By Jeffrey B. Burton | Senior Member
So right after you’ve emailed five teasers out to five notable mystery publications, you suddenly realize that you missed the final “T” in Dashiell Hammett’s last name. Immediately, you wonder if the garage rafters can hold your body weight.
Sadly, that’s a true story, but I’d been through enough client reviews at work to not go all fetal-positioned up under my desk. I was able to fix the corresponding error that existed in a Flash teaser movie that I’d linked the editors to in the email. Then, I mumbled a quick prayer in hope that their eyes would glide over “Hammet” and not notice how I’d butchered their icon’s surname.
My name is Jeffrey B. Burton, and by day I’m an instructional designer at HealthPartners (a Minnesota HMO), where my duties include developing online courses, developing online help, editing IT’s monthly newsletter, and dusting up IT’s site on the HMO’s intranet. But by night I spend my free time plotting the perfect crime, creating a malevolent demon that slides in and out of the shadows, or shattering true love. Mind you, I do all of these grisly things on paper. “Lies” of mine have appeared in dozens of genre magazines (mystery, horror, literary, science fiction). A collection of my stories, Shadow Play, and a full-length mystery, Sleuth Slayer, were both published by a small literary press to some very pleasant reviews. And, in addition to being an STC member, I’m a member of the Horror Writers Association.
These are two distinctly different roles. Tech writing is brief and to the point, we use phrases and bullet points, we avoid jargon, and we don’t use big words. But for creative writing, we write to have an effect on the reader, to create a mood piece that lingers—smoke-like—in the mind of the reader long after they’ve put the book back on the shelf. We actually research jargon (if your main character is a sanitation engineer, make sure you’re able to make him talk trash), and we thank our lucky stars that Word has a glorious thesaurus function built in so we’ve got a universe of big words right at our very fingertips—eat your heart out F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Years of maintaining WebHelp files for ever-changing applications have allowed me to make peace with the delete key. You need to delete previous work because that functionality has disappeared in the new version, this functionality has changed, that process flow is no longer valid, etc. These same concepts can easily apply to fiction. For example, two main characters in a short story appears to be diluting the plot, so they should be combined into one (that functionality has disappeared in the new version); it’s no longer your lucid dream that’s narrating the story, but the lucid dream of your killer (the functionality has changed); how could you possibly have had the thief drive cross-country to magically arrive in time for the denouement (this process flow is no longer valid). When situations such as these come into play, no worries—say hello to Mr. Delete.
Years of involvement in the development of course curriculum, selection of the best images to use, creation of the best interactions to punch home course objectives, as well as navigating the various review committees involved in obtaining tiers of approval before launching a completed course to our LMS has left me not only with thick kryptonite-like skin, but also with the ability to collaborate with others and to play well in the sandbox.
My father and I spent two years working together on Sleuth Slayer, a novel about famed mystery writers being stalked by a serial killer. Our hero, some Dashiell Hammett wannabe (note the two T’s), trips over the villain’s M.O. and the book is off to the races. So how does writing a novel with another author work? Not so bad, as my day job has conditioned me to keep my ego in check. Plus, my father lives in South Dakota, so we were far enough apart that neither one could lure the other one out to a shallow grave in the back 40.
And, thankfully, by about the fourth time my father had written me out of his will, we realized the novel was done. It’s a fun read; too bad my sister’s going to wind up with all the inheritance.
