Life & Wisdom Quote by Russell Banks

Programming shows up here as a respectable alibi for the oldest, least glamorous part of becoming a writer: being an apprentice. Banks’ phrasing is slyly transactional. “The best thing” isn’t aesthetic pleasure or artistic freedom; it’s that writing code “rationalized” apprenticeship, making practice look like purpose. In other words, it gave him a socially legible reason to spend hours at a keyboard, revising, debugging, and trying again without having to announce, to himself or anyone else, that he was training for a vocation still widely treated as indulgence.

The subtext is class and credibility. Banks came up without the institutional runway that smooths a writer’s early years. Apprenticeship usually means time you can afford to waste: reading deeply, drafting badly, failing privately. Programming, especially in the late 20th-century moment when computers became synonymous with productivity, casts that same time as work. It converts the stigma of “trying to be a writer” into the esteem of “learning a useful skill.” You get paid, you get feedback, you get measurable progress. You also absorb discipline: syntax, structure, the unforgiving logic of small errors that break the whole.

Banks isn’t claiming code and fiction are the same. He’s pointing to a cultural hack: when art feels economically or psychologically illegitimate, you borrow legitimacy from a neighboring craft. Programming becomes the mask that lets apprenticeship happen, and the irony is that the mask may be what makes the writer possible.