I should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve been so busy that I hadn’t been aware it was that time of year again.

Once again this year, the QWF (Quebec Writers’ Federation) is offering a mentorship program. If you’re selected, this program will pair you up with a writing mentor who will help you work on your current project. You can also apply to be a mentor if.

To apply, simply send four copies of a 10-page sample of the project you want to work to the QWF before December 5, 2008. They offer mentoring in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and screenplays.

I haven’t been selected for mentorship yet (though I’ve been short-listed three times), and I’ll be trying again this year. I do know people who were mentored however (e.g., Saleema Nawaz) and apparently they learn a hell of a lot. It’s an invaluable experience, and I hope that one day I’ll be selected.

For more information, go to the QWF Website at http://qwf.org/programs/index.html#mentorship

By the way, dear readers, I had my first short story accepted in a Canadian Literary magazine! I was very excited. It will be published in the next issue of the Nashwaak Review. It certainly encourages me to work even harder on my writing…

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a francophone writing in English (most probably), but I seem to have a hard time with prepositions. Probably less and less because I try to be mindful of them, but if there’s something I should always double check when I edit myself it’s the prepositions.

Yes, I’m francophone, but I learned English when I was 5 and comleted my undergrad and graduate degree in English. So I can’t be that bad, but these darn prepositions cause so much interference. Probably because they’re so small and mostly innocent looking (or that’s what most people think). For example, it’s a lot more natural for me to say “associated to” rather than “associated with,” even though I know the latter is the proper one. It’s probably because in French we say “associer à.”

So for all of you who aren’t born anglophone, but who write in English, I have a couple of books to recommend.

First, there’s English Prepositional Idioms by Frederick T. Wood. As the title suggests, it only talks about prepositions. In the first half of the book, it lists all the prepositions and explains their different uses, and in the second half of the book, he lists different words that usually require prepositions and mentions which preposition is used in which case. This book is pretty straightforward and easy to use, but it’s pretty old, so more recent words aren’t in it. Also, it’s no longer in print. I had to buy mine used from amazon. I even had to buy it from some guy in Germany because nobody in the US shipped it internationally.

The other book I use a lot more than Wood’s book is The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations by Morton Benson, Evelyn Benson and Robert Ilson. This book looks like a dictionary. It lists words (not every single one, alas. I guess they had to make choices) and gives you other words they usually work with, not just prepositions. For example, the word heir gives you “to fall heir to” and “an heir apparent,” and others. I find this book extremely useful, but it doesn’t seem to have all the prepositions I’m looking for.

The third choice is obviously a good dictionary, and if that fails, then I ask. The person I ask actually has a third that is also out of print. It’s called the Word Finder by Rodale. I’ve leafed through it and it seems to have a lot of information (maybe too much), but I haven’t had a chance to work with it.

I’d be interested in finding out about other reference books that you guys might use. Are there even better ones out there that I don’t know of?

With time, I have come to notice that there are two kinds of technical writers: tech writers whose emphasis lies on the technical side (a Technical writer) and tech writers who are more writers than techies (a technical Writer). The former usually has a degree in programming, networking, electronics, engineering, and so on, while the latter usually has a degree in communications or English.

You have to learn to embrace the kind of technical writer you are and apply to a company that fits your profile. For example, writing about software is a lot easier than writing about hardware. You usually have to be a Technical writer to write documentation for hardware. Remember resistance and frequency we learned in high school? Yeah, me neither. I’ve written a bit about hardware, but I think I was only able to manage it because my SME (Source Material Expert) was so good. His brain worked in steps so he practically gave me the verbal version of the document I was going to write. I just had to write down the steps he was describing and maybe ask a few questions about user-related things he may not have thought about.

Most of the time, however, you can’t know if the company fits the type of writer you are until you go to the interview. Some companies focus on your tech degree (or lack thereof) and may ask you what you’re doing as a tech writer if you don’t know anything about technology (like most companies ask me . . . “how come you’re a tech writer with a degree in Medieval Studies?”), while others will be bothered by the fact that you have no obvious writing skills. The important thing is not to get discouraged. For every company that wants a Technical writer, there’s another that wants a technical Writer.

Truth be told that there’s a tendency these days to hire Tech writers. I’m not quite sure why. Probably because they want to add non-tech writing related work to their tech writer. Because, as a tech writer, expect to be asked to also write the Web content, marketing brochures and to translate (if you’re bilingual). Especially if you’re working for a small company.

