I need your help! I've signed up for an exciting writing class in Corvallis, taught by an Emmy-award-winning TV writer/novelist/teacher, Linda E. Hamner. The problem is, if we don't find two more people by noon on Friday who are keen to learn about writing, it's going to be canceled!

The topic is "Introduction to Screenwriting," but this will be a fun sleigh ride for anyone interested in writing of pretty much any kind.

The class is on Mondays from 4:00-5:50 at Benton Center in Corvallis. It doesn't carry any college credit, alas, but that means it can't hurt your GPA, either. It runs for seven weeks and costs a measly $57. Give it a shot!

To register, or to find out more, check out the Linn-Benton Community College Schedule.

See you there!

Full class description: "Explore the basics and obtain the tools it takes to write a professional screenplay. Terminology, format, story, building a scene, character development, production considerations and dialogue will be discussed and analyzed. Emmy-award winning TV writer, novelist and teacher, Linda Elin Hamner will provide real-life insights into the workings of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Film clips will be shown to illustrate screenwriting techniques."

I started writing seriously (that is, "for money") when I was in college. For me, the keys to mastery were:

• Write a lot. I became much more fluent during the course of my first book, Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers' Handbook, (Reston Publishing, 1981) which covered how to play Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games in general. When I started out, I set myself a quota of 1,200 words a day and just couldn't do it. At the end, I'd upped my quota to 4,500 and beat it every day. (I have since had a number of 10,000 word days.) Going over my old work, it seems that the extra speed was a free bonus, involving no loss of quality.
• Big works are easier than small ones. I think that's it's infinitely easier to write a 100,000 word novel than a hundred 1,000-word short stories or even four 25,000-word novelettes. Similarly, it's easier to write a nonfiction book than a series of articles that add up to the same length. Coming up with new themes is harder than running with what you've got.
• Write for a reason. I come from a storytelling tradition, which means that connecting with my audience is important to me. If I lose them, I've screwed up. I also wrote for money from the beginning, because I was broke. Writing is hard, so you need a goal in mind.
• Writing is hard. It's harder than anything. After a hard day's writing, I sometimes lose the power to speak coherently. If that happens to you, you're doing something right.
• Pick up the nuts and bolts as you go. Perfectionism is for editors. Just keep going. Get to the end before you rewrite. Keep notes, but leave the earlier passages alone. A lot of people use perfectionism and revision as an excuse to never finish anything -- or to never start. There are editors everywhere, so your stuff can be professionally washed, waxed, and detailed after the fact. So get to work!

I have about a zillion patent applications filed with the Patent Office on behalf of my employer, Citrix Systems, where I'm something of a network acceleration guru.

Patents are weird, especially the way other people do it. My goal is always to write up the idea just as clearly and completely as I can, which is the least-weird (weirdless?) way of doing it. An alternate school of thought is that the patent should be lawyered up to increase its protection even at the expense of clarity (or comprehensibility). That's what happened to these two. Yet a third school is that the patent should be made incomprehensible on purpose, and even given a misleading title, so that only you know what it means. This theoretically gives you advantages in court, but I think it's too clever by half.

Both patents (patent 1 patent 2 have to do with fancy compression techiques like we use for the Citrix WANScaler network accelerator. Which is very cool stuff if you're into that sort of thing. I sure am.

Patents are a topsy-turvy world. They don't give your invention any direct protection -- there are no Patent Police -- they basically are just a license to sue infringers. Getting a patent is also a strange process, something only the federal government could come up with. It took nearly two years for these applications to thread the maze, and that's pretty quick! I have some applications that have been in the mill twice as long.

Also, frankly, just because an idea has been patented doesn't mean it's any good. Anybody who can cough up the filing fee and a lot of patience can get a worthless invention patented if it's worthless in the right way. Me, I don't see the point -- in the topsy-turvy world of patents, coming up with a good invention is the easy part -- but some people get a kick out of it.

Before I landed my current job working remotely for Citrix Systems, I was a free-lance technical writer for about ten years, and I had a page designed to draw in business. Yesterday, I finally got around to ripping all the irrelevant stuff out, and what remains are a few articles about my life as a technical writer and technical writing in general. Check it out!

Technical writing is a very strange line of work. It centers around the intersection between product development and publishing, two very different lines of work.

Then there's the fundamental problem of writing: it's hard. It's almost impossible to get started, and it's easy to stop. Once you're in the zone, you don't want to stop until you're done. It's "lock yourself in your office and turn off the phone" work. Different writers have different ways of coping with the problem, which, taken as a whole, tend to explain why people think we're weird.

I like the "total immersion" method of technical writing: learn everything I can about the topic so that when I start writing, I can plow through to the end without stopping. But that's just one of many approaches.

One thing that surprises people is that there really isn't any difference between "technical writing" and "nonfiction writing" in terms of how the actual writing step works. Technical writing just means that you're writing how-to stuff about a product (mostly user's guides and reference manuals) and you're probably being paid by the product's manufacturer. In othe words, a book about bass fishing is technical writing if its title is "Catching Bass with the Gizmo Complete Bass Fishing System," but it's not if the title is, "Backwoods Bass-Fishing Secrets." This means that general nonfiction writing skills all transfer to technical writing and vice versa.

My technical writing site is HighTechWriting.com.