.
The day job craziness hit this very topic this week. I got tagged to contribute to a bid proposal at the last minute. While spending 30 hours on it in 2 days, I discovered some interesting relationships between fiction and business writing. Here’s a couple of nuggets I gleaned:
1) Decide on your story and write to it.
In the romance genre, we have a pretty set pattern to follow. There’s an inciting event, a first, second, and third turning point, and a resolution with a happily ever after. In business writing, that’s very similar. The inciting event is subject is prompting the writing – be it a proposal, a white paper, a term paper for school, or whatever. If my job is to persuade my boss that my technical solution is the best one since Newton discovered gravity, then that’s my inciting event.
Similarly, the turning points consist of the main support elements of my writing. And the resolution should wrap up the entire discussion, recapping the vital points and ending with a happily ever after (but only if they buy my product, etc., of course!).
2) Watch your pacing!
I think more business writing would benefit from learning about pacing. Sagging middles are the bane of the business proposal, prompting the desire to skip whole pages of dry, repetitive, and not very exciting material. Oh, I know sometimes you have to have the dry, unexciting discussions of how you’re going to fix all the customer’s problems with your new, custom designed SuperSystem, but if you can, don’t make the whole thing that way.
One other problem I see in business writing is repetition. It seems like we have to pound a concept multiple times in order to get it across. Sadly, some fiction authors do this too, making sure to drop information about a character’s angst and issues on every third page in case I didn’t read it the first twelve times.
This one could be a personal peeve of mine, but I believe in both types of writing you should build ona concept throughout the writing. If the reader finds out on page three that our hero doesn’t have any parents, I don’t mind waiting until page forty that they died in a car accident when he was twelve. Maybe on page ninety I’ll find out that he thought he caused the car accident because he was having a temper tantrum in the backseat because they wouldn’t stop at Dairy Queen. And so on.
In business writing, I’d probably reverse the concept a bit. I’d make sure the reader thoroughly understood the concept the first time I introduced it, then incorporate it into the rest of the writing so they could see how integral it was, but I wouldn’t repeat stuff I said earlier to a great extent. Just a “as discussed in para 3.2.1, we’ll use WonderGadget to support the connection….”
3) -ly words
I really had to laugh when I read the original draft of a document I recently reviewed. If we weren’t “expertly” doing something, we were “effectively” and “efficently” doing it.
Just like in fiction writing – let your characters do the talking for you. If your concept is well-designed, the customer will see the expert in the writing and recognize the effectiveness and efficiency of the concept without you having to use the words to point it out.
If I wanted to think about it some more, I could probably come up with a few more, but I have to get back to the day job for awhile. Can you help flesh out this list with me?
Yesterday I managed to find the LYS I was looking for, despite the fact that it was on the third floor of an office building, tucked above the 7-11 and between a tax place and an insurance company.