Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets.
—Donald Ervin Knuth, “Interview with Donald Knuth”
The following is a transcription of part of a talk by Francine Prose, which aired on the April 26, 2017 broadcast of the OBP radio program Literary Arts: The Archive Project. It picks up about ten minutes into a recording of the talk posted on the program’s website. See also Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham.
This will probably sound like yet another banal and obvious similarity, but the fact is both fiction and non-fiction involve writing. That’s what they are. They’re about writing. And both involve, if you care about writing, a kind of obsessive attention to writing: to detail, to matters of precision, especially clarity. I mean, the most important thing to me always has been to write a completely clear, comprehensible sentence—which sounds like the easiest thing in the world. But any of you who have ever taught, for example, have probably noticed how rare this is.
And writers—most writers, many writers—are real fanatics. I mean it’s true that we can spend hours dithering about a colon, a semicolon, a comma, and so forth. And when I’ve had students—actually, Alyssa Chappell, who was just mentioned, was a student of mine, and I knew that she was going to be a real writer. She gave me a story, and she called me up that evening and said, “I need it back. I need it back.” And I said, “Well, I’ve started reading it. And it seems perfectly fine.” She said “There are five typos in it. And I can’t stand to think that you’re reading a story with typos in it.” And I knew she was the real thing.
Once, I was signing books with my friend, the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, and people were lined up for her to sign books of one of her story collections. And everyone who came to her—she opened the book to the typo, corrected it (laughter), and handed it back. It took forever. But I understood completely, the impulse to do it.
And you know, things like sentences, paragraphs, where you break a paragraph—are all extremely important. And what I found, it’s kind of hard to explain, so I will read you a little bit to try and explain what I mean; what I found is that things that seem like—and this is mostly in writing non-fiction—things that seem like decisions about plot and about character and about who characters are, which seems like they might come from actually thinking about the character, actually come from language. They’re language decisions. That is... I wish I were the kind of writer who outlined things, who knew where she was going, who knew how a book was going to end. Because those writers actually finish what they start. I’m a writer who writes one sentence after the other, and so I have drawers and closets full of unfinished novels. But what I’ve found is that often as I’m writing this way, a character will use a word, or a sentence or a phrase will pop into a character’s mind and suddenly I’ll know who that character is. In the same way when you’re talking to someone, you figure out who someone is by the way that—partly—by the way the person speaks. How they speak, what words they use, intonation, gesture, and so forth. And that happens with characters in fiction [and objects in software] as well.
And so I thought I’d read you, um, a still kind of slightly raw—this is a novel I’m working on now, um—I have about [stutter] three hundred more drafts [voice cracking] to do before its done. But, uh, this is a draft that I’ve actually given my editor. [voice shaking]
The novel’s called A Changed Man.