The work writers actually do
March 4th, 2006 by Bill
It always amazes me just how little actual writing I do in my career as a writer. This week was a good example.
I spent good deal of time editing, a lot of time on the phone and oodles of time managing e-mail. But the thing that most struck me was how much time I spent entering code and working with images in Photoshop.
Neither the code business nor the images work was particularly sophisticated – it was pretty basic stuff. But good heavens, there certainly was a lot of it!
And a lot of it was because the business world uses multiple programs and many of the people using them don’t understand that Word is not Adobe and neither of those is HTML. I was given a lot of Web pages and images that had been cut and pasted into Word documents, from which I was to edit and then put online.
It doesn’t quite work that way, however. And most people you end up dealing with don’t realize or grasp that what they see online is actually made up of material pulled from various sources – there are stylesheets and databases and so on. And then there is the matter of character sets. For me, the one that currently ends up online isn’t exactly extensive. So I end up having to change characters so the correct letters and symbols appear online.
Anyway … the point is, the amount of actual writing I do is not that great. If someone was asking me today what they should do to make themselves more valuable as a writer I would say, apart from writing and reading as much and as widely as possible, learn coding. And design. You don’t have to actually be a programmer or designer, but they are skills that will make you more valuable (and make the work you do quicker and more efficient – rather than waiting for someone else to get around to doing it, you can just do it yourself).
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