I've been so busy with my day job for the past year that I haven't had time to work on my next novel. But that doesn't mean I'm not writing. I churn out thousands of words a day, whether it's business documents, emails, or chat messages with coworkers. Do I think my experience in writing fiction have helped with the writing I do at work? Absolutely!
Whether you're writing a story or a business memo, the ability to communicate is vital. Just as a story won't be as enjoyable if the author can't express what is happening to the characters, work goes more smoothly if coworkers can communicate their ideas to one another. As someone who works in software engineering, we often need to share engineering design ideas and be able to understand designs proposed by other engineers. I have seen miscommunication result in building the wrong software or building it incorrectly. While I can't claim that my ideas are all good, I can tell that I get them across in a less confusing manner than many of my colleagues, and I attribute that to the years I've spent writing stories.
Three ways that writing fiction have helped me in my business writing:
- The mechanics of writing, such as spelling, syntax, and grammar - Even in this age of spell check, I come across too much business writing riddled with misspellings and sentences that don't make sense. It's hard to get your ideas across if people can't understand your sentences.
- Saying what you want to convey - It doesn't matter how smart you are if your email or memo doesn't convey what you intend or if your engineering design document doesn't describe how you think the software should be implemented. Thanks to my fiction writing, with its need to tell my stories without confusing readers, I believe I have a good grasp of this.
- Not saying more than what you want to convey - Just as importantly as getting your point across is not drowning your message in extra words. While some fiction authors have a problem with this, my stories tend to be more concise, and this has helped with my business writing.
I miss writing fiction because of the workload from my day job, but I'm glad that my fiction writing background serves me well at work too. Once I finally get to return to writing stories again, it'll be interesting to see if all of the practice in business writing helps with writing fiction.
