Recently, I self-published a book and I made a presentation. These two events, or rather the whole creative thinking connected to them brought me to this idea. To start a new category on my S1000D blog called “A Fiction Writer’s Musings on S1000D”.
It might appear strange, but if you have seen my presentation at this year’s S1000D User Forum in Seville you might be able to guess why.
A year or even a month ago, I might not have been sure myself what this is all about, but now I am convinced that this is a good idea.
The epiphany came when I exclaimed in a discussion in a break between the forum’s sessions in Seville, “Data modules are so much like scenes in a novel!” And after that I couldn’t stop the flow of realizations. “Just as scenes, data modules have a start (for a procedural data module it is preliminary requirements), an end (close-up requirements) and one setting (a unit or assembly). And in a way just like the scenes in a novel they tell a very short and self-contained story, or a future short story, that is how the given procedure is to take place.”
The previous statement during the presentation I made at the S1000D User Forum in Seville this year, claiming that technical manuals are books, whatever format they are in or however interactive they are, only strengthened this flow of parallels between books in general and S1000D conformant technical publications in particular.
After the User Forum I jotted down a list of topics I could think of when relating S1000D and its constructs to story-telling, and I came up with seven of them immediately.
Already at the User Forum and also after, during the training courses on S1000D, I started bringing up these parallels and the result was inspiring. Aha reactions and wide smiles of finally understanding a complicated topic. And I felt that after bringing such parallels forward, about the matter I love so much to those who start dealing with it and dread it (like I did twelve years ago), I felt that they began to like S1000D and the ideas behind it or at least started to look at it with curiosity.
So yes, this is the main reason and motivation behind this category: to take fear from such a substantial and multidimensional standard, and also to show its brilliance and again multidimensionality as well as also connect it to what we all already know and love, story-telling.
I wish both, you and me, an interesting, curious, fun and valuable journey on this yet unpaved ground.
Copyright © 2016 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels