Story Guy in Digital World

Heading in to my fourth week of school already, and I've completed around eight assignments of varying complexity with a few more in the pipes. Got a big win today after submitting my back-alley dice game programmed in C#. I had a LOT of help with it from fellow students (big thanks to Angus, Cramer, Marc, and Gray), but I'll take the win, and the game turned out to be pretty entertaining (with Zap Brannigan and Kif providing the dialog). It wasn't elegant—I finished up with somewhere around 550 lines of code, where the guys with Comp Sci degrees were finishing in under 300—but it doesn't break and it has a lot of personality.

It also reinforced with great strength and clarity that I will not be a programmer without a complete change in personality and inclination. Wow, do I hate feeling clueless. Our next assignment will be to code a Tamagotchi-style virtual pet, which might just be terrible, but the group project afterwards (a text adventure) has me pretty excited to have my strongest skills at the group's disposal.

Anyway, here is one of my favourite Zapper lines before I go any further.

For the most part, my assignments are going really well with good grades and high praise rewarding the extra touches I've been focusing on. I would be surprised if I don't end up with a 90% average heading into the second half of my first term. As a story guy with a strong writing background, these early assignments (which are mostly written) are a breeze, and the topics are awesome (I broke Chrono Trigger down into the three-act storytelling structure last week, for example). This bodes well as the writing will remain important and useful throughout my stay at VFS.

What's strange, though—shocking, even—is that I haven't been taken up on my offer to help anyone write or edit their assignments so far. We have ESL guys from India, Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil, as well as guys and gals fresh out of high school, and not one of them is looking for free help from a seasoned editor.

It boggled my mind, and it took a comment from my wife to sort out what I should have known already. It's simple. Most people think they can write. Some people who have no formal training or a good deal of experience can write very well in their fields—my last boss was a good writer, for example, and he was an auditor before running his own software company. Most people, though, are only passable writers with little grasp of grammar or pacing or sentence structure. For most people that's just fine, too—it's just goofballs like me who would scoff at investing in a venture with typo-ridden documentation or poor marketing or bad dialog. Right?

Well, maybe not, but I know that unless you have written a one-hour weekly drama or a best-selling novel, people generally don't consider written communication skills to be all that important or impressive. For example, I can't count how many times I've had to explain what I did these past nine years (four of them in school). Journalism? Not really my focus. Software development? You, reader, know that isn't true. IT? If I'm handling your IT, you have a problem.

I write and I edit. Words. Those may be my greatest skills.

Writing and editing are disciplines like any other—art forms, really—with each requiring practice and, in my case, formal training to polish into career-worthy skills. I didn't know this in high school, and I have met dozens of people of all ages and at all stages in their lives that don't get that.

Anyway, this is a VERY long-winded way of saying that I hope some of my fellow students take what I'm offering. I hope I can convince them over the year that I have the expertise to help them write clear, interesting, and useful works. I know that strong communications skills will be useful to every one of them in their future careers and personal lives, but maybe they're hoping to get by with the basics of the craft.

Considering my feelings about C# and photoshop, I'm not sure I blame them. :)

Thanks for reading.