Engineering as a creative pursuit

Growing up, I was almost unconsciously tracked into the same advanced classes as all of the other little girls — English, social studies, art. I loved it. I thrived. And clearly, because I’m blogging about my life and thoughts in advance of a book release, I am an artist, in whatever sense of the word you like.

But as a child, the world taught me that’s all I was. I could not be an artist and also good at math or interested in physics or curious about engineering. There were two types of brain you could have, and I clearly had the creative, writerly one. And this was a great thing!

It pains me every time I see someone joke about being bad at math, because I once truly believed I was. Because I believed I had to be, in order to be good at the things I valued.

I believed it until my sheer stubbornness and desire to be the best — something rattled harshly out of me at one of America’s so-called elite universities, but that’s another blog post — drove me to take AP Calculus. AP Calculus led to Multivariate Vector Calculus led to Introduction to Computer Science led to two Computer Science degrees and a career in machine learning, and everyone who knew me as a kid was left blinking, confused, wondering where the artsy girl they knew went.

Escaping from the idea that I could not craft stories if I also reveled in statistics took me half of my bachelor’s degree. I stumbled through two years of seeking a middle ground, some way I could be a serious “techy” and happy “fuzzy” at the same time (the rather blunt divisions my university’s culture imposed upon all undergrads). I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that I was not serious about stories — aided, surely, by how busy I was in college, unable to lose myself in a good book for months at a time. I took only the computer science classes I deemed most suitable for a creative person, those interested in user experience and frontend design.

Finally, I had to admit that I hated those classes and a book-less life. I wanted to conjure characters every night as I fell asleep; I wanted to workshop fantastical worlds; I wanted to write low-level code, hyper-optimized to run on tiny embedded devices.

These things are not orthogonal. Learning to think like an engineer, holding immense amounts of information in my mind at once, tossing it all up in the air and dividing it into little pieces that I can fit together as it comes back down — all of these things serve me well in writing as in software engineering. I feel the same thread of blissful panic when confronted with a bug I cannot trackdown in my code as when I’ve written myself into a corner and cannot, for the moment, see a way out for my characters. When I sit down to edit a hundred thousand words of raw, first-draft prose, it feels a lot like coming back to nicely written code that I know doesn’t run.

Don’t fall for the false left-brain, right-brain dichotomy. Let yourself find the elegance in math as in art, the logic in art as in math. At least contemplate that if you want to be good at something you can be, even if it feels outside the range of things you’re meant to do. My first stories and first programs were equally terrible. I hope neither are any longer.