Technical Writer

I am currently a technical writer. I did not train to be one; in fact, I didn't even take any srs bsns writing courses in college. I did try to take one once, though. It was a Creative Writing course, and I quickly realized I was in the wrong place because a writing sample was required to be accepted into the class:

I wrote a story about a gas station attendant with rage issues who discovers the porta-potty next to the station contains a horrible black hole monster of evil, and promptly begins gleefully directing people to it while they get horribly eaten.

One girl wrote a story about a middle-aged white woman. She gets divorced, then takes up pottery and starts selling her pottery at this art gallery her friend runs. Later, she looks at her ring finger and realizes her tan line has disappeared. The tan line is a metaphor for how she got over her husband and began Respecting Herself.

Another girl wrote about a girl who goes to the beach, and gets naked. Then she dances in the waves, and it is Erotic. The waves, they are freeing. Like sex.

Like sex.

Those two other girls read their samples aloud to the class.

The professor clapped like a seal.

I was placed on the waiting list.

Anyway, so I didn't really take any writing classes in college. I did take a number of programming courses, in which they didn't really teach you how to program. Especially the later courses. Man.

I am getting really off track. The point is, I am not trained as a writer, but somehow got hired as one based on my mysterious ability to write words. Words that say things! I do not know how I got this mysterious ability. It may have had to do with reading lots and lots of silly books about unicorns and mecha when I was little.

My interview was very terrifying (as are all interviews, to me), and involved puzzles. It seems to me singularly cruel to take a nervous applicant and then demand that they tell you how to get a gold bar across the river with two locks and two keys and a thieving ferryman, but I had been playing Professor Layton obsessively at the time (it is the only way to play Professor Layton), and so I came up with an answer and somehow blundered my way through some question about SQL. So there you go. I got here by playing video games and reading about mecha.

Now that I am hired, it is not my writing ability that is the biggest stressor of my job, but making sure that people tell me what I'm supposed to be writing about. Because developers are sneaky and they will keep things from you, or they'll change things without telling you, or they'll wait to design a feature until a week before all coding needs to stop. I also do not like the weekly meetings in which we discuss what we did, because I can never remember what I did, especially in front of seven or so people staring at me.

However, it is much better than my last job, which was as a software developer who had to work with Javascript and CSS. INTERNET BROWSERS ARE THE DEVIL, and also DEADLINES AND SMALL SOFTWARE COMPANIES. And also, when I was little, one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up was a writer.

I probably should have specified what kind of writer.

Unlike whyyy, I do not have a set career path, which is good and bad. It's good because I don't feel tied down to any committed job, and it's bad because I have no real direction in life, and no one or thing to tell me what to do. Like my friend who works at a publishing house, I don't think I want to stay here forever, but don't know what I should be doing instead. I'm kind of convinced the things I like doing (drawing comics, for instance) won't actually get me anywhere. So I play video games. It's pretty depressing.