I think it’s better to be a tech Writer than a Tech writer because you don’t need to know everything about technology to be a tech writer. Rather, you need to be tech savvy, you need to be able to learn what the product you’re documenting does, but you don’t need to program or create that product yourself. It’s easier to learn to technology part on the job. However, who will teach you to write on the job if you’re supposed to be the writing expert? How many senior tech writers have I seen, who are “senior” because they’re been tech writing for more than 7 years, but who still can’t write.

Be a technical Writer, learn to write, and if employers are bothered by the fact that you don’t have a tech degree, tell them you learn quickly!

As I explained in my previous post, it is very important to create paragraph and character styles when designing the look and feel of a document. This post will explain how to create paragraph and character styles in FrameMaker, which is really quite simple.

About the Paragraph Designer Dialog Box

Creating a New Paragraph Style

1. Do one of the following:
   • From the Format menu, point to Paragraph and click Designer; or
   • Press CTRL + M on your keyboard.
     The Paragraph Designer dialog box appears.
2. Enter the name of the new style in the Paragraph Tag box.
3. Enter the settings of the style (see “Description of the Paragraph Designer” above).
4. Click Apply.
   If your cursor was in a paragraph, the new style is applied to that paragraph.

To apply the new style to paragraphs, simply select the paragraph and click the Apply button in the Paragraph Designer dialog box.

Modifying a Paragraph Style

1. Do one of the following:
   • From the Format menu, point to Paragraph and click Designer; or
   • Press CTRL + M on your keyboard.
     The Paragraph Designer dialog box appears.
2. Select the style you want to modify from the Paragraph Tag list.
3. Modify the settings of the style (see “Description of the Paragraph Designer” above).
4. Click Apply.
   If your cursor was in a paragraph, the modifications are applied to that paragraph.

To apply the modifications to every paragraph using that style, simply click Update All. If one of the paragraphs contained overrides, a message appears. Click Retain Overrides to keep your overrides in the paragraph style or click Remove Overrides to remove them. Unless you know which overrides exists and why, it is always best to remove them. You will then see where you failed to create a new style for a new look.

Armitage, Simon. Book of Matches. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1993

In contemporary poetry, I like poems that are clear and straightforward, but that contain images that are both inspired and interesting. Most of the poems I like, usually tell a story or have a point of sorts and Simon Armitage’s Book of Matches fulfils these requirements.

The premise of the first part of Book of Matches (I - Book of Matches) allows for short, anecdotal poems as each poem is supposed to recount a part of its narrator’s biography in the time it takes to strike a match and let it burn out. This concept, therefore, also requires a more colloquial voice:

“[…] My mind worksquickly
and well these days,
and I like the look of myself of late:

a little more meat
around the face, a little more bite
at the back of the lungs,
a little more point to the tip of the tongue —
no wonder I’ve been smiling
like a melon with a slice missing.”
(‘Strike two. My mind works,’ lines 1-9)

“[…] And, anyways, like he says,
on the day I’m broad and bothered and bold enough
to take a swing and try and knock his grin off,

he’ll be too old.”
(‘Mice and snakes don’t give me the shivers,’ lines 11-14)

Though using colloquial words and everyday voices, Armitage still recounts classical tales such as the story of Prometheus. The colloquial tone in this piece is very effective in giving Prometheus the voice of a revolutionary:

“Those bastards in their mansions
to hear them shriek, you’d think
I’d poisoned the dogs and vaulted the ditches,
crossed the lawns in stocking feet and threadbare britches,
forced the door of one of the porches, and lifted
the gift of fire from the burning torches,

then given heat and light to streets and houses,
told the people how to ditch their cuffs and shackles,
armed them with the iron from their wrists and ankles.

[…]

Me, I stick to the shadows, carry a gun.”
(‘Those bastards in their mansions,’ lines 1-9 and 14)

In his longer poems, however, Armitage can use too much familiar language. In his poem “To Poverty,” which appears in the second part of Book of Matches (II - Becoming of Age), Armitage seems to indulge in clichés and familiar language, which almost seems ridiculous:

“How have you hurt me, let me count the ways:
the months of Sundays
when you left me in the damp, the dark,
the red, or down and out, or out of work.
The weeks on end of bread without butter,
bed without supper.”
(To Poverty, lines 13-18)

Simon Armitage uses imagery very effectively, describing common events and activities to portray a significant episode. In his poem ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span,’ he describes measuring a house with his mother, while she holds the fixed point of the measuring tape and he is wandering about the house reporting lengths. The poem ends, with the narrator on the roof, at the end of the measuring tape, ready to fall or fly, to cut the umbilical cord, as it were.

