Why You Should Try the Worst Writing Job Ever

The hidden market in compliance prose

Here’s some irony: I spent six years writing the driest, most dispassionate prose imaginable, and it helped my creative writing more than any of the artistic work I’ve ever done. Moreover, it paid the bills, left me plenty of time to do my own writing, write, and even funded a pension that I am fully enjoying now. Not a bad deal for the worst writing job in the world.

You call this writing?

Hidden miles beneath the fast-paced gig economy of freelance writing lies a gold mine of writing work for those who can find it. Well, maybe a silver mine. I’m talking about writing and editing fundamental institutional materials like compliance, risk management, policy, procedure, and human resources documents.

Institutions both public and private need skilled wordsmiths to help them comply with today’s burgeoning regulatory requirements. To be sure, lawyers do the heavy lifting of ensuring the legality of those thousands of pages. But the policy writer/editor/administrator renders them intelligible to the ordinary people who must read and abide by them. I won’t lie; it’s generally a rigorous and thankless process.

If you are a creative free spirit, you may be thinking to yourself, “I would rather be hit over the head repeatedly with a MacBook Air.” Please let me persuade you to think again. My six years of experience in this role, shepherding the driest of documents through the most trying editing process, taught me to do the following tricks:

1. Structure information so the reader keeps up and feels clever;

2. Ensure that a strong start doesn’t backfire;

3. Interrogate the syntax until it begs for mercy; and

4. Put “thesaurus.com” in its place.

These are tricks we all know. But they are difficult to practice on prose you care about — prose you have a personal investment in. It’s like trying to do brain surgery on yourself. But on an institutional document, you can work through these techniques as ruthlessly as you want, and nobody gets hurt.

The writing career that time forgot

Quite by chance, after various extroverted careers in communications, teaching, ministry, and human resources (for which I, an introvert, paid dearly in psychic energy), I became the director of policy administration for a major institution of higher learning.

Though I had never written policies, I was a policy power user when I worked in human resources management. You had to be in order to guide management or draft disciplinary documents. Everyone in HR thought I was good at writing those documents, and I thought so, too. No false modesty here.

Disciplinary write-ups are fun, in a way, and would be profitable exercises for fiction writers. A write-up is a perfect example of “show, don’t tell.” It’s not supposed to characterize anyone or anything; it’s only supposed to relate factual, observable events.

For example, we wouldn’t say, “She was very angry. ” We’d say, “Her fists were clenched, her face was red, her remarks could be heard by witnesses 100 yards away, and she had spittle on her chin.” See? Fun.

Anyhow, when I got to the policy office, my confidence in my writing ability was immediately crushed. Under the direction of a brilliant mentor, I spent six hellish years seeing all the ways that writing could go wrong.

But I lived to tell about it, and here are some of the things I learned.

1. Information, like toddlers, needs structure

At first, I was sure I knew how to order a piece of writing. I knew all that stuff we all learn, about paragraphs and topic sentences and introductions and conclusions and whatnot. I also knew all the linking words and when to use them. I could tell a “furthermore” from a “nonetheless” at 1000 paces.

From my stint in academia, I also knew about the scholarly “whereas” structure:

“Whereas Scholar One says this, and Scholar Two says that, I say thus, and here is why they are pathetically wrong and I am right.”

None of that knowledge worked. Policy “whereases” are not counterfactual arguments, but are the factual and theoretical basis for the policy.

Here is a simplified version of the structure a policy might use:

“Whereas there is a danger of idiots setting fire to the lab; and
whereas they will need instructions on putting out those fires; and
whereas the Feds make us post those instructions or else they will pull our funding,
therefore you must post instructions on putting out fires,
and here they are.”

So a policy information structure must culminate with a requirement; it must demand an action or an effect.

Typically, you add an exact procedure, and you post it, and people may or may not pay any attention to it. But that’s not your problem. Unless you are in the lab when it burns down.

Your story has an information structure, too

This rubric can also be used for creative pieces, both fiction and nonfiction. Underneath the lyrical prose, the writer provides the reader the information they need in the right order for best comprehension.

The information need not always be explicit. For suspense, the writer may encode or obscure the “whereases,” or even tell the story “backward” chronologically, if there is a coherent structure underlying the information.

The reader will happily go along if they get just enough clues to have that “Aha!” moment at the end. Then they feel smart, and when the reader feels smart, they think you are a stone cold genius.

Analyzing the information structure of the piece, whether nonfiction or fiction, can help writers avoid the “curse of too much information” — the tendency to assume the reader knows something they have no way to know.

And just as a policy necessitates an action, so you might analyze whether your story arc leads to a result for the reader. Does the sum of its “whereases” lead to a “therefore” — some epiphany, some improvement, some call to action? It’s good to practice looking for the “therefore.”

2. Going nowhere but making good time

Creative writers don’t always like starting with a “whereas.” Sometimes it seems boring. After all that’s how we got, “It was a dark and stormy night.” (On the other hand, that’s also how we got, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” Our mileage does indeed vary.) So they look for a strong, attention-getting start.

In the policy world, that’s called an “executive summary.” It’s a front-page abstract that lets the executive know whether to read the thing or bounce it to a flunky. It is certain to go to the flunky unless the executive can see immediately why they must read it.

A strong start, no matter how sparkling, must also tell me where we are going. Recent creative non-fiction often buries ledes deeply beneath lengthy opening anecdotes full of thick description. In those cases, no matter how exotic the opening, I will bail on the piece if I don’t get a clue about its direction. I fancy myself a busy executive; I want my ego stroked a little bit; I want to know why I should spend my valuable time on this story.

