The pressure on corporate types, academics, and entrepreneurs to publish their work is intense. I know of a family therapist who has been working on her own therapy model for upwards of 30 years, and although she wants to publish, she just can’t find the time to work on the manuscript.

She says, “I know that if I get this book written, it will improve my visibility as a trainer and lecturer, and probably allow me to raise my hourly rates significantly. But I just can’t justify taking time to write, when what I’m really in the business of doing is helping families.” This professional is not alone: the pressure to document what we do, either for marketing purposes, or to faciliate the sharing of knowledge for the greater good, is especially hard on entrepreneurs.

Often working alone, entrepreneurs have almost zero help with this aspect of their work. Without a full-time sounding board of coworkers or associates, it’s almost impossible to self-edit. And let’s face it, entrepreneurs and freelancers need to spend up to half their time selling themselves or their product, leaving little time for anything else. The idea of having to produce articles, white papers, blogs, training materials, etc., is often completely out of the question.

There’s also the problem of the ability to communicate well. Engineers (just to pick any professional) do what they do very well, but it’s difficult to find someone who can both write for the audience who may not be experts, and be a top-notch person in their field.

I’ve recently started ghost writing a blog for a marketing consultant. Let’s call him Dave. Dave is like most entrepreneurs: he spends his days fueled by caffeine and fast food, leaping every time a client needs him. He travels often, uses networking and speaking engagements to up his public profile, and when he’s not doing all of this, his family likes to see him occasionally. It took him a while to realize that he was better off hiring an accountant than trying to do his own books, but now he sees that this relationship has saved him a fortune in taxes and time lost.

Dave has been working on a book for years. It sits on his hard drive, and he picks at it when he can, like on planes and in hotel rooms late at night. But this doesn’t happen as often as it used to. And now, when he opens it again to re-read what he’s written, the information sounds stale and unusable.

I offered to edit this book for him, fill in the blanks, and work it into something he could self-publish now. I ask for a combination of up-front fees plus a royalty, which is a deal we can both live with. Dave was able to rationalize this investment using the same logic he did when hiring his accountant: this deal doesn’t cost him money, it MAKES him money. I truly enjoy this type of work, because it is a great opportunity for me to learn about diverse topics. I am the “go-to” girl for many of my friends, because I’m known for my research skills.

I’m currently working on a book written by a professional fly fisherman, who also owns a guiding outfit. His knowledge is extensive, but he knows he’s not a writer. In an earlier post, I described the one teensy problem I’m having with this project, in that writing about bugs, worms, and other bait is getting kind of creepy. So, in addition to politics, firearms and tobacco, I’ve added bugs as a topic I will never write about again. One of the benefits of being a freelancer is that I can say no to jobs that give me nightmares.

I really need a holodeck. Installed in my basement, this pixelated artificial reality could host an exact replica of myself to watch the baby all day, while I wrote and got work done. I could cook exotic meals – which contained no calories – and never have to clean up the mess. My old dog would be forever young. And my husband would look like the guy on the cover of a romance novel. (It’s not cheating if the character still has his face, is it?)

It’s tough to watch Star Trek without the tech writer in me wondering, “Who is writing all those user manuals for all that cool stuff?” On the show, when there is a system failure, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is always standing by with the answer we all want to hear. His staff is eager and well-trained to handle any emergency. He’s amazing! Everybody loves him and they can’t live without him… then I remember that Geordie works for free.

All too often the answer to the question of who is writing the manuals, is that nobody is writing the manuals. There either isn’t a manual at all, or there is a limp attempt at a website full of broken links, telephone numbers that connect to call centres overseas, or (every tech writer’s personal favourite,) a badly translated sheet of instructions printed on thin paper, without illustrations.

Nobody asks what the cost of the problem of insufficient documentation is, or who foots that bill. It’s a much bigger bill than the one for writing services, believe me. When a consumer has no reference for parts, support, or even worse, has unclear information, products get returned to retailers, and in turn to distributors and manufacturers. Plain and simple. (There goes my DIY holodeck, right back to the Future Shop returns counter.) Consumer confidence is reduced, sales drop off, layoffs happen, and more marketing dollars are wasted on the next insufficient effort.

