Autobiography of a writer
In elementary school, my primary goal was to learn cursive. By middle school, I wanted to publish a great work of non-fiction that would change perspectives and help people see their value. In high school, everyone encouraged me to write fiction instead, but by the end of college I knew that wasn’t the right path.
I have several unedited books under my belt, but no desire to perfect them. The process was the exciting part. I loved to be surprised by a character’s decisions; I’d watch the story unfold as I typed and it would delight me as much as it might a reader. My favorite part was when I’d magically think of something that tied the current chapter to an earlier one.
As a fiction writer, I was a “pantser.” This is a term coined by the folks leading National Novel Writing Month (“Nanowrimo”) and it means that you jump into the 50,000 words in 30 days challenge without an outline.
- times tried: 10
- times completed the challenge (50k words/30 days): 5
- times completed a book: 3
At some point I burnt out (probably after writing 12-page papers for school four years in a row, and then cramming in two additional hours of fiction, with little balance otherwise). I lost my dream of writing a book that would change people’s lives and moved my focus more towards supporting technology that assisted in adult online continuing education. I found purpose in that, too.
In every role, I’ve been adaptable to new technology and finding ways to use it for efficiency, and patient with teaching others so they can improve, too. You can imagine how these skills served me in a technology-based career. That in addition to my sense of purpose found in the work that I do kept me employed for the next decade.
Though I worked retail for part of it, I was the “tech person” at the job: not the one who could fix the computer, but the one who could help you improve your use of it. I could help you narrow down the search and use better keywords to find the customer’s books. At my small, family owned bookstore job, I suggested and built the website, providing materials and guidance on how to maintain it without me after I left. The web presence increased traffic a bit, but that was before I knew about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I tried freelance web design for a few years, but what I loved about it was writing those site maintenance guides for my clients.
It wasn’t until I had been working for five years at UMGC (formerly UMUC) that it clicked. When I started working there in 2013, my team had a shared drive with about 100 Word documents. These provided guidance for the migration project I had been hired to support, plus a handful of other tools. No offense to the person who wrote them, but they were clunky, hard to read/use, and gave incomplete instructions with skipped steps. I think most documentation I had ever used for work was similar, and it wasn’t detrimental to getting the work done, but did make things harder than they needed to be.
A coworker (a work bestie now) and I built and improved on that library. Others contributed but it was our initiative to build an architecture for that information, decide on doc best practice and style, write new guides, and maintain existing guides. Together we were unstoppable documentation managers. We didn’t even know at the time what a great skill that is (imposter syndrome, but it was not the focus of the job either).
As the university explored more options for delivering better online learning, the scope of the support team grew. We were supporting a major part of the classroom experience – the content management system (CMS), which provided a centralized storage solution for delivering consistent content across multiple classrooms and semesters. We also supported the syllabus management tool and the university’s course approval process which involved an in-house created application that is integrated with the learning management system (LMS) to publish content.
Supporting those platforms encompassed several processes and systems and required consistent instructions for a team of six. Of course we weren’t going to make them each individually write notes!
We created process/procedure guides, work tracking systems, project management and tracking templates, email templates, troubleshooting guides, conceptual/context job aids, spreadsheet formulas, configuration guides, onboarding guidance, team expectations, issue summaries, reporting guides and templates, timeline reports, and more. We had a fountain of resources and were regularly meeting to ensure the organization made sense, archived guides were flushed out, and docs were up to date.
About five years into that work, it clicked. It met all the criteria. I found purpose in writing documentation as it helped others with efficiency, and you didn’t have to remember literally everything. I started to engage in technical writing professional development on top of my learning technology and support experience development. I followed blogs, read books, took courses, and loved every second of it. In 2017, I started talking to my boss about morphing my job into a writing-focused position. It’s evolved in that direction since then, but it’s not there yet.
Since then, the documentation library has gone through several lives, and we’re turning it into a new one again soon. We now support almost every aspect of classroom experience, not just the CMS. With my team championing the importance of documentation, plus a few requests from VIPs who needed docs, the entire resource library for my department and others are evolving. Eventually they will combine into a huge system of guidance and best practice. It’s very exciting, though slow going with other priorities ahead.
Created: 4/15/24