What makes someone fall in love with writing? Is it a learned behavior, or are writers born that way?

Long before the days of Kindle, e-Books and Microsoft Word - In the days before Apple PowerBooks, Sony Digital Readers or PodCasts, a strange little girl sat in the corner of the library, reading a book about sneetches. She wasn't really strange - just quiet (although she did resemble Emily Strange a little). She didn't like to play jacks like the other little girls, and had funny clothes and no dolls to share with them, so she had few friends. The little girl liked to do things they didn't, like skateboard on the sidewalks around her neighborhood, play on swings made out of old tires and lie under the big tree in the back yard, talking to it. She also liked to read. Which is where our story began - In the library.

This little girl couldn't wait to read. As a toddler, she found the newspaper in her father's lap fascinating. He read a lot of books and newspapers and magazines, sometimes even writing books of his own on a big black typewriter. She followed him around like a shadow, and he, being a kind man and a charter member of this mutual admiration society, would pick her up and set her in his lap as he typed. Her eyes would sting from the cigarette smoke, but she was riveted by the strange symbols on the page - What did they all mean? Sometimes, in quiet moments, she would cuddle in her father's lap as he read the paper and she would point to the heiroglyphics and ask 'what does this say?'. Sometimes he would read to her, and sometimes he wouldn't. He told her as soon as she started school, she would learn to read for herself. And he was right. As soon as she started the First Grade, the little girl was reading. One day, she was staring at the page of a book about a cat in a tall hat, and the symbols transofrmed into words right before her eyes. She couldn't wait to get home and tell her father! Soon she was reading everything in sight - books, magazines, newspapers, even cereal boxes.

What makes someone love words? I don't mean just reading them, and not even using them as tools of self-expression. But a wholesale adoration of words - clamoring to know the origin of a word, the meanings (most words have more than one meaning), its opposite, its rhyming word, which words sound the same but have a completely different meaning, their grammatical prootocols, their power. Were they bitten by a WereWriter one night on the moors, under a full moon, doomed to an undeniable lifelong obsession with words to the point where they pursue you even in your dreams?

I can't read anything without editing it....try as I might, I simply can't do it. Even leisure reading. Even cereal boxes. Not only do I actually read the stuff on them, my mind is simultaneously editing the content for grammar, voice, and punctuation, and looking at it from a marketing persective. It's like that with anything - I can't read anything, even a good book, without part of me being in Edit Mode, scanning the page for even the tiniest mistake. I have found errors in Bonfire of the Vanities, 1984, Gone With The Wind, and even The Good Earth. And don't get me started on the newspaper. I find errors in newspaper articles every single time I read the paper. So, why is that? Are the people who write and edit copy brain-dead?

No.

The fact is, with tight deadlines, especially in newsrooms, something is going to fall through the cracks, no matter how many checks and rechecks are performed. That's the human component. So it pays to take every document seriously - Even a toaster manual. And it's the same for any written publication - Deadlines are in place, not just for the technical documentation, but for the software application or other product being developed. Sometimes they are being built simultaneously, and the writer is flying by the seat of their pants, so to speak, using each new module in its early stages, which helps the developers find bugs. Sometimes you actually fly blind, working only from your notes, writing about something that doesn't exist yet, and going back to the engineers who go "yeah, you're on the right track", and you shelve that component until the entire product is built. Then take it out, dust it off and give it a full-blown edit and add the new information and begin building the finished product.

To find out what really goes on in the lifecycle of a technical document, tune in to my next exciting hub, WRITING (Part II).