What Does Programming Have to Do With Writing?

After stumbling upon Paul Graham's web site, I feel like a cowboy who stopped at a random creek and found gold nuggets in the water-- Graham's essays, while mostly written about programming, embody a clear logic that for the most part applies to all creative endeavors and most definitely to writing.

In "Copy What You Like," Graham even uses writing to illustrate his point that it is too easy to imitate what is admired rather than that which you genuinely like:

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. ... The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.


He gives useful techniques for avoiding this:

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.

And the final exhortation of the essay is imperative, but sometimes difficult to remember, especially after an MFA:

You have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities. They'll lie to you on this one.