When an engineer writes a short story

11 points by harshbhasin ↗ HN
My Short Story "The Donkey Lane" is now published on kindle (free over the holidays, so please do read). http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RA3UD20

As a software engineer I've authored technical books and written software, so writing fiction should be easy for me, I thought. My plan was to do a MVP, that is, write a quick story, put it out for the world to see, and if there is a positive response, continue writing. It will be a humorous short story, I told myself. However, most of the humor was outside of the short story: the story took me over six months to write. Why? Scope creep and distractions. First distraction: could not find a mac text editor that I liked, so I started creating my own. This led to the creation of the Mac app: Published! Manuscript Manager (www.published-app.com.) I put it out in the Mac store and soon started communicating with a number of its users. First it needed a "submissions module" which authors of short stories would use to submit and track their submissions to various publishers. Then it needed an Income and Expense module which writers would use to track the profit/loss from each of their work. Each time I used my own text editor to write my story, I discovered some new enhancements that just had to be done, and finally when I reached the enhancement saturation point, and had about two pages of my story written, distraction #2 hit me: I thought, won't it be nice if I have a platform to display the fecundity of my mind to the world, if and when such fecundity occurred? Thus started my next journey: creating the web site www.mystacki.com, which writers can use to display "stacks" of their work.

Every good story should have a happy ending and mine does too. My fictional story "The Donkey Lane," is no longer fictional, an abstract Platonic idea up there in the sky: Its been written. Please do read it and provide feedback. "The Donkey Lane" http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RA3UD20

5 comments

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Dude your story is hilarious. Totally enjoyed it. Keep writing.
I agree. You write well. Make this into a series.
Thanks for your appreciation guys. I've written programming books so writing a story would be easy I thought. Creative writing is similar to programing I told myself. Writing has grammar, software has syntax; writers plot their stories, we engineers create architecture diagrams. But there are important differences as I found out. We engineers are proud of our knowledge software patterns but writers snub their nose at word-patterns, calling them clichés. Why, George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" shook my belief system to the very core! The pinnacle of our skill set is our ability to abstract objects, and the highest animal in our food chain, the software architect is paid big bucks because he can make "John" a "Man". Our abstract objects are like the Platonic archetypes: if there is John, then there is an archetypal form of John called "Man" up there in the sky. But writers snub their noses at abstractions. We want to know about John, not "Man" they say; show & tell, they say; be concrete and not abstract, they say.

These writers, these omnipotent, omnipresent gods, are in the minds of all their characters at the same time. Natural laws do not bind them: John can slip from the past to the present tense whenever he likes; but for an engineer if a font is out of place, or if he uses a hex code not specified in the style guide, the wrath of the QA department is upon him. We are the ants, the workers, the technicians forever bound to technical specs, UX and style guides. Writers have the magical "voice," which their characters echo. The closest we poor engineers can get to articulating a "voice" is through a spirited /debug comment/ which is an inadequate substitute because, mindful of the peer review, we dare not be too spirited in our comments.

As both an author and a software engineer I have to object to your thought that software engineers do not have a voice in what they write. My programming voice is every bit as strong as my writing voice, stronger even for I've been an engineer longer. I control variable and function names, the way the code looks on the screen, the way that it reads. If you think software writers have no voice you just haven't found yours yet.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr argued that all good stories follow the same mechanics. Literature is full of patterns though.

That's why we also have the 3 act structure, and the highest pattern of all, the Heros journey (check out Bruce Campbell). A good pattern is the 3 whys of character development: who is this guy? What does he want? Why do I give a shit?

Also, not all writers hate abstractions. Check out Umberto Eco.