{"id":52,"date":"2022-11-10T12:49:31","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T17:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2023-09-16T08:34:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-16T12:34:15","slug":"something-to-write-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Something To Write About"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/span> 8<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span>\n

I’ll gladly give you a career tomorrow for a job today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career,
I don’t want to do that. <\/p>Cameron Crowe, Say Anything<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Forty years ago today, I began my first job not<\/span><\/em> as a printer. As a kid, I learned to make first blueprints and, from there, print design specifications from my father, whose architecture practice employed me periodically and eventually full-time from junior high school through university. When after graduation, I moved to Southern California to seek my fortune as a professional writer; I supported my young family by working in a print shop in West Los Angeles. Through a series of loosely connected events\u2014the most cosmic being the proximity of the job titles Printer<\/em> and Programmer<\/em> in the want ads of the L.A. Times<\/em>\u2014I found myself the morning of November 10, 1982, ready to write my first professionally published lines of … software. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll do this for 10 years,\u201d I told my then-and-still wife Kari, with whom I had extensively counseled before shelving a four-year degree in professional writing to become a software engineer, \u201cand then<\/em> I\u2019ll write something readable.\u201d The suggestion that I was not ready to parlay my then-and-still fascination with words into an actual profession had come from the only working writers I had met in the years that led up to that moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Douglas Thayer, on his first-day teaching Writing the Novel<\/em>, harrumphed to us students, \u201cI sure hope none of you is planning to major in creative writing\u2014if there even is<\/em> such a major at this university. If a student will invest the same effort in becoming a novelist\u2014should \u2018novelist\u2019 even be considered an actual job title\u2014in my experience, unless you\u2019re Steven King and can crank out 500 pages from the back of a taxi between Soho and Times Square, being a novelist is hardly an occupation. If you put in the same energy to become, say, an engineer, odds are you will be just as successful at either. But here\u2019s the math. There are fifty courses at this university on how to become an engineer. You\u2019re sitting in the only course on how to write a novel. And if you missed that point, you won\u2019t miss this: were you to become an engineer, you\u2019d at least have something to write, something people might find interesting enough to read, even pay<\/em> to read. What human being is going to put down money for a story about a writer? I\u2019m a writer. I know lots of writers. Writers don\u2019t live interesting lives. We don\u2019t have<\/em> lives; we write<\/em>. If I were you and had designs on becoming a writer, I\u2019d walk out of that door, go straight over to the engineering building, and get myself something to write about<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orson Scott Card, another of my writing mentors, gave me the same advice but without the chip. \u201cIt took me years to write my first three novels, and I was paid so little for them that when I sold my fourth, I used the money to buy back the first three. So I didn\u2019t make a nickel until I sold that fourth book. You might write part-time for years. Maybe ever. Go find yourself something you love and write about that<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having dismissed both words of advice, I find myself the week after graduating as a book-learned writer sitting in a plush chair across from the head of an advertising agency. Besides writing novels, I had trained to write stage plays, screenplays, poems, essays, and magazine articles, basically anything with words in it, including ad copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut when I get home and walk in that door,\u201d Clack again, right on cue, \u201cthe dog\u2019s barking, the kids are crying, the last thing I want to do is write<\/em>, Vous savez?<\/em>“<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, Scott, it says in your resume you know how to write. What brings you to DDB?\u201d asks the managing director of Doyle Dane Bernbach West, the L.A. office of the Madison Avenue firm representing Cracker Jack<\/em> and Ernest and Julio Gallo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have expected this question, and my confidence soars that I can lead off my first job interview with a rehearsed answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUm, I\u2019m thinking beginning writers, at first, anyway, only write in their free time. So what better day job for an aspiring writer than to get paid for, you know, writing all day?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCome here,\u201d he says, signaling to me by standing that my one-question interview is now over. \u201cThere\u2019s someone you should meet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We make our way to another office, where I am introduced to the ad agency\u2019s head copywriter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cScott, meet Bob.