Why I Write?
I enjoy writing creative things. I enjoy crafting a narrative from beginning to end and bringing together distinct and separate elements into one cohesive story. I think more than anything I am a storyteller. I don’t need to tell the story just in terms of words, but I can convey it through pictures. For that reason, I have always admired film as a medium. I believe writing is a form of physical memory. It is translating your thoughts into a fixed form and in a place that they can exist without you. They are creations to mark that something has occurred.
All stories have some logical form. In a sense, a story is a computer program. Stories are algorithmic. They follow sequentially in order in some cases. As I study computer science, I can see the parallels between the two. Programming consists of decision structures: conditional if/else statements and loops. Programming consists of objects. In stories, there are characters. For all intents and purposes, they are the same. A character will follow some algorithm. They will interact with some situation and then they will act according to some rule. This is the same conditional statement that you would find in a program. A character will repeat these situations and they will grow in some manner as they iterate through scenes. I realized I have been programming for as long as I can remember. I just haven’t been programming in C or in Java, but in English in the form of story…
