People keep asking me the difference between what I do for a living and what a “regular” writer does, whatever regular means in this context. You would think I should know, because for my whole life I have been a writer. It has been my life’s blood, my life’s work, or as my father once said to me in one rare moment of actual admiration – the only, in fact, but memorable – he saw me sitting at my little Olivetti type-writer and said to me that I had a gift. He said exactly, “You just sit over the typewriter and open a vein.”

He meant this in a good way, i assure you. He meant that i write from the heart, though the image itself is, i would agree, rather gruesome. More, the quote sounded familiar even then, so I’m not even sure that these were his own words. All I can tell you with certainty are the words he said to me, be they his or plagiarized (likely), he meant them and it was a rare and unusual compliment and the first and the last.

He was right, of course. Any good real writer, any one who wants to truly become a writer and isn’t just screwing around with a dull journal and does not write every day does not qualify because a true writer will view his or her work as a type of calling or ministry. It is what you do, what you are, what you consume and what consumes you. Writer’s Block is an invention, you think. IT is for people who are afraid to face the blank page and a real writer will face the blank page every single day and will never leave a day entirely blank, even if what you write is absolute nonsense, you will write. You will, as author and friend Harry Mathews once wrote and said and entitled a book, you will write “Twenty Lines a Day.” It doesn’t matter what it’s about, just as long as you write something.

In Harry’s case, he wrote twenty lines a day and more and took his yellow legal pad with his pencil writing to a publisher and voila, it was published. It was published because Harry had a good gimmick with the title, but more, and the real reason, is that Harry has a gift and when he writes about ordinary things, they become precious in his hands. A morning cup of coffee becomes a ritual, a thing to hold with reverence.

Of course, I’ve already digressed and I’m not so sure that even I am a real writer, because I still don’t know what that means other than one writes every day and feels a strong calling and takes the vows and makes the cross and all the other trappings and so it is. I qualify because I have made it my life. I qualify because I write it so. I qualify because I am able to convey, when I try hard, complex situations and theorems and because I am able to take scientific and medical information and turn it into something for the lay reader, the ordinary person, because I can take abstracts and make them not abstract, I am a good technical writer and that is how I make my living.

Technical writing is not something you go into overnight. One doesn’t just decide to call him or herself a technical writer and so it becomes. It takes enormous effort, studying, patience, as well as an ability to skip from traditional book or magazine publishing to actually getting a job in a biotech firm or IT department. How in god’s name do you do that? Students have asked me this question over and over again and my answers are practical but also somewhat intangible.

For starters, start reviewing and critiquing books in the field in to which you wish to go. For example, if you wish to work as a software writer, then pick up a mid-level complexity software book for the lay or average reader and write a good, solid book review of it. Your review should be less friendly or chatty and more technical and serious than your previous writing. You can find a job at a local newspaper as the reviewer of technical books, which is a good start, or if you have contacts at a big national journal of newspaper, ask if you can write for them. But don’t show up empty handed. Have a book chosen that has not yet been released, call the Publicity Department of the publisher and get an advance galley of the book, be prepared to turn your review around in two or three days – which means you have to read the book and synthesize highly complex information within a very short period of time.

More, much of what you will be reading may initially seem very dull to you and this is where you see the light and your niche. Do you see how this book or article could be improved? Do you see a way of keeping it technical but less obtuse and more transparent, more comprehensible? If so, then try it out. Write your review but make suggestions about where and how the author could have improved his or her book to make it more user friendly.

Keep doing this and soon you will become the technical or IT or medical book reviewer for any number of given journals both online and offline. Keep pursuing it and save all of your clippings. Try to get your column syndicated and when a new company pops up either online or offline, approach them and ask if they need a technical writer for let’s say, package inserts for a medical product, a user guide for a new software that’s being developed, marketing information for a drug manufacturer – whatever you have spent the last year or more studying and reviewing is the type of job you should apply for. NO matter if the job is initially entry level with not much writing – you will learn in time and just being in the environment will help you pick up a great deal of information that will carry you through to your next job.

You have the basic construct here – or one way anyway. Of course, there are many other ways to become a technical writer. You can study it in university as I did with a double major in journalism of a specific type and a double in philosophy therefore you graduate with a Bachelor of Science, which is preferable to biotech and IT firms than a B.A. for the most part. Fortunately, I have a B.S. because I always knew I wanted this. I studied biology for a year, I studied my sciences and did well. I could take the most abstract papers and by working with the doctors and the researchers and using my own skill, I could turn the information into a newsletter with sidebars and a feature story about Alzheimer’s or women’s health issues or for Harvard ages ago, an entire section of a Web site devoted to sexually transmitted diseases and women’s health issues. In other work, I covered many neurological and auto-immune conditions such as M.S., Lupus, Epilepsy, Narcolepsy, and the like. I know more about the human body and what can go wrong than any one would want to know and yet still, I find it fascinating. To this day, I still love what I do and love the challenge of taking the highly complex and pitching it to the public so that it can be caught. So that we make contact, as I call it.