In general, when reading Armitage’s poetry, I am left with the feeling that he truly enjoys playing with words and sounds, sometimes even heralding his Yorkshire dialect, thereby showing the reader that writing poetry can be fun:

“Brung up with swine, I was,
and dogs
and raised on a diet of slime and slopsand pobs,
then fell in one day
with a different kind. Some say

that gives me the right
to try out that line
about having a bark and having a bite,
and a nose for uncovering truffles, and shite […]”
(‘Brung up with swine, I was,’ lines 1-9)

Furthermore, I feel that he leaves internal rhymes throughout his poems like Easter eggs for the reader to find, such as the last stanza of the very first poem in the book:

“A warning, though, to anyone nursing
an ounce of sadness, anyone alone:
don’t try this on your own; it’s dangerous
madness.”
(‘My party piece’ lines 12-15)

Or as in the second stanza of the fourth poem, where the Yorkshire accent enhances the “blood/good” rhyme more than a North American accent ever could:

“Keep love in the mind
and out of the blood, beds
are for sleep, for dreams, for good.”
(‘I like vivid, true-to-life love scenes’ lines 6-8)

On the whole, one of the things I love about Simon Armitage is that he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously, for, as he says in “For The Record,” published in CloudCuckooLand (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1997),

“[…] I’m unhappy about the way
they stitched the tip of my tongue

to my cheek.”
(For the Record, lines 55-57)

Last weekend, an article I wrote for the Rover on a story festival in Hudson was posted, but I’ll mention it here again today. There’s nothing wrong with a lot of publicity, I say. Of course, I don’t have the readership that the Rover already has, but I feel like I should mention the festival to readers who haven’t browsed through the Rover yet (how could you?). The StoryFest organizer, Audrey Wall, was pretty thrilled about having a piece on the festival in a Montreal magazine. She wants to spread the word about StoryFest and attract people from outside Hudson. 

This year, the StoryFest includes big names like Jospeh Boyden (November 6) and Stevie Cameron (October 28), which promises to be exciting. There’s also a film showing and some theatre (”The Vagina Monologues” as well as some local plays). Furthermore, there is a poetry reading by none other than Jon Paul Fiorentino, Susan Gillis, Mark Abley and Susan McMaster, and if you feel like reading your own poetry, there’s a Poetry Free For All on November 9.

So, I’m sending this off into cyberspace in the hope that some people will read it and attend some StoryFest events. I’m going to the Joseph Boyden event on November 6 and I hope I’ll see some of you there. I’ll also be revewing Boyden’s latest book Through Black Spruce. I started it yesterday and I’m already hooked. If it’s even half as good as Three Day Road, I’m in for a great book.

For the longest time in my youth as ell as during my undergraduate and graduate studies, I only read classical poetry. Before I started my BA in English lit, I read French poets like Emile Nelligan, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, etc. (teenage angst, anyone?). During my BA, I read the mandatory poets (i.e., Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, etc.) whom I loved, and then when I started my MA in Medieval Lit, I mostly stuck to Chaucer. All this to say that I didn’t really know any contemporary, let alone living poets.

To tell the truth, I hadn’t really progessed passed the Romantics.

Then, I discovered Simon Armitage.

I was in the UK, doing my MA in Medieval Studies when the University of Leeds School of English organized a poetry reading by Simon Armitage. I had no idea who the guy was, but I went with friends anyways because, heck, we were students of English Literature, right? And that was the kind of things we did.

I immediately fell in love with the man’s words. His poetry was accessible, it told stories, and, truth be told, his Yorshire accent had something to do with it too. So, I was a late bloomer. I didn’t know what poetry was supposed to sound like in 1997, but I found out real fast and my own poetry completely changed after that. I even wrote a poem about my poetic transformation, but I think I’ll keep it hidden, thank you very much.

Armitage is one of my favourite poets because his poetry is very, very accessible. I’ve lent some of his poetry collections to friends (especially friends who said they didn’t like poetry) and they all like him. They get him. He tells stories, he has a point and people like that. I like that. Poetry is no longer a lofty thing with Armitage, instead, poetry is down to earth.

He’s only started to be really distributed in Canada. I used to have to order his books from amazon.co.uk, but since Anansi published Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Corduroy Kid you can get his books here. He actually did a tour when Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Corduroy Kid came out. He read in Montreal at the Nicholas Hoare bookstore with George Murray, whom I discovered that day (along with bookninja.com).

Since then, I’ve been avidly seeking out new Canadian poets, reading our literary magazines and paying attention to local readings. I’ll share these discoveries with others like me who are late bloomers.

