Fanciful Friday: From Semicolons to Sentiments

The Continuing Awkward Journey from Code Monkey to Story Spinner

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

For most of my adult professional life, I’ve been all about curly braces and semicolons. I devoted late nights building algorithms and solving problems. If you needed a program to calculate asset depreciation or plan production based upon forecast and inventory, I was the one to call. My world made sense—logic and order ruled everything, and every bug could be tracked down to a specific line and resolved.

So when I decided to try writing short paragraphs to complement the story of an image, I thought, “How difficult could it be?” I’d written thousands of lines of code. Words are words, right?

Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

First, there’s the issue of syntax. In coding, if you forget a bracket, the compiler immediately complains. In prose, you can misplace a comma or let a sentence wander on, and nobody, not even Microsoft Word, will notice. I started wishing for a prose compiler that could flag things like “awkward emotional transition” or “excessive melodrama detected on line so-and-so.” I run each through a spell and grammar checker, which helps me correct my excessive melodrama bad text to be written correctly, but still bad text.

Then there’s the problem of structure. Programmers love structure. We enjoy the neat, nested blocks of an if-else ladder. We like things to be in order and each step to be clearly defined. We even annotate our text on what and how it’s supposed to operate. However, emotions in situations are messy, unpredictable, and, worst of all, subjective. There’s no flowchart for heartbreak and no algorithm for joy. You can’t just refactor grief within a helper function and be done with it. And what’s with all the words that have multiple meanings dependent upon a situation and their use?

It just makes no sense, no sense at all, I tell you.

But that’s the point. Code is about making things work in an orderly manner, step by step. Life and narratives on life subjects are about communicating things beyond just the written word, and sometimes it’s chaotic and messy. 

So, I’m having to let go of my need for orderly control, to accept the flow, art and considerable pain of creative writing. I’m killing brain cells trying to learn to write in such a manner that the prose carries much of the narrative without saying too much, allowing the work of understanding the situation and emotional subtlety to fall to the reader.

I have a lot of years of practice as a code monkey to overcome, and it’s a slow process I struggle with on each Life Frames image. But in truth, it’s a skill I keenly want to acquire, so I’ll keep working on it in the hope of becoming a better story spinner.