Of Course I’m A Writer

Of Course I’m a Writer.

My timeline for writing goes back to when Ike was President.  Yes, they had paper back then.    

Being raised in a rural area, my earliest realization that writing was important was the power that figures and words had on our farm.  Everything went into a ledger (Google that if you need to), those chicken-scratches represented our life and our livelihood from the farm.  Writing was a series of numbers and dates.  Throughout the early 60’s, my writing consisted of answering questions as efficiently as possible.  Any essay-writing was imitating an example and changing the words to personalize it and make it accurate.

Just about the time that Nixon became President, I began speaking in public.  This required recording thoughts based on my experiences rather than modifying existing examples.  I found that using parables was the most logical way for me to express my thoughts.

Completing high school during the years when Ford was not just a car but a President, writing once again became numbers with minimal text associated with it.  Fill-in-the-box sort of stuff.

With a change of careers halfway through Reagan’s First Term, my responsibilities became writing instruction manuals and software descriptions for rudimentary software programs for the personal computer market, just in case those things ever became popular.  In order to do this, I reverted to imitating the things I knew rather than drawing upon any formal education.

Throughout the remainder of the ‘80’s documentation remained the focal point of my writing – installation manuals, project procedures and documentation.  I also began to create budget proposals for yearly budgets, complete with descriptions of anticipation of benefits from the budget items.  A form of Business to Business writing, my writing focused on appealing to the needs and expediency rather than seeking spur of the moment impulse decisions from the reader.

During Clinton’s first term, my writing included computer-rollout procedures, sales proposals and documentation.  In ’94, I was published in a computer software magazine and became an irregular contributor in this area.

My IT career continued to include writing procedures, instructions and proposals well into the new millennia. I dabbled in website construction in ’96 but did not follow through with this after proof of concept.

At the start of the present century, I began to write pieces for quarterly and monthly newsletters.  These articles were motivational in nature and the writing was (and is) voluntary – unpaid.  I put my best effort, it seems, into contributing freely in the hope that I can make a difference.  Writing from the heart is exponentially more gratifying than writing to the Cloud.  No offense to the present reader.

I began to incorporate video and still-photography, accompanied with written descriptions into my work.  Capturing snippets of life in motion, real-time, is absolutely enthralling to me.

In 2013, I documented over 400 structures, many of these structures having historical significance, in three Utah towns using video and still-photos enhanced by words …

…  or is it using words backed by video and still-photographs to enhance the readers understanding?