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We shake hands unevenly, Bob, the actual writer; I, the pretender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBob, Scott wants to write ad copy during the day, so when he gets home, he can write, what, screenplays at night?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I attempt a facial gesture that might have passed for sheepish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, Bob, tell Scott how many episodes of Sesame Street<\/em> you are under contract to write for the Children\u2019s Television Workshop<\/em> this year\u2014when you\u2019re not at work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh, I don\u2019t know,\u201d says Bob. \u201cI think I\u2019m up to about forty a year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd how many episodes of Sesame Street<\/em> did you write last year?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh, I don\u2019t know, maybe ten?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bob has one of those stand-up desks that looks more like an architect\u2019s drafting table than something a working writer would stand at. Except there is nothing on its broad surface to reveal its purpose except an 11 x 17 blank sheet of white paper and a couple of felt-tip markers, one black, one red.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, Scott, why don\u2019t you ask Bob why he didn\u2019t submit the other 30 episodes they would have paid him handsomely to write?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By now, it\u2019s obvious that not unlike my practiced answer, Click and Clack have performed this routine a dozen times before. I wryly accommodate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, Bob, tell me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh, I don\u2019t know,\u201d Bob goes on. \u201cI come to the office every day, stare at this piece of paper till my brain dries up, and in a good month, I might crank out, what, one<\/em> tangible idea?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No wonder he doesn\u2019t own a typewriter. (Remember, this is 1982.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s being modest,\u201d interjects Click. \u201c\u2019Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize? … We will sell no wine before its time?’\u201d Those were Bob on a slow day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut when I get home and walk in that door,\u201d Clack again, right on cue, \u201cthe dog\u2019s barking, the kids are crying, the last thing I want to do is write<\/em>, Vous savez? <\/em>My advice: if you want to write screenplays \u2026\u201d\u2014I decide, right on cue, that I no longer do\u2014\u201c\u2026 go out and do what every \u2018screenwriter\u2019 in this town does every single day: wait tables or drive a taxi. Give yourself something to write about<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So there I am, seven months after enrolling in emergency engineering school, sitting in a steel chair, staring at a green screen, juicing up my brain to write its first line, not of a screenplay, nor of a novel, but of a block of computer code linked through a series of other blocks of computer code to the manufacture of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Introduced to my first boss, I am reminded just by hearing his name how close I might have gotten to becoming an actual writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affectionally called \u2018Sixto\u2019 behind his back\u2014\u201cWhen are you gonna be done? Six hours? Six days? Six months?\u201d\u2014Paul Timon comes by to introduce himself and to give me my first writing assignment. \u201cThis software program prints out a shuttle manufacturing schedule with a report date that\u2019s up in the right-hand corner. See, right here?\u201d Paul hands me a fan-folded printout and points to where the date is. \u201cThe guys want to add something else up there, so I need you to write a routine that moves that date,\u201d he jabs at the printout, \u201cto that spot right there. Piece of cake; shouldn\u2019t take long.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My \u201cengineering school\u201d turned out to be for software<\/em> engineering, enough of it to land me a job with Rockwell Space Systems, NASA\u2019s primary shuttle manufacturer. Changing the position of the date on a parts list should not have taken even six minutes to complete. But in technical school\u2014which was my only computer experience up until then\u2014they insist that before you change even a word in someone else\u2019s code, you\u2019ve got to figure out where that word fits in the entire scheme of the program. This is because software is like anything changeful. If you\u2019re not careful, the butterfly in your code could inadvertently trigger a tsunami in someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would later be introduced to a piece of still-working code at Rockwell written for the Apollo Program twenty years earlier. It was so messed up by the time I heard about it that no one was allowed even to load it into an editor, let alone modify it. That\u2019s because nobody still at the company knew how the program tracked manufacturing work in progress. But it apparently did. \u201cChange something in the landing gear assembly, and the right-wing might fall off!