Category: Great Writing

Great Writing — Why the Lucky Stiff

Programming computers is a serious business. It is a business involving tens of thousands of workers across thousands of companies, all busy making and spending hundreds of billions of dollars. It is an industry that I happen to have been in for most of my adult life.

You can see the seriousness of software development in the books about programming. They’re often big, weighty tomes, packed full of material that will be outdated within a few years.

What you do not find in typical software books is humor, silliness, or even mild fun. While programmers might occasionally wax poetic about “code as art,” it is art underpinned by logic and exacting precision. Software must be precisely written in order to work correctly. Unnecessary ornamentation is not generally considered a good thing when it comes to programming.

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Why the Lucky Stiff is a programmer. Or at least the online pseudonym of one (often shortened to just _why). I first discovered him the way many people did, through a book that he wrote called Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.

This strange book title, authored by this strange pseudonym, immediately caught my interest because it is so unlike the serious programmers and programming books that I have become familiar with throughout my career. The book doesn’t begin with a forward, with acknowledgements or a table of contents or a summary to sell you on what you’re about to learn.

It begins with comics. Weird comics. “An elf and his pet ham.” Pixel art and old pictures taken out of context and given captions.

When we get to the second chapter (page 2) and some actual text, it apes the format of a “normal” programming book, but continues to be absurd. The opening blurb sells the book by explaining that it will make us cry over the beauty of this programming language. There’s an extremely long sidebar (and dear God, programming books love sidebars), to talk about what the author will “do with the massive proceeds from this book,” which is, in fact, written under an open license that lets anyone do anything they want with it.

The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to a shaggy dog story with a literal shaggy dog, an explanation of how learning the Ruby programming language will make you a better person, and another nonsensical story to explain why the book has cartoon foxes. It’s a pretty accurate introduction to what you’ll be getting in the rest of the book.

The (Poignant) Guide does eventually settle down into some actual code examples and explanations. However, as you get further along, the code seems to be less and less of the book, while the bizarre stories and long-winded sidebars take up more and more of the text.

The truth is that, even if you’re a programmer familiar with other languages, the guide is not actually all that helpful for learning the Ruby programming language. It’s a fever-dream of non-sequiturs, silly stories and comics that happens to include some programming instruction. When I first read it, it inspired me to seek out other resources to learn Ruby, but it wasn’t enough by itself to really get a grasp on the language.

So what was the guide trying to be? Is it a post-modern masterpiece? An allegory? Just some weird stories that a programmer wrote down for fun? Maybe it wants to be a mish-mash of all of these things.

Why the Lucky Stiff

I only learned about _why after the fact.

_why developed many projects in the Ruby language, some larger, some smaller, some popular and some very niche. Over the years, his philosophies became more apparent through his writings, bloggings, twitter and projects.

He didn’t seem to put much stock in the serious programming that is the norm in the industry. He made useful tools, but he also just goofed around a lot in his literary projects and in his code. From writings like The Little Coder’s Predicament, we glimpse his frustration with the pain and complexity of “serious coding” and a desire to get back to basics: just hacking on things because they’re fun and interesting, and not worrying so much about doing it the “right” way.

I do not write tests for my code. I do not write very many comments. I change styles very frequently. And, most of all, I shun the predominant styles of coding because that would go against the very essence of experimentation. In short: all I do is muck around.

A letter from _why

Many people found inspiration in _why’s hacking and in his philosophy. Some were just in it for the cartoon foxes and the ham. And, of course, all the comics and goofy stories and non-sequiturs irritated a lot of people who didn’t get it.

Interestingly, as _why became more well-known, he remained pseudonymous. Even when he spoke at the occasional software conference or showed up to some real-life community event, he went by his online moniker. For the most part, nobody seemed to mind or think too much about it. It was just another fun quirk on top of all the others. But it turned out to maybe be important, because one day, _why disappeared.

