Breakfast Bytes Blogs

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, which commemorates the ending of slavery in the United States. It is a Cadence holiday. Breakfast Bytes will not appear. Today's off-topic post is about how I became a writer. The short answer is "by accident" since I never planned it.

People who know nothing about me but know I am a sort of technology journalist assume that I have had some actual training in writing. Maybe I even went to journalism school. Even people who know that I am a software engineer by background wonder about what I did to make the transition. They are usually surprised when I tell them nothing.

My Last Ever Writing Class

Education in England was very different from how it is in the US, and even how it is in England today (it was and is different in Scotland, but I only went to Scotland when I already had my undergraduate degree). In my day, if you were academic enough to be on a track to go to University then at age 16 or so you would do O-levels (the "O" stands for "ordinary" but that was never used). You would typically take 8 or 9 O-levels in different subjects. You didn't usually have a completely free choice since subjects would often be timetabled in the same time slots. I think it would have been impossible for me to take both History and Physics, for example. I took Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Latin, French, English Literature, and English Language. O-levels were graded 1-6 if you passed, and 7-9 if you failed. My grades were in the order I just listed the subjects. I got 1s in Maths, Physics, and Biology. My worst three grades were English Literature (Chaucer and Shakespeare) and French where I got 3s. And English Language where I got a 4. Given that, it is ironic that I ended up living in France (and so speak fluent French) and work as a writer.

And that was it. After O-levels, you do three (or occasionally four) A-levels (the "A" stands for "Advanced" but again that was never said). I did Mathematics, Further Mathematics, and Physics. With a couple of minor general education lessons, those were the only classes I took. The late teens in England were much more like the final year at an American University. When I got to University, since I was studying Math, the only courses I took were in Math. There was none of this "two semesters of a foreign language and a visual art" sort of thing.

Anyway, for this post, the key thing is that I was 15 the last time I took a class in anything in English (or writing, or composition, or journalism). And when I took those last classes, it was my worst subject. I was not a good candidate to become a professional writer!

EDAgraffiti

I got into writing entirely by accident. When my daughter was away at boarding school for a time, I tried writing some pieces about technology. It was partially a way to give her an idea of the area I worked in, and partly to see if I could do it on a regular basis. I put them on my consulting website, too, and got various positive feedback from people. Doug Fairbairn, who had hired me and brought me to the US, said he thought they were good. But when I told him someone else had suggested I put them into a book and publish them, said "I wouldn't go that far." So feedback wasn't that complimentary.

When I was CEO of Envis, Jim Hogan was on my board. He told me that EDN Magazine was looking for some unpaid contributors to produce a "blog". In late 2008, I told the investors in Envis that the technology didn't have a future, but they didn't want to shut the company down. So I helped them bring on a new CEO (who went on to prove my point) and then I was out of a job. I started writing the EDAgraffiti blog on the EDN website. Since I had no job, and it was the depth of the financial downturn, I produced a post every day. Partly to see if I could keep it up, and partly because on unemployment it is good to add some structure to life. It turned out that I could keep it up, and I did that for nearly a year. I collected many of the blog posts into the book EDAgraffiti (still available). Wally Rhines, the CEO of Mentor, told me he thought it was the best book on the EDA industry in existence. It was intended to be a great compliment but turned out to be a little back-handed when neither of us could think of another book on the industry.

SemiWiki

Another person who had been blogging about the EDA and semiconductor industries was Dan Nenni. He decided to start a website called SemiWiki. The business model was going to be that we would get companies to sponsor us for, I think, $15K per year, and we would write about them once a month. Maybe the bigger companies would pay more. He had managed to get a couple of companies to sign on to the idea, mostly because they were personal friends. He asked me if I was interested. To be honest, I was not optimistic that the idea would work all that well. It was still the financial downturn, remember, so money was tight. But he gave me a few thousand dollars to sign on, which was better than my zero income at the time (actually $1800/month state unemployment). I carried on writing the type of posts I wrote on EDAgraffiti, but then in between I would drop in a post about one of our sponsors. The basic idea worked pretty well, and soon we had lots of sponsors and I was back to my cadence (small "c") of one post per day.

I did that for a couple of years. It was often challenging to get blog topics from the sponsors. Small companies tended to run out of things to write about after the first few posts on what their product line contained. Large companies were often too bureaucratic to be able to decide on a topic in a five-minute phone conversation. But we were explicit that it was the company's job to come up with the topics, not ours (and we already had the money).

Breakfast Bytes

When Richard Goering retired from Cadence, I was asked if I had the bandwidth to do some writing for Cadence. It rapidly became clear that it was all-or-nothing. Either Cadence employed me, or I couldn't do it. There was no way that I was going to be able to continue doing consulting for other EDA companies if my name was all over the Cadence website. We opted for "all".

So I rejoined Cadence. Breakfast Bytes has appeared every weekday since October 7, 2015.

Advice About Writing

But I did read some writing on writing. Here are some that I recommend.

The Elements of Style or "Strunk & White". I'd never heard of this book in England. It just wasn't a "thing" like it is in the US. I probably read Kernighan and Plaugher's 1974 The Elements of Programming Style before I read the original, which was first published in 1918 (and I presume has been continuously in print since then).

Plain Words by Ernest Gowers. This was first published in 1954 and has never been out of print. Gowers was a civil servant in the UK treasury and was asked to write two pamphlets on helping civil servants write more clearly and less pretentiously. I did actually read this book when I was at university, on the recommendation of my father. One challenge for anyone doing a PhD in a STEM subject is that you have to write a 1-200 page dissertation having written very little, if anything, for years. Gowers' two pamphlets were published inside the government in 1948 and 1951 and then grouped into a normal published book in 1954.

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. This is an essay more than a book. That link is not to Amazon but to the online text. It is 10 pages long, just over 5,000 words. Anyone who writes, even emails (so everyone) should invest the short time it takes to read this piece. Orwell distills the piece into six rules towards the end:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

On Writing by Stephen King. Yes, that Stephen King. The subtitle is A Memoir of the Craft. The book describes some of his experience but mostly it is a guide for aspiring writers. It was originally published in 2000, his first book after he had nearly been killed after being hit by a car (he was out walking) so presumably written while he was recuperating. By the way, King is famously prolific, having written 61 novels, and 6 non-fiction books (and other stuff like short stories and screenplays). His advice:

Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer.

I'm not sure I average quite that much, but I find the basic idea is true. It is much easier to write every day than just to write sometimes. Although Breakfast Bytes comes out "fresh every morning", I don't work on a journalist's deadlines. I don't normally write tomorrow's post today, I try and build up a funnel of posts so that I have some flexibility when I'm unable to write. That can be because I'm attending a conference (remember them?), or even just that I am not in the mood. I know from programming that it is a waste of time to try and be productive when you are not "in the zone". And I can produce a lot when I am. I have often written three or four posts on a long plane flight, for example.

Here is an interesting video of Stephen King discussing his productivity with George R. R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones, although the book series is actually called A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin is a famously slow writer. The first volume of the series (the one that is actually called A Game of Thrones) was started in 1991, and published in 1996. Anyone who has watched the HBO series knows that the TV series, even at less than one series per year for a decade, got ahead of the books. Since Martin is over 70, fans wonder if he'll ever manage to finish the series...or even get out The Winds of Winter, which is the planned penultimate book of the series, which he has been working on since the last volume was published 9 years ago in 2011.

Video is 4 minutes long:

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