Opinion, fact and fiction

My career as an author is quite wide ranging. I get to write opinion, fact and fiction in different situations.

Writing opinion is something that happens through this blog, I also had an article published in the recent Communicator. This takes my traditionally-published life to three pieces. I’ve written for a local newspaper (although they have heavily edited and not attributed authorship in the online rendition), conference proceedings on the subject of textbooks (the proceedings themselves will be published in the new year) and now an article for the professional journal. I identify strongly with this genre of writing, and find myself leaning towards it in my other written work (hence the vocabulary and reference choices in my personal blog).

Article, blog and journal writing is actually quite an unusual way for me to write. As a technical author I tend to document procedures grounded in fact. This means that I tend to write with the voice of the company, or the machine. I often imagine that software would explain itself in the voice Commander Data would use if he were coaching an inexperienced pilot over the phone. The linguistic precision necessary in technical authoring and factual writing is in many ways more demanding than that required by any other type of writing (Issac Asimov’s short story Risk sums up why).

Finally, there’s fiction writing. I’ve taken the instincts for detail and control of my writer’s voice from technical authoring and am well on my way to my first novel which should be with us late in 2013. It features confidence trickery and well researched real world locations that will hopefully have some people scratching their heads.

I’d very much like to hear from anyone of my readers who write via the comments section.

Andrew