These are hard things to try to convey to most of the students I’ve taught, though I can say they are all enthusiastic, most want to work in literary publishing, which means they want to be editors sitting at a desk and buying works of great literature and stories and getting big New York Times book review and hanging out with other editors who wear to much black and go to trendy bars in Manhattan. This is what appeals to most of my students. It seems glamorous to them.

The real kicker is that this is how I began in publishing and as a writer. I started out at a high fashion publishing house - Conde Nast – and I was given so much opportunity to pursue a career there if I wanted to, yet at the time anyway, I did not want that. I found working on fashion shoots too dull, and working in fashion was necessary before you got to the editorial department, it seemed. Sort of like paying your dues. don’t get me wrong; I was then and remain now deeply honored that at fifteen, I was working at Vogue and hanging out with the likes of Avedon and the greatest editors and CEOs in publishing today and I will always be grateful to Steven (Florio) for helping me understand that I was “the real thing” as he once said and encouraging me and helping me along. I also had the honor of working for the best literary publishing houses in America and publishing award-winning authors, the best around in their day. I even started my own imprint, as I mentioned, called Lumen Editions and the books still sell to this day and every single one of the books that I published, every author under me, received a New York Times review and I am immensely proud of this for getting a Times review is incredibly hard. Getting one for a soft-cover book is even harder, yet I did every time. I made my mark, was interviewed by industry magazines and had my moment as a sort of enfant terrible because I was too young to be having so much success, it seemed, and if I weren’t’ me, I would have hated me too because I had all this and more and with Lumen Editions, so much of it appeared on the surface effortless, though I guarantee, ask my staff, it was hard work, long hours and life-consuming. What made Lumen work was the absolute lack of any hierarchical structure; the idea that this was “our” house, our publishing house and that was that. When it’s your baby, so to speak, you tend to work tens times harder and we suffered in the down times and moped around, and when I got Meningitis one year, everyone panicked and though I was dead because my mum, in her haste, sent a fax that spoke of my “demise”, which meant to her that I had become more ill, but the staff took the dictionary meaning and for days moped until one day, I rang and our graphic designer literally screamed as if I had been resurrected. Well, I suppose I had been. They had thought me dead, yet here I was asking about the Times reviews and if anyone had rang. Family is what made it work – and we were a great family and I miss it all too much.

Yet I had worked for it. It was not handed to me, which is not to say that I did not have friends as anyone but at the end of the day, it was only my responsibility to hold up my end and I did. I did and I did it well and I left it all and pursued information technology and medical writing initially for Harvard before branching out to various other national organizations and Web sites that I helped develop from the ground up. I made the leap from literary publishing to scientific and I.T.

It is possible, I tell students and friends. Anything is possible with the right attitude and the right drive. And never mind the naysayers around you. Everyone told me Lumen would fail and it was a huge success and we’re all proud of it. I was told getting into technical writing would be impossible but those people who said that did not know that I had a full degree in it and had studied it and hard. They misjudged me and sometimes, you will be misjudged or underestimated or told “you can’t” or It’s impossible and so on. You have to remember that most of this is pure projection on the part of the person saying it. What they mean is, “I would fail if….” and perhaps they would. Perhaps they lack your spirit, your verve, which quirky combination that makes you you and that makes it work. Who knows. What I can tell you for sure is that if you want it to work for you, it will.

You’re every day blog could become a piece of real and true journalism and not a simple accounting of your day. It could become a thing or perhaps already it is, that affects and influences hundreds or thousands of people a day who are deeply moved or instructed by what you write. You can inspire. You can do so very, very much. It’s not going to happen without effort, but it is possible. Force yourself to do it every day if you want to be a writer of the first order. Think of it as you would any other job and then go at it like a blood hound and don’t let go.

What makes a writer a good writer is always going to be subjective. it’s all in the eye of your end-reader, so I cannot say whether I am good or you are good. It depends on who is doing the reading, as I said. What I can say is that without question, if you trust your own instincts, you will be a far better writer than if you try to be like someone else. Just be you, be yourself and do it your way and you will succeed. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.