Suppose you want to write a story about a writer, a writer who has won professional awards for his prose, who has authored educational books, and who is now at work on a novel. How can your words do justice to someone whose own words are so splendid? He would blush and surrender his customary chuckle at this. Not knowing why you wanted to know, he once offered advice on putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard: "I've learned that the story you are telling isn't the thing. It's how you tell it."

Right.

The formula works for Mel Beckman, a mild-mannered and gifted wordsmith whose love of the letter and the arts conjoins with his fascination for all things scientific, all things technical.

Never mind his story. This is just the telling of it.

We could start with his left brain, but it's far too webbed to the one on the right. Thus the Beckman who beholds network communications (borrowing Sun Microsystems' slogan that "The network is the computer") and produces hundreds of articles on everything from thwarting hackers to the next high in Wi-Fi to backup horror stories also chats with folks like Ray Bradbury at workshops on the writing of fiction.

The Minnesota come California guy ("They're keeping this place a secret from Minnesotans. Nobody would live there if they knew about the perfect climate on the West Coast!"), who is a senior technical editor and writer for iSeries NEWS and has had a textbook translated into six languages ("It was fun to see my work in Chinese."), also plays fine flamenco guitar tunes, flies helicopters, and says the joy of homeschooling his own three kids (all in college now) overshadows the thrill of teaching university-level courses.

Back in the land of a thousand lakes, Beckman worked at one of the original S/38 beta test sites at St. Olaf College in the late 1970s. He also helped start a medical software company in Rochester that made its mark using the affordable S/36 midrange system. His résumé confesses that he has built two regional Internet service providers.

A couple other iSeries NEWS techies lured Beckman to the magazine nearly 20 years and oodles of literary repertoires ago when he was a software engineer at ASNA. "The biggest pressure of tech editing is getting every detail correct, from terminology to figure headings. We're the last line of defense between the printed page and technical accuracy," he notes. "But I also like helping an author organize his or her presentation logically, with a clear introduction, path, and conclusion," his left brain adds.

He encourages new computer scribes to write about topics that excite them. "Then read the technical writing of the best authors you can find and observe the structure they use to communicate. Logical structure and clear writing are the keys to a successful article." (The commonsensical voice again.) What motivates Mel is learning "some fun new technology" and then explaining it to readers. Immerse him in Ajax or Ruby on Rails, and he won't want to come up for air. He's also "Dr. I Doctor," faithful answerer of Internet questions and loyal blogger. He composed Power Tips for Networking and An Introduction to ISDN among other popular tomes and co-authored LAN to WAN Communications. There's something soon to come on wireless technology. ("I always have outlines for books," he says, illustrating the mingling of the analytical and the intuitive.)

Mel has meandered the globe teaching about networking and the cross-system issues that networkers face. To programmers he says, "Keep your eye on the problem!" Many programs are simple, neat, and wrong, Beckman contends. They unravel a quandary that the customer doesn't need to have cracked and leave his actual dilemma hanging.

He would never do such a thing. "I love problem solving in the heat of battle. When the network is down, users are screaming, and money is flowing down the drain like water, I do my best work." Being the president of Beckman Software Engineering, a technical consultancy specializing in large-scale, high-bandwidth networks, promises him such combat. On a typical day, there's nothing typical. A client might lose the configuration for one of its core network devices, and Mel might have to reverse engineer the system over the phone. "I love doing it. I would almost pay to do it if I didn't have to eat."

It's early to bed and often up at 4 a.m. to allow quiet time for both right and left writing. "With fiction it's a different animal. There's a huge swath of material to cover to prepare the reader for character and plot development. You can't go straight to the dénouement. You have to go around the bend so that they don't see you coming," he explains. "There's no suspense in a technical article, but it is always fun cooking up introductions that will capture the reader's interest." For a piece on security, he recommends opening with a disaster.

He perceives the wholes; he distinguishes the parts. Mel wanted to be a physicist, but he has become a philosopher. "I love science and the study of the created universe. I want to spend more time learning about the amazing design of living things. I look at DNA and see immediately that it is a computer program. That makes me want to seek out the programmer."

In the program is the story, and in the programmer is the telling of it.

Vicki Hamende is acquisitions editor for iSeries NEWS. To read more of her profiles of iSeries NEWS tech editors, click here.