An associate recently came to me with a dilemma: a software company who had contracted him to market their products had several thousand pieces of software sitting in a distributor’s warehouse. It had been sold to a major retailer, who had placed it on their shelves, sold a few units, and then returned what didn’t sell to the distributor. The software company has not been paid for the products (shipped in fall 2006), and the distributor wants it out of their warehouse. My friend is trying to find a way to “dump” the product for as little as a dollar a unit. At this point, the software company has the philosophy that anything is better than crushing it for landfill.

The reason this product didn’t sell? It can be summed up in two words: bad communication. The consumer who saw it on the shelf didn’t understand what the product was, and why it was better than any other competitor. The buyer at the retailer bought too many units because he didn’t understand the product’s positioning. The manufacturer didn’t understand that his target market wasn’t the guy who shops at that store. The packaging designer didn’t understand what the message of the product should have been. And now, somebody at the top is losing a major chunk of cash.

It’s not always visible, but this is extremely frustrating to company owners. They are all on tight budgets, no matter how much money a company has, because nobody wants to part with cash they worked hard to get. No matter what they say, the owners of companies really want everyone they hire to help them sell their product. For this reason, they find it difficult to justify the hiring of a “writer”, when what they really need is a sales system that works.

Starting with the conception of the product, the job of the technical writer is often to act as a technical “translater”, which facilitates the selling of the product. Research is done in partnership with marketing to determine the target market, their buying habits, the competitors, etc., This is presented to the developers of the product, and to the sales reps, the distributors, and the graphic designer. It all works together to communicate the same thing: Here I am, and this is why you need me!

As a technical writer and editor, I have written about a fairly wide variety of topics, including oil rigs in Alberta, security documentation for a BC Supreme Court Prosecutions office, sleep habits of workers on commercial boats, cellular phone features, and even waste management. But the toughest one to date is the project I’m currently working on: bugs.

Not just bugs, dear readers, but fly-fishing lures, which in case you were not in the know, is not just limited to flies. This delightful topic for the dinner table includes leeches, scuds, dragonflies, worms, mayflies, chironomids, and all of their tasty forms throughout the life cycle. I’ve been living on caffeine and mineral water for days now, unable to consume anything with small, questionable particles like herbs or rice. I can’t even look at seafood. My husband wakes me up two or three times a night, shaking me to stop me from mumbling, “Don’t use a barbed hook!”

Emotional detachment is not one of my strong suits. I’ve always had trouble with one key function in the technical writing business: the ability to abstract onesself from the topic at hand. To write about any technical topic well, you must first be objective to it. I’m pretty good at that in the beginning of a project, but all too often I find myself emotionally involved with computer security issues, or the ingredients in canned goods. Most technical writers try to learn all there is to know about a topic in a very short time frame, and then forget it a week later. The mental hard drive is only so large, after all, so we learn to deiberately and selectively forget. I just don’t think I’m going to be able to let this bug thing go.

A dear friend of mine spent the summer of 2006 discovering the joys of gardening, albeit not in a garden. Her new 10×20 sundeck is filled with planters of all descriptions, and a wide variety of herbs and perennials. The amazing thing is that Liz hates bugs even more than I do – and I suppose if she can learn to get over her creepiness about it, I should too. She even started composting in a bin with REAL worms!! I have an outdoor composter in my garden, but I never turn it over – the thought of what might be in there terrifies me.

So what can I do to get the “bugs out of my system”? I could turn to the eternal tool of all writers, gin, and let that work it’s magic for me. But fankly, it’s expensive, and my recently limited diet has probably bumped my alcoholic tendencies into overdrive. One thimbleful could put me over the edge. And when I think about it, most alcoholic writers die young.

Instead, I think I’ll go for a run tomorrow morning, with my new walkman blasting trashy 80′s metal, let the dog off the leash, think about the fresh air and sunshine, and when I’ve had enough of going outdoors where the bugs live, come back and think about leeches again for a while.