"The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer"
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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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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