Tricks of the Trade

In any profession, doesn't matter what it is, you'll find that there are specialized tools, tricks, and even languages related to that profession. Part of it is due to the needs of identifying techniques, procedures, and pieces necessary for the profession to work and part is due to our need to belong to an exclusive club.

Let's face it, from forming groups in school to joining organizations and clubs as adults, we want to belong to something exclusive. Something that not everyone can be part of. And we love it when we're talking about our work and we see a non-member either looking impressed or their eyes glaze over as our discussion goes past them. It gives us a feeling of being superior.

I guess it is something important to our psyche, our ego. We all need to feel needed. In our personal lives and in our professional lives. It's one of the reasons why some people can't retire. If they can't work then they've lost a reason to be needed.  This is especially true for single people, perhaps even more so for people who have lost their loved ones either through death or divorce.

One of the most important trick of any trade is the language associated with it. When language changes, either through changing technologies or just through natural evolution, the person who doesn't keep current with their profession's lingo is going to notice it and feel even less needed. Because it shows their knowledge is obsolete. Often, retired people will try and stay as current as they can in their old field so they feel they are still capable of being a viable member of that group. Some retirees are willing to let go and spend their retirement pursuing other interests. They learn the new lingo of their hobbies.

Now most professions are easy to get into and learn their lingo, you just have to study any text books or how-to books on the subject. That gets you a beginner's guide so that you can show some professionalism without claiming to be an expert. But some organizations and professions have stricter requirements for people getting into them. You can't just toss off a few terms and look like you know something. You have to really understand the terms.

Writers know this best and this is the one area that will give most of us the hardest time when we write about specific events or procedures. When we need more to our stories and characters than simply a profession casually mentioned. For example, John was a plumber and he was fixing the main line at the corner of West Main and 43rd Street when the accident occurred. This is a great line to introduce your character and the starting event but what if there was no main line at that intersection? What if there was no intersection of those two streets? A map of the city helps give a location but research has to be done to determine the underlying structure of a city. Most of that can be done online nowadays. But any plumber in that city reading the story and knowing one or more facts were wrong and that the terminology was wrong will give a bad review of the story and the writer.

So writers deal with their own lingo as well as the lingo they need for their stories. Which is why most stories don't deal with the nuts and bolts of professions. We brush over them, hoping that if our editor or proof readers don't catch any mistakes that any readers will forgive us minor flaws. A good writer will try and find out if their usage is right but we also won't spend a long time trying to find out if there really is a main line at West Main and 43rd and a plumber would be called to fix it. It's called artistic license.

The main tricks writers concentrate on are tone, voice, and style. How we write is just as important, if not more so, as what we write about. Anybody can have a great idea. In fact some of the best stories came about because someone the writer knew said "Wouldn't a story about (subject) be great?" and the writer's imagination took off.

I've read books that were well written but the subject was boring (to me anyway) and books where the subject was fascinating yet the writing was bad. I've slogged through some books because I wanted to see how the story developed but sometimes the writing is too ponderous that it doesn't matter how interested I was at the start. I'll either give it up or, more often, hop to the end to see what the final resolution was. If I'm lucky I'll be able to figure it out but sometimes I can't.

Personally, I try to keep my writing style light and easy. I use short, upbeat sentences as much as possible. But I like a well written complex sentence so I will throw those in some times. A lot depends on who I'm writing for. When I'm trying to get complicated thoughts out of my head I'm writing for myself. So my sentences will be longer, composed of compound or complex statements. My vocabulary will become more complex as I use the extensive amount of words I know to better express what I am thinking or feeling.

When I write for other people, I watch my vocabulary because I know that not everyone knows all the words I do. Also words have shifted in meanings over the years as our language evolves so I have to make sure I'm not using slang that's outdated or using words whose meanings have shifted and no longer mean what I had first learned them to mean. But that's just another trick of the trade.