The Bitter Quill

No, not a paying gig. I’m talking about something intangible.

See, it’s easy for me to lose confidence in my abilities. (I’m guessing other writers are also plagued with this sort of doubt.) So often, the constraints of time are given priority over the desire to produce work of quality. Sometimes, even when time is not of the essence, it can seem so hard to fight for quality when so many around you are choosing the polysyllabic and ugly over the simple and clear.

I’m not saying that all long words are bad. It’s just that people should not be allowed to make them up simply because their active vocabularies are limited.

Pardon my digression. Where was I?

Ah, yes. My big accomplishment for this week is finishing a short piece of science writing. For this piece, my work entailed:

• Finding articles in the scientific literature dealing with my topic of interest
• Reading these articles and gleaning the relevant information from them
• Summarizing the relevant information in a format that a general audience will understand what I’m talking about
• Presenting the background material that a general audience probably doesn’t have

Ideally, the process goes exactly as I’ve described above, and a decent product comes out. This time, I think that may be the case. Of course, it’s hard to judge one’s own work and easy to be too critical or too fond. I am sure that if this piece ever sees print (or pixel—it has been sent off to a webzine) I will be instantly dissatisfied with my work. Still, it’s nice to finish a piece, to believe that it doesn’t suck, and to believe that maybe I’ve got it in me after all.

I’m rereading Lolita right now. I do this every couple of years, because in my opinion Lolita is the best book ever written. I’ve borrowed a copy of The Annotated Lolita from one of my friends, and it’s fantastic. I now know what all those French words mean. Of course, I’ve sort of been borrowing it for the last couple of months, because I’ve got this darn graduate school thing keeping me from reading as much as I’d like. (Except for papers with titles like “Learning and Applying Contextual Constraints in Sentence Comprehension,” I’m reading plenty of those.) So, anyway, I’m trying to hurry up and finish Lolita, because my friend wants it back, and I turn the page, and right there, on page 265, is exactly what I was I trying to say about why we feel betrayed by false memoirs. Except, of course, Nabokov has said it much better than me. (Don’t you hate how Nabokov always does that?)

So here it is. From Lolita:

“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen King Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever revolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.”

Of course, as a writer, I’m fine with the hot-dog stand operator writing poetry, as long as his stuff doesn’t get published before mine.

I must confess, I haven’t managed to finish reading a single book since the start of the year. I did start four books, which I am reading in small pieces, but it irks me that so far I haven’t managed to finish one. Instead, I am trapped in the middle of:

• Dubliners, by James Joyce.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.
• The Science Book, edited by Peter Tallack.
• Every Living Thing, by James Herriot.

Part of the reason I haven’t finished any of these is that I need what everyone else does: more time. I especially need more time—a nearly infinite amount, it seems—to catch up on my science reading. Every day there are new research articles, news stories, and blog commentaries to read.

Although keeping up is the biggest reading challenge, achieving balance is of equal importance. That balance can be lost if one dwells to long on the list of must-reads. Reading nothing but specialized or technical writing is a subtle danger.

Don’t get me wrong, such work is certainly real writing and real reading, but technical writing is often limited in the way it manipulates words. This narrowness occurs in part because medical, technical, and science writers always (or should always) strive for simplicity. It also happens because these writers are experts in a subject area rather than experts in a content area.

When reading creative writing, one has greater opportunity to find masterful writers who use techniques and words that aren’t commonly found in medical, technical, and science writing. Reading work that is more overtly creative allows a writer to re-immerse herself in the craft. Such reading replenishes the writing toolbox. Those words and techniques that aren’t common in specialized writing may still be useful later on, but you can’t use them if you don’t have them at the ready. The best writer is one who has a full toolbox, who knows how and when to use her tools, and who also knows how and when not to use them.

As for me, maybe I’ll have finished reading something by December. I’ll let you know.

Whether they write as part of a regular 9-to-5 job or as a freelancer, most of the time medical writers and their ilk are working for someone. If it’s not a boss, it’s a client. Either way, working for someone else means that at some point, you will get a Project from Hell.

Projects from Hell don’t usually start out that way. They usually are challenging, but that’s often part of why they are initially so interesting. Eventually, however, the interest fades, largely as a result of spending too much time or effort on the project. Eventually the work becomes less about an intellectual exercise, and more about minutia.

