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Lately, I’ve been doing more coding than writing; in fact, at times it feels as if a large switch has been thrown in my mind, and my default mode is now the former, rather than the latter.

As practices, coding and writing can be quite similar – in both cases, though I might sketch an idea out on paper beforehand, the bulk of the work is done sitting in front of a computer screen, making sequences of characters appear in a text-editing window on my computer’s screen. Arguably, part of the reason that one tends to crowd out the other (one way or another) is the sheer similarity of the two actions…there’s only so much time that one can sit and type on a keyboard, and the activity will naturally come to be associated with whatever you use it for the most.

This is the thing that concerns me – when I sit down at my computer these days, my mind begins to automatically ease into coding mode. I say that this is a concern for one main reason; though I enjoy both, I fundamentally identify more as a writer than a coder.

The difference, as I see it, is less one of practice than of intent. As I said, both coding and writing involve stringing together symbols, but with different normative goals; there’s a richness to prose, meant to be read in many more ways than the spare efficiency of code written solely to achieve a discrete task when executed. I find coding to be a more mechanistic process, constructing a Rube Goldberg-esque machine which, when set in motion, is ultimately assessed on one criterion – does it *work*? Prose, on the other hand, can aspire to more than mere functionality.

I don’t mean to denigrate code – there can be an elegant beauty or astonishing intricacy to a well-crafted function, but in the end, it’s meant to be executed, and execution seems fundamentally different from reading. It might just be a question of the user’s intent…we come to a program expecting it to work, but we come to a book looking for more than the pure conveyance of information.

The thing I’ve been noticing is that the more time I spend coding, the more my prose begins to resemble code. As I’ve begun to associate my keyboard more with coding than writing, my writing has become more functional, less joyous. In some ways, this isn’t anything new – my trajectory throughout graduate school was toward a simple formula, “writing = argument,” and the upshot of this “tyranny of the thesis” is an unfortunate state of affairs in which I’ve grown to see writing in mostly instrumental terms. The words become a means to an end, not really much different than lines of code, and the more code I write, the harder I’m finding it to recapture a mode of writing as more than purely informational. On the fringes of my conscious mind, I can tell that I’m grasping to bring back a sense of joy (or at least something more than workmanlike trudging) into my prose, but I can’t seem to find it.

Even more unsettling, I’m finding that my coding skills are getting sharper and sharper, but my writing feels as if it’s getting muddier. It’s shouldn’t come as a surprise, really – I’ve been exercising the former on a daily basis, while my experience with the latter has mostly been limited to revisions on my dissertation, a project of which I’m more or less tired by now (this work falls solidly into the “green vegetables” mode of writing – I’m doing it more because I know that it’s good for me and my career than because I really want to do it). Maybe things’ll improve once I get this damned manuscript out the door, and take the time I’ve been learning to carve out of every week and apply it to fresh ideas and fresh projects…

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