Early in my career, someone once said to me “creative writing and technical writing are not mutually exclusive”. I’ve thought a lot about what that means in the years since.

We wouldn’t typically associate creativity with technical documentation. After all, technical documentation is meant to focus on facts and details, and be, well, very technical about everything.

However, we would be doing our customers a great disservice if we separated creativity from our documentation. This doesn’t mean that customer support would suddenly be inundated with plot, character development and a personal voice, but rather that we consider our customers’ problems from a variety of positions and find one or many solutions to that problem. The solutions are not always the obvious ones; this is where we must be creative writers.