In some cases, these projects become one continuous exercise in revision. In others, the project may disappear for long periods at a time, apparently completed, only to return with more revision. Worst, however, are the ones that periodically self-destruct and then begin again, like phoenixes. Such projects may creep into time allocated for other projects, your leisure time, or your weekends.

In most cases, these projects become nightmares because of a lack of communication or direction. Sometimes the instructions from a boss or client are not transmitted clearly. In other cases, the people who want the project may not have a good idea of who their audience is or what the ultimate purpose is for a written piece.

Much as you may try, these situations aren’t always avoidable. However, it helps to keep in mind that at least you’re getting paid to be bored, irritated, or otherwise inconvenienced and you’re getting paid to write. (Maintaining that perspective is made easier if you’re paid a good salary or by the hour.) That’s one thing your creative writing friends can’t always say.

There are some rather obvious “tools” a medical writer needs: knowledge of medical concepts, good grammar, a good vocabulary, a sense of composition…. You get the idea. There are two other tools that are worth mentioning, though. The first is may seem rather obvious: You need to master a word processing program. The second may seem strange at first, but after you work as a medical writer for a while, you’ll understand why I mention this: you need to learn to use a spreadsheet program.

The most commonly used word processing program is Word. Most of the time, it’s also a pretty good program, although you do need to make sure you’ve installed it on a machine that has the proper hardware to support it. Most of my word processing experience is with Word, so I’m going to speak about its functions in particular, but whichever program you use, it’s worth looking to see if similar features are available.

For most people, Word is like a typewriter that allows you to make an infinite number of typing errors. Word actually has a large number of built in functions that can make a medical writer’s life (or at least her job) much easier. Here are a few of the features in Word that can be rather useful:

• Customize your toolbars: Word lets you add toolbars and rearrange the buttons on them. Some buttons I find useful are the superscript and subscript ones, and the paragraph indent ones. I also like the track changes toolbar, and the button that allows you to see not-printing and formatting characters.
• Track changes: Often, a medical writer collaborates on documents with other writers, editors, and medical experts. In these instances, it’s useful to see what changes have been made to the document, and by whom. It’s also useful if you want to be able to backtrack through your own work, selectively removing certain changes.
• Find and Replace: Perhaps you’re laughing, but do not underestimate the power of this function. You can use it to change the capitalization and even formatting of sections of text. For example, if you wanted to find every number that has two digits after a decimal point and color that text in red, you could do so. There are limitations to this function, but what it can do is rather remarkable.
• Keyboard shortcuts: There are always two or three ways to do something in Word. Rather than considering this a confusing hindrance, I encourage you to embrace this and learn as many ways to do things as possible. It can only make your work more efficient. Keyboard shortcuts are great things to learn. Word has a number of built in shortcuts, but you can also create your own. I’ve found it useful to do so for several tasks. Just remember that the shortcuts you add may not be on all the machines you use.
• Formatting and Styles, Templates: Depending on the kinds of projects you do, you may find that you have certain formats that you use over and over again. It’s worth learning to use the Formatting and Styles feature and to create templates, or at least to feel comfortable doing this with a reference guide handy.
• General formatting of documents: This isn’t a single feature, but rather a general principle. You should be able to use page breaks in place of carriage returns to adjust spacing, or better yet, know how to adjust paragraph attributes so that the lines stick together, stay with the next paragraph, etc. It’s also useful to know how to format different sections of a single document in different ways, such as having a section that’s in landscape between two sections in portrait view, or to have the pages in each section numbered differently.

Finally, keep in mind that Excel can be extremely useful. Medical writers spend a remarkable amount of time creating, formatting, and filling in tables. Excel can do a remarkable amount of this very quickly. One useful feature is the ability to customize number formats. Pivot tables and graphs can also be useful, although I’m not as familiar with them as I’d like to be.

There are a number of ways to learn these things. The first is simply to play with the program. Even if you choose to learn more formally, I recommend doing this from time to time. You should never be scared of your tools. If you prefer more formal tutorials, there are a number of tips and tricks books available. Finally, should you seek quick and free answers, Microsoft does provide some tutorials online.

Even if you are not a medical writer, I hope you’ll explore what your word processing program has to offer. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised, and the ability to manipulate words in more than just the traditional sense is quite valuable.

