how to write computer books - Conflict is your friend

Tips, tricks, and techniques to make your computer books better. by David Barnes

Email me: davidb at packtpub dot com. Get updates by email

Conflict is your friend

For any book or story to be really satisfying to read it needs conflict. You won’t keep a tutorial engaging for several hundred pages without some battles here and there.

Without it your writing will seem flat and either like an encyclopedia or a marketing release. Boring, turgid, put downable.

Conflict doesn’t have to mean war. The ingredients of conflict are:

Somebody has a goal
An object or person gets in the way of that goal

You then resolve the conflict by finding a way to acheive the goal anyway, for changing your goal.

The object or person that gets in the way is called an antagonist. When writing technical books, you can find these antagonists:

Other stakeholders and characters: a boss who makes unrealistic or unpallatable demands; and administrator who won’t give you the rights you need; a client with their own unrealistic demands.
The tool itself, or the computer: at times we all hate the tools we work with. Computers are fussy, systems are non-intuitive. We have all crashed our fists on the keyboard at times. Don’t praise to tool all the time — sometimes it is the enemy.
The seeming impossibility of the goal: sometimes, a goal appears tough or impossible. Build this up sometimes — make it seem really hard — and then say “but I’m going to show you how to do it anyway”.

These conflicts probably exist in the reader’s life anyway… you can have fun by acknowledging and emphasising them in your writing.

Let me suggest this… look for ways to incorporate conflict into your next chapter, tutorial or book.

Let me ask you this… what are the conflicts that YOU face when learning a new tool or building a new system?

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