The Kind of Story Writers Love to Tell

So, here I sit alone in my hotel room, a Samuel Adams draught lager on my left and a TV remote on my right. No kids to put to bed (my husband gets to do that tonight), no dinner dishes to clean up after (housekeeping gets to do that), and no one to interrupt me while I'm trying to write. Ah, this is the life!

I don't go on business trips very often. I avoided doing them for years when my kids were younger because I just couldn't stand to leave them and my husband for any length of time. And of course, when they were still nursing (and I nursed all of mine well past the recommended one year), it wasn't really practical for me to leave.

But now, business trips (as long as they are only one or two nights long) are a godsend. They are a little gift to myself--peace, quiet, and nothing to do but please myself and (during the work day) the client. Believe me, I love my husband and children beyond anything, but there is something so blissful about being beholden to no one, even for just a few hours a day, that I never fully appreciated before I had a family.

Maybe at this point, you are wondering what I do for a living. I am an instructional designer. (Cue puzzled expressions.) Don't worry, no one else knows what it means, either. I always tell people it's shorthand for someone who creates corporate training materials. Then they usually nod and say "oh" in a tone that clearly indicates they wonder why I don't call myself a corporate training writer.

And I guess the answer I'd give is that there really is a design element and process to writing training materials. It's so much more than just knowing what your students need to know, but about knowing in what order they need to know it and then, once you figure that out, building documentation and demonstrations and activities that use only what they've learned up to this point and nothing more. Do anything out of order and it's a bit like trying to put the roof on the house before you've framed the walls--it all falls down around your ears. In addition, a good instructional designer writes course materials that can be delivered by many different instructors in essentially the same way. The course has to be repeatable in a way that's consistent and doesn't depend on who happens to be the teacher on any given day. That makes doing instructional design well a real challenge. And I love a challenge!

The company I work for provides data processing software to credit unions. I'd link to the company's website because I'd love to promote it, but I'm a little hinky about sharing my secret aspirations as a romance novelist with most of my coworkers, and I'm thinking the link might get tracked backward at some point. Still, it's a great place to work or I wouldn't still be there after more than 12 years. (It doesn't hurt that they let me telecommute despite the fact that I live 20 minutes from the office!)

As an instructional designer, I rarely travel or see clients. Mostly, I sit at my computer and research how the software works and then design training to teach people how to use it. But every once in a while, a client wants training on an aspect of the software in which I'm either the acknowledged expert or I'm the only available instructor. And when that happens, I'm generally willing to do it as long as it's not more than a couple of nights. Any more than that is just too hard on my family.

Okay, it's 9:40 and my beer's almost gone, so it's about time to wrap this up. The real reason I started this post was to share a story my husband told me about our seven-year-old daughter when I called earlier this evening. Now, the first thing you have to understand is that our daughter is very literal-minded. Ever read an Amelia Bedelia book? If you have, then you will understand me perfectly when I say my daughter is Amelia Bedelia. She is so much Amelia Bedelia that she usually doesn't get the joke in Amelia Bedelia stories.

For example, one morning, when she was about four, she came downstairs very early, one of her Kelly dolls in each hand. My husband said, "My, you're up with the chickens." She looked from one hand to the other then at him and said solemnly, "No, I'm up with my dolls." God, I love that story!

Today, she went to a Brownie meeting after school. As one of their projects this year, they are making a pair of knitting needles from soft wood. One of the leader moms is going to teach them to knit and they are each going to knit a square which we'll assemble into a blanket and give to a charity at the end of the year. So, this mom sharpened all the needles between the last meeting and this one and gave them to the girls, but the wood was still quite rough.

When my daughter arrived home with her knitting needles, she immediately took them out in the back yard and began covering them with dirt. My mother, who babysat this afternoon, saw her and was extremely puzzled.

"What are you doing?" my mother asked.

To which my daughter promptly responded, "I'm sanding them." Which was, of course, exactly what the leader had told her she should do.