Entertaining
Technical Writer First Experiences Stage and Screen
By Michael
Abrams
We're pleased to welcome Michael Abrams as the new columnist for "Introductions."
Résumé
bullets we all have, but she's got TV credits, including lead and feature
roles on Divorce Court, Matlock, and Scarecrow and Mrs.
King. She's done stage work and voice-overs and produced and directed
commercials.
Marsha
Fickas is the most entertaining of technical writers. I'm not kidding.
She's a publications specialist with experience on stage and screen, and
her off-camera life has been an adventure, too.
For a frisson,
ask Marsha to describe a Saharan sunset framed by the Doser pyramid at
Sakara (the one with stair steps). During her émigré days
in Cairo, Marsha would hop out there for weekend rides past the Sphinx
"in the saddle of a tall white horse that ran like the wind."
So how did
Marsha find herself documenting medical equipment and military ordnance
in San Diego?
The tale
begins in suburban Riverside, where as a teenager Marsha was drawn to
theater. She earned a best-actress award from her high school drama department,
won a scholarship to Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts, and was
picked as female representative during a nationwide young actors competition.
She acted professionally and sang lead for rock bands touring the West
Coast in the ensuing six years.
When Marsha's
partner took an offer to develop flight-training films for Saudi pilots,
she joined him. That was followed with stays around Arabia, North Africa,
and the eastern Mediterranean. She wore many hats: commercial-jingle writer,
cohost of the first English-language radio program in Abu Dhabi, singer
in Arabic, set designer for a Ceylon Tea brochure on location in Sri Lanka.
Talk about flexibility, resourcefulness, and being comfortable in multicultural
contexts!
Back home, Marsha found TV gigs and other work, but Hollywood glamour soon gave way to the grind. Los Angeles intruded: traffic, smog, and, in 1991, Rodney King and the riots.
Marsha and
a friend escaped to Fallbrook.
Plans to set up a landscape-design business were aborted by the bad post-Desert Storm economy, freeing Marsha to try her hand at writing. She enrolled in a Palomar College English class, where she discovered not only was she good at writing, but the art satisfied her creative cravings.
From there,
Marsha worked and learned, stringing for the Times Advocate Escondido,
now part of the North County Times, and the Press-Enterprise,
Temecula. She trained in broadcast television and radio production.
Then she fell into technical writing, being hired to a term contract at
Camp Pendleton's Naval Weapons Station.
"On
my first day I was handed a tutorial of QuarkXpress," Marsha says.
"I was told I had two weeks before I needed to begin the process
for my first draft of the military technical field manual." So began
a period (which continues today) of being a voracious software learner.
She landed
at Alaris Medical Systems as a Publication Specialist and enjoyed frequent
teaming up with interpreters to develop foreign-language documents. Unfortunately,
Marsha was swept up in a mass layoff; she's now looking for work. Her
focus is technical writing because there are more job opportunities and
better pay than in journalism or theater.
So how does all of this tie together? Well, it can't hurt when the same person writing documentation can produce training and promotional videos. And how do theater, journalism, and tech writing compare