the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

Like most people I started writing at school where essays were regularly required on a range of topics according to the subject being taught. Although we were usually given a target number of words, 500 being common, we were rarely kept to this, 10% under or over would normally be OK and, of course, you had to have addressed the subject.

The only time that I can remember being given a specific target was as a punishment when I was found with a Free Nelson Mandela badge on my duffle bag, such adornments being forbidden, and was told to write two essays, one in support of his release and the other in support of his continued confinement and both of which were to e exactly 500 words. I had a week, and delivered both. I’m not sure if they were read, they were not commented on, but the words were certainly counted.

After I had left school my first couple of jobs involved me writing about properties for sale and here an economy of words was required to attract people rather than bore them. After those jobs I moved into areas where the only writing that I did was to fill in forms and, this being the early days of computer input, such forms were filled in using capital letters set into pre-printed boxes. My handwriting skills faded along with any ability that I might have had to write.

In the late 1970s I moved into a job where I wrote invitations to tender for major engineering and construction projects. I had to re-learn handwriting to a standard good enough for the typing pool to interpret and how to tell stories in a way that would produce responses that would do the jobs that were were asking for. It was another opportunity to be economical with language in order to be very specific.

Then I got into computing and wrote programs using the very structured language of business machines (BOBOL was my genre, for want of a better word). It was story telling of a sort, in that you told the computer what to do to make things happen. It was an intellectual challenge to apply the specific syntax required, but was almost like learning to write in a foreign language. It was called pseudo code and was a staging post between English and the machine code that would be generated from it.

Business report writing followed that and here I was back in the world of writing in my native tongue, or at least sort of. It was story telling in that you had to write words that would lead to a conclusion and the tale that you had to tell did not always lead conclusively to the end that was required. There was a skill in biasing the facts so that the reader would follow your path to where you wanted them to go. Paths that might have led to other conclusions needed to be there, but written of in such a way that the reader would not choose to follow them. This allowed for the situation where the chosen solution proved to be the wrong one, but you could show that the right option had been there, but was not selected. The technical term for this is arse covering.

Until the advent of desktop computers and word processing in the mid-1980s the typing pool ruled business correspondence and the typing supervisor’s word was law. The house style ruled and no matter what you wrote it would be tidied before it was allowed out (unless you had upset them; I recall a colleague who misspelled warehouse with an h after the w and did not make the next letter clearly an a. The result was a proposal for an whorehouse). One could learn a lot about writing well if one courted that typing pool supervisor.

I became reasonably good at writing business correspondence in all forms and it was some help in advancing my career until Business Speak, or Management Speak, came to the fore and my penchant for writing plain English went out of fashion. The ability to write, or speak, completely meaningless bollocks became the skill to have. I loathed it.

My first efforts at blogging came after I went freelance as a business consultant. A web presence of some sort was necessary to keep my name out there and I dived in looking for my cyberspace voice. It was in an airport lounge in the US that I found my muse. I was sat with one of those yellow legal pads that are the norm over there scribbling down ideas for blogs. Sat next to me was a rather frail looking lady and we began to chat. She was a journalist who also worked as a freelance editor and was suffering from terminal cancer. She had been making a visit to former colleagues and was heading home to die, but she took one of my business cards and said that she would look at my writing. Her advice was to aim for 600 words each week and to say something at the beginning of each blog that I could bring the story back to in the last paragraph. “Become a columnist” she advised.

I took that on board for some time and if you dig back into these musings you will find that I hit 600 words week after week and a lot of those blogs I am quite proud of when I look back on them (which isn’t often). It was hard work and I admire the people who do that sort of thing for a living. When I began to earn money from writing features three years of banging out 1600 words once a month was hard enough, but to write a daily, or even weekly, column is a talent that I admire immensely.

As may be obvious if you are following me I have begun to write regularly again. I am trying to find my way back into writing more often if not regularly. Part of the issue is having something to say. but there are five part completed novels sitting in my files and to get one of those over the finishing line would be an achievement. I could re-visit some of the other books that I have written and revise them perhaps (they are still selling).

To be able to write for pleasure is a great thing and as long as I can stop it becoming the chore that it did at one time then maybe I can get back to a regular pattern. If you are happy to read what I write then it is nice to have an audience.