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By Jenny Boothe, Member
The featured speaker for the November meeting was local author Suzanne Frank. A Romantic Times award winner, Frank is the author of a time travel series that includes her newest book, Twilight in Babylon. She has also authored a mystery series under the pseudonym Chloe Green.
Frank has a varied history as a writer, working as a journalist and a tech writer before becoming a novelist. As a tech writer, she had a difficult time until she started thinking about her assignment in terms of an Indiana Jones-type adventure. She envisioned herself as the heroine whose mission it was to translate the secret language of the natives (programmers) in order to survive the assignment.
Frank spoke of the similarities and differences between fiction writing and technical writing. Both require:
A main difference between a fiction writer and a technical writer, said Frank, is that "I write lies for fun and profit; you write truths for fun, and hopefully, profit."
Frank then directed her speech into a comparison of the technical writer as a hero. There are two kinds of hero: the reluctant and the excited. The technical writer as the reluctant hero is someone who has taken on a project that they'd rather not work on but feel that they must. The technical writer as the excited hero is someone who has taken on a project that they see as a challenge, a call to adventure.
Every hero, even a technical writer, has allies and mentors, as well as enemies. There are traditional allies, such as a friendly manager, and non-traditional allies, like the software to produce work. Mentors are the people who sacrifice their time to help the tech writer learn and grow. Enemies of the writer, said Frank, continuing with the fantasy hero metaphor, are lurking in dark corners, waiting to sabotage the writer. Enemies can include arrogance, boredom, and frustration.
Frank ended her discussion with questions from the audience and advice on publishing. The group presented her with a thank you gift, a toy camel, as a reference to the camel Frank has "adopted" at the Dallas Zoo. The evening concluded with a raffle of copies of Twilight in Babylon.