\u201d Or so the legend went. But the block of code Paul asked me to tweak had not yet hardened into a complete black box, though it had lost any appearance of wholeness. Still, the code was so poorly composed that what it needed was to be completely broken down and rebuilt. And if not then, when?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if my heroic overhaul of an entire block of already working software\u2014just to move a six-digit printer field a handful of vertical inches to the south\u2014ever benefited anybody. Had \u2018the guys\u2019, whoever they were, needed the date field moved to the upper-left<\/em> corner at some point? If so, I like to think my extra effort had given the next Cool Hand junior developer a shallower hole to dig and fill back up.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Not six minutes, but sixty go by before Sixto is at my desk. \u201cReady for your next assignment?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPaul, sorry, but this code is messed up. I need to change a bunch of stuff before I fiddle with that date.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFiddle with that date\u2019,\u201d he muses. “I only need you to move<\/em> that date. How long can it take? Six minutes? Six hours? Six years<\/em>? What is there to fiddle with?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of it, “I say. \u201cThere are Go-to<\/em>\u2019s that go nowhere. There are no Perform<\/em> statements. And whoever coded the printout counted spaces when they should have used tabs. I can\u2019t work it without fixing all that \u2026 and some other things that won\u2019t make sense to whoever gets it next.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJust fix the &#$% date,\u201d Sixto mumbles as he walks away, shaking his head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I remember correctly, forty years on, that six-minute task did<\/em> take six hours. I stayed after work to finish. Even before Paul had come by, there was no going back. Writing software in those days was not like today. They stored changes in staging areas before sending them to card punchers. Incremental undo\u2019s and redo\u2019s were all but impossible to track. Once taken, my decision to rewrite the entire program and create a brand new set of punched cards had become an all-or-nothing act of fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if my heroic overhaul of an entire block of already working software\u2014just to move a six-digit printer field a handful of vertical inches to the south\u2014ever benefited anybody. Had \u2018the guys\u2019, whoever they were, needed the date field moved to the upper-left<\/em> corner at some point? If so, I like to think my extra effort had given the next Cool Hand junior developer a shallower hole to dig and fill back up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what if that bit of software, like the untouchable Apollo code, was never to be looked at again? What if\u2014Gasp! This truthfully just<\/em> occurred to me 40 years later\u2014what if Sixto gave me a non-production piece of code just to practice on my first day as a software engineer? What if knowing how brittle the actual code was, he would only allow me to make changes in what today we would call a test environment\u2014a dummy program with no connections or consequences to actual manufacturing operations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never looked at that code again, and not long after my principled refusal to follow Paul\u2019s orders, he assigned me a mentor\u2014despite my insubordination, because of it?\u2014whose humility, patience, and trembling hands opened effectual doors for me that I am still passing through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The language of the software program whose date I fiddled with was of a kind Rockwell had co-developed with IBM during the Apollo days. The first hierarchical database, IMS, for Information Management System<\/em>, powered some of the systems NASA used to send astronauts to the moon. At the dawn of the Space Shuttle Era, a Rockwell engineer named Ervin Lester had worked with IBM to devise a new software language based on a shift away from hierarchical databases. A few days after my all-or-nothing, date-changing, Sisyphus-busting, prima donna, first-day-on-the-job performance not<\/em> as a printer but as a printout engineer<\/em>, Erv educated me on the marvels of what he haltingly explained was a relational database language<\/em>. Called ISARS, for Information Storage and Retrieval System<\/em>\u2013IBM would later rename it SQL\u2013Erv\u2019s little test language formed the basis for what would become the most widely used query system on the planet and remains so four decades later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That little language, and Erv\u2019s kindness in revealing it to me, led me to a systems engineering role at IBM and ultimately\u2013albeit 30 years later than planned\u2013this piece of writing. As I now have something to write about<\/em>, my next adventure could involve learning to write something someone might actually read<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That you have come this far, I thank you for your pains and hope you will return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/span> 8<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll gladly give you a career tomorrow for a job today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-odyssey","tag-introduction"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Hollywood.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}