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This isn't applicable to only programmers, of course; my wife is a novelist -- there are a lot of high-level concerns that she needs to balance in her head PLUS
by jtheory 13y ago
This isn't applicable to only programmers, of course; my wife is a novelist -- there are a lot of high-level concerns that she needs to balance in her head PLUS there's the fiddly nature of creative flow, and it all comes crashing down all too easily.
I had creative aspirations when I was younger (writing and music in particular), and came to programming because it's far more predictable; the costs of interruption are bad, but interruptions can be avoided, and the difficulties can be mitigated (e.g., I take notes for anything complicated, and re-read them when restarting a task; I break compilation as a to-do list, and/or use version control for non-compiling code). Flow is really important, but I generally know how to do it -- get enough sleep, clear away overhanging stress clouds (like "taxes are due soon"), eat well, break tasks down, get the smallest possible thing working, iterate, and so on).
But creative work killed me -- it was so painful to do iteratively; I'd spend 8 hours "writing" a poem that actually didn't coalesce until the 7.5 hour point, at 4am. Composing a bad first draft of anything left me feeling horrible; I never managed to force my way through that as long as I was trying to make it "what I did".
Now that I do something else primarily, I can noodle around creatively and get much more joy out of it -- but those years left me with much more respect for people doing more creatively-oriented mental work than I do.
- eru 13y agoLook up writer's discipline. `Creativity' is not too different from coding. > - get enough sleep, clear away overhanging stress clouds (like "taxes are due soon"), eat well, break tasks down, get the smallest possible thing working, iterate, and so on). That's great for writing a novel, too.
- lazyant 13y agoyes, see Daily Rituals: How Artists Work http://www.amazon.ca/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work-ebook/dp/B009Y4I4OM/ http://www.amazon.ca/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work-ebook/dp...
- jtheory 13y agoIt's not that these things don't help creatives, but that they are not reliably sufficient to produce something of value. If I'm coding on an uninspired day, I can easily just shift to tasks that I know are simpler, and create a perfectly workable (if boring) solution. I can work my way through to finding even fairly subtle bugs just by stepping through the logic; it's slower than a flash of insight, but it works. A writer or other creative person with high standards must discard all of that uninspired work. In theory it may help keep the ideas churning, but for most writers I know it can be a frustrating grind when things just aren't quite clicking. It certainly helps to "train the muse" by writing every day at the same time, always filling the page (even with nonsense if that's all you can produce), and so on, but at the end of the day, they can't say "well, this is a shitty story, but it'll pay the bills". It won't. There's also the psychological difficulty that comes with putting sometimes years of work into something that may actually have no monetary value, or minimal. There are obvious parallels to building a startup, except that novels that succeed can't naturally be built into sustaining income -- you have to start another novel, and it can easily earn you nothing after 5 years of work.
- eru 13y agoIn eg writing, there's lots of rewriting and editing. (And in coding, there's lots of truly inspired work, too.)
- thirdtruck 13y agoAs a full-time software developer just about to launch a Kickstarter for a novel (http://planetoz.net/kickstarter http://planetoz.net/kickstarter), I can confirm the numerous parallels between writing code and writing prose. I like to think of writing prose as "writing code against the human BIOS."