Reading Your Own Words

Self-reflection makes most people uncomfortable: We don’t like our own recorded voices, seeing ourselves in video or pictures, or reading our own written words days, weeks or months later. It’s an occupational hazard for writers. Earlier this week I the Tar Heel Yankee and I were comparing notes on books in progress, and she made the comment that one of her first works isn’t “her voice anymore.” I think this problem is compounded for technical books because as we write, we both discover more topics and themes for each chapter and decide we can go epsilon better in our exposition. It’s a potential deadly embrace.

I generalize the technical book writing process into a series of moods:

Wide-eyed enthusiasm. It’s a new book project, you have a blank piece of paper (or screen, or outline form), and someone has asked you to be an authority. You set out to capture the best possible treatment of your topic.

Plumbing the depth of your knowledge. At some point, you need to explain a topic and you simply haven’t worked with it before. So you start reading code, asking other experts, and doing more basic research. This is the point at which the book goes from ten chapters to fifteen, when you realize there are entire facets of topics that you’ve ignored. Publishers love this moment, because it creates meaty, dense books, but they equally fear the resultant slips in the writing schedule.

Content stride. Parse that as “content” meaning happy or “content” meaning “words”, yes to both. You’re writing at full bore, the words are flying from brain through fingertips to disk with ultimate ease. You end up writing some things that are goofy, or light-hearted, because you’re having fun. I snuck an xkcd reference into the chapter on database design, because it seemed like the right way to explain SQL query cleanup.

Hearing your own voice. After the technical reviewers and editors get done with your initial pass, you get to go back and read your own words again. And you hate your voice, can’t believe what you passed off as humor, and wonder if the book will be turned into something publishable before the heat death of the universe. At the same time, you have the hindsight of additional sidebar conversations and research, so you know there are ten things missing.

Sand to fit. You make the final edits to the original manuscript so it flows and tells a story. Your list of ideas becomes an outline for the second edition, or topics to start in online forums run by your publisher. The page proofs come back and you see your words set neatly, with clean page breaks and header artwork.

A few weeks later, you hold a printed, bound book in your hand with your name on the spine. It’s a feeling I’m sure goes back to the painters at Lascaux, who argued over who made them look fat.

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