15 Comments

My day job is software engineer :-)

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Great article and very interesting analysis. I don't know the first thing about programming but I wonder if the creativity element comes into play. I imagine that programming probably involves a lot more creativity than people would readily assume. Interesting stuff!

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I did a 3-year apprenticeship in programming from 1990-93 called Datenverarbeitungskaufmann. A mouthful. Job title does not exist anymore of course. I learned Cobol and C and Assembler. Later I taught myself PHP and Javascript and stopped at Python. I think my aversion to semicolons comes from coding jscript. The semicolon in JavaScript represents an “end of statement” or “statement delimiter.” I did do creative writing, poetry, and songwriting before becoming a programmer, though and I stopped programming years ago, aside from some quick hacks to make stuff more efficient at work and since the office closed down I don't do that anymore either.

With programming, you have to think in structure and be more modular, you want to be efficient, lean and reuse code, being verbose is not something that is wanted. I remember back when I was Azubi the Team Lead for medical surgery devices asked me to code a query routine to output the state of the tool in C. It was my first task and I added comments about everything and he said, no no, no comments, bare code, it has to be as small as possible, people who use this will know how to use it.

It's the same with readers or viewers, they don't need to be told everything, it's boring. Let them work stuff out for themselves, and when they do it will be so much more rewarding, for both sides.

Anyway, I ramble. Verbosely. In the end, does programming help with creative writing? Maybe. You still need to have that certain something otherwise no amount of programming or writing classes will help. Or books on writing, they are all the same anyway. I am finishing my Cambridge studies currently and even the tutors would tell you, it's all the same, you don't need that, you already know this, well, so why am I here then? One guest tutor went so far as to say Robert McKee is as hack and a fossil and if we use him then oh my... he will pray for us. He really hates Robert McKee, no clue why.

I think more important than anything, programming, writing classes, theory books, is to find your voice, reach down deep and let it out. Ugly warts and all. Many tend to cage or tame their voice and as a result, the writing is timid. The fear of your own voice. Or maybe I am all wrong, I am still figuring things out for myself.

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I love this, thanks for sharing it. Since I found this newsletter I always enjoy how you write and the topics you write about. Most of the newsletters I’m subscribed here, is not because they are niche down, is because people have interesting perspectives and I like the way they write.

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