Back-to-front development...

(Similarities of coding and writing?!)

I have been coding since I was ten.

Some may say this explains a few things.

I say I have no idea what they are talking about.

But what those people don’t know, and I fully admit I failed to tell them.

Is that I’ve been writing for longer.

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I have short stories (they were very short) from back when I was eight.

One that always springs to mind is ‘Blade of Oren’, it was a story about a boy fighting against evil supported by his animal pals. This was before Pokémon, before Paw Patrol, which is good because it has nothing to do with them. I think it was probably inspired by Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The story was, and still is terrible. But —and you may be wondering this— the reason why I’m pointing it out, is to give some kind of weight to the argument that despite my wordiness and terrible use of the English language, I have always wanted to create fabricated stories.

You may well ask (and I’ll hold off asking if you asked it well) why, then… did I become one of those pseudo necessary evils… a web developer?

That’s because the way my mind works, I don’t see a huge difference.

I could also get paid more working with computers, which allowed me to push my personal projects forward —albeit at a glacier-like pace.

I’ve also always been fascinated with crossover between disciplines, and —weirdly enough— there are quite a few between coding and writing. True, in order to get to some of them, you need to be coding more visually, and you may need to blur your eyes a bit. But there are similarities.

And when I find something that works across many worlds, my brain is always very happy, and it will spend many planetary rotations obsessing over things that will likely never be thought of again —for good reason.

So, researching on the shoulders of giants

The barrier to entry for both writing and coding is low.

Very low.

For writing it has always been the case, you can get far with just trial and error.

For computing, in the early days (I am aware of the scope of the universe) you needed a spare room with a team of engineers and boxes full of vacuum tubes. They were a bit thin on the ground, and even thinner in the air. But these days, you can buy a computer that allows you to learn to code for under £25.

And the key point is, with the internet, you have access to so much information you can easily pick up any number of coding (or writing) skills.

You just need time and an idea.

And… it is for that fact that I love both writing and coding.

Pastimes that require heavy or expensive equipment have never been my thing.

For example, kite surfing has never once entered my mind.

It’s like looking at a story you wrote when you were eight

It is most likely the same for many creative endeavours, but I have noticed it more with my coding and my writing than anything else. Much more than with my sketching, painting, self-deprecating internal nagging, cooking or video/audio editing.

There is definitely an official name for this, but I shall call it temporal disappointment. I’ll then look at this name months later and think that it is terrible.

Which is kind of the point. I’m not looking forward to the time when I look back on my TEOWAD novels and feel they are terrible. But it is likely I will, because that always happens.

It has happened for years with my coding. Every time I get to an end of a project, I look back and think “Okay, this bit was alright, but what on Io was I thinking here…??!”

It is an oft reported fact. By developers and authors alike.

“But you started off saying that you enjoyed crossovers? This doesn’t sound like a good thing…”

Yes, and you are correct. But… despite how it sounds. I like this effect. The reason being is that it either: a) shows that you have continued to learn and grow, something that has never stopped yet even after coding for thirty years. And of course I’m still very much learning with the writing. Or (b) proves that you are a miserable soul and can never be happy.

I obviously opt for (a) and continually prove to myself that (b) could not be true. After all, who would spend their days sitting in a room, by themselves, smirking, shivering, surprising or baffling themselves with only the use of words or gobbledegook?

That person could not be miserable.

At least not all of the time.

Be modular, and operate in starts, middles and ends

Some might say this is obvious, others might call this heresy.

But the fact that I instinctively work in patterns and in a modular way (thanks to coding) has helped in the editing process for TEOWAD.

And perhaps calling it modular makes things sound horrible in terms of a book, people don’t want modular stories. But there are many ways to slice things to be modular. And I’m not specifically meaning chapters or scenes. I’m meaning the way events occur, how scenes start and end. I guess, the writing has a modular flow. Meaning I can cut and paste bits around, and things still work. Because each item is a stable part in of itself. True, just like with moving code modules around, you still have to tweak inputs and outputs. And it doesn’t mean your writing can’t blur the lines or have side effects.

But by making sure everything has a start, middle an end —which is probably obvious to writers, but it isn’t so obvious to many coders— is a very good way to write code. It almost feels like you get into the ‘power of three’ for programming (but perhaps not quite).

When starting a function, there you should prep everything the code needs to deal with, make sure things make sense in terms of context, and escape out if they don’t. You essentially, set the scene clearly.

The middle of you function is where you change things, your runtime experiences things, effects happen, new things are created, existing things are destroyed.

The end of you function is where you set things up for the code that comes next, you give your outputs, the highlights, the minor cliff hangers.

But where as in coding you try and avoid side effects, in writing, side effects are the main event.

And this applies to whatever level you are writing/coding at. The whole app, the entire story, the current scene or function.

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And the similarities do not end there… but perhaps this blog post does?