The document discusses how writing code and telling stories are similar. It provides advice from various authors on writing and storytelling such as breaking large tasks into smaller pieces, writing shitty first drafts, and rewriting to remove unnecessary parts. The document emphasizes that beauty and simplicity are defenses against complexity and that the goal is to make the final product look easy to create.

1. Does Your Code Tell A Story?
H. Alan Stevens
A Desultory Philippic On Code Clarity

3. Contact Me
Email/IM: alanstevens@gmail.com
Blog: http://halanstevens.com
Twitter: @alanstevens

4. David Gelernter
Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology
Beauty is more important in
computing than anywhere else
in technology because software
is so complicated.
Beauty is the ultimate defense
against complexity.

5. Beauty is the
ultimate defense
against complexity

7. Good ideas
come slowly

8. Busyness leads to
little sharp staccato
ideas instead of big
slow ideas
Brenda Ueland

9. Writing is:
• Telepathy
• Refined Thinking
• Seduction

10. You must freely
and recklessly
make new mistakes

11. You need a tolerance for
having no idea where
your thing is going.
Merlin Mann

12. When I write, I feel like
an armless, legless man
with a pen in his mouth.
Kurt Vonnegut

13. E. L. Doctorow
Writing a novel is like driving
a car at night.
You can only see as far as
your headlights, but you can
make the whole trip that way.

14. Stories are
found things.
Stephen King

15. You won't see how to
do it until you see
yourself doing it.
David Allen

16. Read a lot.
Write a lot.
Stephen King

17. It’s not the writing part
that’s hard.
It’s the sitting down to
write.
Stephen Pressfield

18. The secret of getting
ahead is getting started.
Mark Twain

19. 1. breaking your complex
overwhelming tasks into small
manageable tasks
2. then starting on the first one
Mark Twain
The secret of getting started is

20. Give Yourself
Short Assignments

21. “All I’m gonna’ do is…”

23. Write shitty
first drafts
Annie Lamont

24. The first draft is
the child’s draft.

25. Begin to write in
the dumb, awkward
way that an animal
cries out in pain.
Natalie Goldberg

26. You must feel that you
have permission to write
the worst junk in the world
and it would be okay.
Natalie Goldberg

27. Perfectionism is the voice
of the oppressor, the
enemy of the people.
It is the main obstacle to
your shitty first draft.
Annie Lamont

28. The counterfeit innovator is
wildly self confident.
The real one is scared to death.
Stephen Pressfield

29. Three Kinds Of Drafts
• The first draft is the “down draft” just get
it down.
• The second draft is the “up draft” clean it
up.
• The third draft is the “dental draft” where
you carefully inspect each tooth.

32. When you write a story, you're
telling yourself the story.
When you rewrite, your main job is
taking out all the things that are
not the story.
Stephen King

33. Write with the door closed.
Rewrite with the door open.
Stephen King

34. The danger is greatest when
the finish line is in sight.
Stephen Pressfield

38. Once you know what the story
is and get it right, as right as
you can anyway, it belongs to
anyone who wants to read it.
Stephen King
!

39. When you finally realize what your
program is doing, you have to go back
and make it look like you knew that all
along.
Make it look like it was easy to write
this program, even if it wasn’t.
Ward Cunningham
“Mastering the Craft of Programming”
http://railslab.newrelic.com/2009/09/15/ward-cunningham-aboutus-org

40. Beauty is the
ultimate defense
against complexity

41. Thanks For Listening!
Email/IM: alanstevens@gmail.com
Blog: http://halanstevens.com
Twitter: @alanstevens