Creativity and Technical Writing

I was thinking about this the other day when I discussed with someone who was interested in entering the technical communication field about their fear of losing creativity by writing and creating technical documents. Which made me think long and hard about what I am doing.

I came to the realization that technical writing makes me creative. For me personally getting to write for a living has been awesome. It let’s me practice my craft, I am always improving. learning, and being creative. By creative I mean, you have to find creative ways to present information to your readers that is useful, meaningful, clear, and concise. In some cases, this isn’t easy. I also appreciate the elegance of making difficult to digest information useful and hearing readers say the occasional thanks.

One byproduct to technical writing is that is gives me ideas for creative fiction writing. I like to write stories about science and technology in my fiction writing. I am paid to learn about technical subjects to write on them in technical communication. How great is that? Then I use my knowledge later in my creative fictional writing to give my characters depth and methods to their actions. A perfect pairing. I guess in the end I just love to write. Technical writing let’s me do that while satisfying both my craving for technology  and creativeness. In the end, I really like my job because I’m always learning and to me that is creativity in itself.