3. Keeping the syn out of syntax

We have all been advised to use adjectives only when necessary and to make sure modifiers of any kind are in the right place. Policy writing will beat this principle into you until it haunts even your dreams.

Here’s a real-life example. My brilliant mentor boss was gently dismayed as she reviewed a policy drafted by the human resources director. (She had so much influence that all she had to be was “gently dismayed” and we would tremble).

I watched her read the following:

This policy only applies to those part-time employees working less than 20 hours per week.

Of course, she immediately struck out “less than” and replaced it with “fewer than.” Equally swiftly, she made a note to query whether he actually meant “employees working “20 hours or fewer.” She was sure he did.

Then, in her civilized way, she mused aloud, “Well, does he really mean ‘This policy only…’? Is this the only policy those employees must follow?” She twinkled her eyes at me. I tried to twinkle back.

And so I learned that it must be “this policy applies only to those part-time employees.”

Furthermore, “part-time” was now redundant, so she deleted the inferior modifier in favor of the more specific one. But “per week” was vague, so she effortlessly revised to “during a standard work week,” which was specific enough because the policy officially defined it at the bottom of the page.

If you have already cynically noted that the policy should have specified “employees who are scheduled to work for 20 or fewer hours,” because who the hell knows whether they are actually “working” during those hours, then congratulations. You have the makings of a fine policy writer.

No exceptions for creatives, either

The same principles apply to creative prose, but for slightly different reasons. In policy writing, we are precise to help the readers understand. In creative writing, we are precise to help the readers read.

Claire only wanted to be left alone.

Sounds good at first draft— plaintive and authentic. But it momentarily misleads the reader — is it going to be, “Claire only, among all others in the world, wanted to be left alone”? Is she really the only one who wanted that? The reader stumbles for a microsecond, probably without even realizing it, but now that vague attribute known as “flow” has suffered.

So we say, “Claire wanted only to be left alone.” Now we know what she wanted. Only this one thing, dammit, that we all want.

4. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Some of the first few policies I drafted were dismal failures, and once again my boss wore that patient half-smile as the red pen flew.

In my eagerness to give those policies some style, by golly, I scattered synonyms throughout. I thought doggedly repeating nouns sounded chunky and awkward.

But synonyms in policies create confusion. Synonyms create ambiguity. Synonyms are simply Not Done. You can tell I do not know a synonym for “synonym.”

Never mind what your thesaurus says: a requirement is not the same as a rule. A manager is not the same as a supervisor, a leader, a facilitator, or an administrator. A policy is not a procedure, or a practice, or a preference, and you’d better know the difference, because the document has to teach it to everyone else, because they don’t know, either.

Moreover, in the policy world, if it’s “the department head” once, it is “the department head” throughout the whole document. Don’t even think about making it “the head of the department” even once, unless that’s a different guy altogether, and then you have some explaining to do.

Creative writing doesn’t have to be quite so rigorous. There’s nothing wrong with using thesaurus.com, or even your old Roget’s, to shake loose the occasional synonym, just for color. However, if you have to keep searching for synonyms for what you mean, perhaps you haven’t yet figured out what you mean.

Now, I’m taking more of a Humpty Dumpty approach:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

I’ll scour the thesaurus is to find exactly the word that means what I mean, and then scour my brain to find, not synonyms, but the three-dimensional contexts from which that word derives that meaning.

As an added benefit, exploring those contexts helps me find pictures, too.

Please let John be John

I sometimes wish writers wouldn’t try so hard to find synonyms for their characters, especially if there a lot of them. If he’s John Smith on page 3, and then he’s Smith on page 5, could he please be Smith for awhile? And then maybe he could introduce himself to someone as “John Smith,” and only then be called “John” after that? (I’m asking for a friend.)

And then, if we haven’t seen John for a while, and he turns up again as “the lanky loner,” could you just remind us that it’s John before you give us the lanky bit?

Or if there is a long, stylishly rapid-fire dialogue between John and another guy, could you please help us out and let us know whose turn it is once in a while? Just in case we lose track? It needn’t slow you down that much.

“Must be able to thrive in a slow-paced environment…”

Ever see that statement on a job ad? Of course not.

In fact, I rarely see these jobs listed as such at all. Most of the people I know who wrangle policies for a living fell into it through other professional or high-level administrative positions in the private or public sector, especially higher education (not necessarily faculty); large research departments at major institutions; compliance offices for health care corporations; human resources departments, and the like.

Others volunteered to write or edit the policies simply because no one else would do it, and the auditors were about to come, and everyone was scrambling because they were about to get their funding pulled. I’m not even kidding. That happens more than you think. The trick is to turn your volunteer writing into a real job and not just something you do in addition to everything else you were hired for. But that’s a whole other article.

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”

Writing and editing policy and compliance material is slow, recursive, un-sexy work, and it is not creative in the usual sense. It will not give you a way to “follow your bliss,” or cultivate your brand, or teach you a thing about blogging or SEO or hustling for gigs or any of the skills a writer is supposed to need today.

It will, however, pay you well to do absorbing work and keep you out of the rat race. And that can truly be a blessing, because, as Lily Tomlin wisely put it,

“The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

As I hope I have shown, this kind of wordsmithing will teach you to see details of structure and language that are hard to discern in writing that is closer to your heart. It will thicken your skin for critique, since development of these documents is an endlessly recursive process. It will be a master class in patience, diplomacy, and refraining from biting people.

If you have not yet made a multi-million dollar book deal; if you still need to make a regular living for awhile; if the scrum of freelance self-promotion seems exhausting; if you want your evenings free to work on your novel, then consider finding yourself one of the worst writing gigs in the world.

It worked for me.

And now I get to do writing like this, in creative communities like this one — and that’s one of the best writing gigs in the world.

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