In my next post, I will review Book of Matches, and I’ll put one of his poems in the Poem of the Month page, even though we haven’t changed month yet.

Nawaz, Saleema. Mother Superior. Calgary: Freehand Books, 2008. 290 pp.

So, I finished reading Mother Superior, Saleema Nawaz’s first collection of short stories, in the metro (subway) this morning . I’m sorry for the delay since the book launch but I had another book to read and review for the Rover (www.roverarts.com). That one should appear by the end of the month.

I loved reading Mother Superior. Because Saleema’s prose is tight and precise, I felt as though every story was thoroughly under control. Furthermore, she has a definite knack for telling the reader things without being explicit, such as in this passage from Look, But Don’t Touch:

“Almost nothing in his face singles him out as different. There is a slight pucker in his pink lips and sometimes, behind the wire frames of his glasses, his eyes look searching and anxious. But really, whose don’t? His dark hair is soft and straight and, if left to its own devices, falls forward over his face in a fringe that makes him look younger than his nineteen years. His tongue is larger than normal. He’s double-jointed. And he has small ears, small and perfect like a china doll’s.”

There’s not need, after that, to tell us that he has Down Syndrom. This approach to telling the reader what’s going on without telling them is particularly effective in The White Dress, the novella for which she won the Malahat Review novella contest’s second prize, but I won’t say more as it is an important part of the story.

Saleema draws you into every single story (bar one: Sandy) and keeps reeling you in as the story progresses. You always want to know what happens next, which is why, I think, her endings are such a dissappointment. At the end of her short stories, I always feel unsatisfied. I want to know more, I want the story to go on, which is good, but it doesn’t and I’m not satiated.

I think this is why her characters aren’t memorable.

Don’t get me wrong: her characters are extremelly well developed and interesting. But only as I’m reading about them. Once a story is finished and I move on to the next, still hungry and looking for my next meal, I’ve stopped thinking about the previous characters. They were just passing by. They didn’t give me closure.

All in all, Mother Superior is a very good collection of short stories, and reading them is a great pleasure., but the prose is more memorable than the stories themselves.

Note: None of what I’ll be writing here is scientifically proven. My comments are just the results of observations and frustrations after seven years of technical and business writing. And maybe I’m a little biased…

Before I continue writing about styles, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce FrameMaker since newbie tech writers don’t usually know FrameMaker and have to learn it in a week or so.

While Microsoft Word is a word processing application, Adobe FrameMaker is a desktop publishing application. This essentially means that if you want to write a letter or a school essay with little to no formatting, use Word. But if you want to write technical manuals with extensive formatting and an elaborate look and feel, use FrameMaker.

I find that when I write a Word document of more than 20 pages that includes many styles, footers, as well as numbered lists and outlines, then the risk of something going wrong is very high. Just last week, I was working on a 200-page Word document with section breaks and different footers for each section and I discovered that when I generated the PDF, all the footers were wrong. One of my biggest frustrations with Word creeps up when I need to use numbered heading and numbered lists.  When a numbered style decides that it doesn’t want to restart its numbering, then there’s very little you can do unless you know the tricks. But should you have to know tricks to force an application to do what it should do in the first place?

FrameMaker’s not perfect either (I’ve had it crash for not reason when generating PDFs), but it’s a lot stronger and more stable than Word when you need to write a heavily formatted document. One of the beauties of FrameMaker is that the first item in a numbered list (i.e., “1.”) is a style on its own. This means that whenever you start a new list, you simply apply that style and FrameMaker knows it has to start the new list at “1.” You never have any problems restarting a numbered list. Furthermore, FrameMaker allows you to identify the different types of list styles you create, which meants that there will be no conflict between the different numbered lists in the document. Another thing I love about FrameMaker is the fact that you can create books, where each chapter is a different file. That way, you can have chapters that have a landscape format while the rest have a portrait format, you can have different footer styles for each chapter, different formats, and none will interfere with another when you print the book.

As a tech writer, you will either have to use FrameMaker or Word to write technical documentation and I hope, for your sake, it will be FrameMaker. However, be aware that Word will always come back to haunt you if you need to edit a press release from the CEO.

One of the subjects of my blog, along with introducing tech writing (and other types of writing), is to introduce FrameMaker and teach people how to use it. The basics of FrameMaker aren’t difficult to learn—anybody can use it to write a letter—but the more advanced stuff isn’t very obvious. There’s even some extremely advanced stuff (e.g., the Reference pages) that I barely use myself. I only use those to format the table of contents, the index and the lines that appear below paragraph styles. But more on that later.