An unlikely practice

There was a time when all I wrote were e-mails and internal control documentation. For a decade, accounting was my only writing practice.

E-mails took up a lot of my time. I enjoyed crafting them because of the subtlety in language. E-mails were shapeless and weightless, but the choice of words could make them prickly and heavy. I liked that.

Corporate e-mails were predictable. Mostly brief and came with a face. The accountability meant countless embarrassing mistakes and wishing never to be seen by certain people again. I learned so much.

Bluish e-mails were trickier. Sometimes they arrived in my inbox angry, berating, harsher than any in-person encounter. They left me questioning humanity sometimes. Did they know that it was a person on the other side?

Documentation though, was different, it was rigid. No flowery language. No subtlety. There was hardly room for creativity, except to tinker with the flow. I challenged word count like a game of limbo. How low can I go? I wrote with concision and then edited my heart out. Pages of marbled writing often trimmed down to just words, strewn side by side.

Most people appreciated brevity when it came to documentation. But understanding was at the mercy of the audience. There was that time an executive marked up my documentation with a slew of grammatical edits, replacing every pronoun with its proper title. Clarity! He wrote in the margins. As if clarity wasn’t there before.

He was poignant in person, too. Aggravated by the auditors and my job description, he pointed his finger at me. This is a waste of my time! He yelled across the room. My face turned hot, until someone wiser spoke up and shut down the farcical act. The room fidgeted, embarrassment circled… but for him, not for me.

***

In our creative writing class, my group sat around a table. We read each other’s work and shared our honest feedback. Our mentor took it a step further and gave us line edits. She was kind and generous. I was relieved. She scribbled a few words on the last page of my submission: a rare combination, she wrote. Because she found my writing concise and perceptive.

Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. Who knew, writing documentation and e-mails would make good practice, too?

Our creative writing class didn’t just consist of my group though, there were many more groups and together we made up a much larger class. At one point, a sample of my writing was read in front of the whole class for editors to critique. Although my smaller group had only kind things to say, the editors from the larger class had only critical things to say. I sat in the lecture hall, sunken in my chair. My face turned hot. And it stayed hot, even when the critique was over.

***

What else can I practice from those accounting days? Growing thicker skin.

But that’s for another reflection, another day.