This is who we, the readers, thought JT LeRoy was: A reclusive writer, biological male (but with gender issues), survivor of an abusive childhood, southern, child hustler, an HIV-positive junkie who wrote autobiographical fiction. This is who JT LeRoy turns out to be: a middle-aged woman from Brooklyn, who wrote fiction that was not at all autobiographical.

This is the new trend, following tight on the heels of the memoir craze: the revelation that the memoir author was not as truthful as we had thought, after all. (See also: James Frey, Augusten Burroughs.) The question is, does it matter? A good story is a good story, after all, regardless of whether or not it’s true. And how true does a story have to be to be a true story? Books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Julie and Julia come with introductions that basically say, “This book is true, except for the parts I made up.” After all, who can be expected to remember word-for-word a conversation they had three months or five years ago?

I have this habit of making everything vaguely interesting or amusing that happens to me into an anecdote, and then telling these anecdotes over and over again to anyone who will listen. (This is a habit that annoyed the hell out of one of my former roommates, who usually got to hear these stories about five times each.) I am definitely way, way wittier in my anecdotes than I am in the actual situations. I move things around to make them funnier, to make myself cleverer. I exaggerate. I make my own motives purer, and my ex-boyfriends jerkier. I’m no JT Leroy (at no point do I claim to be a rent boy), but sometimes I may be a little bit Augusten Burroughs.

So why do we as a culture feel betrayed when it turns out that James Frey wasn’t really a criminal? If it’s about the art, should it really matter? After all, aren’t we writing aiming for Truth with a capital T, the underlying big truths of life, instead of truth with a little t, the facts and dates of what really happened? And how true does something have to be? Obviously, LeRoy made up an entire life. But what about all the writers who are just stretching the truth a little, to make things sound better? All writers are liars, after all. And the books are still the same, whether they are true or not.

I don’t think it matters in terms of art, whether the things written are true or not. But it matters to us culturally, because we feel emotionally manipulated and suckered by these false memoirs. Some writers get to be celebrities, and writing is a business, after all. James Frey got to be on Oprah. And maybe the thing that bothers us most is that we liked our illusions. We got attached to the fakes.

There’s a certain semi-ridiculous segment of Harry Potter fandom that was really, really ticked off that Hermione ended up with Ron and not with Harry. They thought they knew the story, and then JK Rowling went and changed it on them. Now they say things like, “Hermione wouldn’t really do that.” It’s the same in the faux memoir game. We thought we knew the how the story went, and then life went and changed it on us.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anju Kanumalla is whipcrack-smart. This will become rapidly apparent. Anju makes her living in a writing field that I’ll wager most of you don’t, and part of the reason that I invited her to join the Bitter Quill team was her unique and erudite perspective on the whole creative process. Read on for a little bit more on just exactly what the hell it is she does.

The title of this post is also the most common response I get when I tell people what I do for a living. I actually write in several genres, but right now medical writing is the only one for which I get paid. I also do a fair amount of science writing and some academic (mostly scientific) writing. Every once in a while I’ll also try out a piece of fiction or creative nonfiction.

“Medical writing” is a catch-all term for just about any writing related to health or medicine. This includes newspaper articles, patient materials, technical documents, clinical trial study reports, physician or pharmacist education materials, and internal documents for the pharmaceutical industry.

To become a medical writer, you (obviously) need good writing skills and some medical knowledge, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be a doctor. You should, however, be comfortable around scientific and medical concepts. From what I’ve observed, it’s easier to pick up the medical knowledge than to pick up the writing skills.

A science writer, as you’ve probably guessed, writes about science. However, this is writing for the general public. When the audience includes professionals or the writing is more technically detailed, it’s considered scientific writing. Research articles and grant writing are both forms of scientific writing. It’s worth noting, however, that some forms of medical writing can also be considered either science writing or scientific writing.

Like medical writing, science writing also requires both excellent writing skills and knowledge of content. My experience has been that it’s much harder to pick up scientific knowledge and that it needs to be actively studied.

Education and continuing education are very important with all of these fields, however, so it’s a good idea to always be working on your professional development. (Ideally, you should work on it more than I do.)

One last field worth mentioning is technical writing. Some medical and scientific writing also falls under the umbrella of technical writing. All three of these fields, and science writing as well, have several aspects in common. They usually require specialized skills, comfort with science and technology, and dedication. They also have similar concerns, such as readability and the need to translate concepts and technical language. All four can also be intellectually and (to varying degrees) financially rewarding.