Exile

_why didn’t just disappear. He removed all the evidence of his existence. He deleted all of his projects, his website, and his Twitter account. There was no warning. Nobody saw it coming.

If he was a somewhat divisive character before this, he became outright controversial in the wake of his disappearance. There were many people who used and relied on his projects, and many who simply felt abandoned by an important parasocial figure.

Whether or not there were more personal reasons for the emotion, most of the community’s anger manifested as irritation that _why had taken down all of his code. Broken and buggy dependencies on other people’s code are a perpetual problem when it comes to software development, and many members of this relatively close-knit community felt betrayed as they were forced to clean up all of _why’s missing projects.

Of course, we know by now that nothing ever disappears completely on the internet, and it turns out that most everything, from his code to his comics to his writings, were preserved in various electronic nooks and crannies. In time, pretty much all of his work was reassembled.

With the projects restored, much of the buzz of the event died down. There were some rumors that _why might have been doxxed, and this was what led to his self-imposed exile from the Ruby community and the internet at large. That still left the question of why he was so worried about remaining pseudonymous in the first place. The mystery of _why’s disappearance still bothered some people, but no clear answers were forthcoming, especially from _why himself.

Return

Three or four years went by. Why the Lucky Stiff became just another interesting anecdote in the vast morass of the internet. People occasionally found his writings (re-hosted by others). People stepped in to take over his projects.

It was a bit of a shock when he returned, and he did so in exactly the sort of bizarre and cryptic fashion that anyone familiar with his work would expect. He left a printer queue that provided a series of hidden messages. The internet, being what it is, immediately took up the puzzle, along with renewed arguments over whether _why should be celebrated or reviled.

The eventual results were nearly a hundred pages—another book, of sorts, which was eventually named CLOSURE. As far as I know, it’s the last thing written by _why.

This feels like the ultimate distillation of the _why aesthetic. It’s not wrapped up in being a programming manual. It’s just a series of strange jottings and stranger stories. But here, clearly, it’s not entirely random and surreal. The text itself makes reference to _why’s disappearance, the opinions of the crowd about him, and itself, wrapping around in a sort of literary ouroboros. It’s clearly allegorical, and sometimes even comes out and says things directly. But it’s also contradictory.

NOW: Lay into the printer queue thing. Just lait on thick with the “4 to 11” just over and over. Try to remember, this is the guy’s only chance to recover from annihilating self-sabotage, okay?

_why – CLOSURE

Closure

_why’s writings stand on their own. They’re a fascinating mix of surrealism, silliness, and occasionally deep thoughts. _why is a talented, if eccentric writer. He combines comics, drawings, stories and anecdotes into something cohesive.

However, I think _why is one of those writers that can’t be properly read without understanding some of the context around his writings. Being a programmer certainly helps, but his work, his exile and his return all play into his writings, especially CLOSURE.

We’ll never know exactly what motivated _why, what exactly made him go away, or what he thought about all of this. We only have his writings to go by. I suspect those are more interesting and satisfying than the plain, unvarnished truth. And so does he.

In CLOSURE, _why talks about reading all the works of Kafka, who asked a friend to burn all of his work when he died:

Of course he didn’t want them burned.

This was just Kafka, writing his own death.

This ending has his signature on it.

Reality’s a kind of medium, maybe greater than paper.

Further Reading

Great Writing — Good Bones

I don’t read or write a lot of poetry. I’m more of a dabbler. However, I know that poetry is important.

Where fiction has all its twisted plots and detailed characters, poetry (at its best) is a distillation of pure emotion. It’s a few precisely chosen words, polished to razor sharpness so they can cut into your soul. Poetry shows sloppy fiction writers like me just how exacting each word can be.

Maggie Smith is a poet I found only recently, but her work exemplifies the things I like best about poetry. I don’t know if Good Bones would have hit me the same way before I had children, but it certainly hits me hard now.

Good Bones

Go read Good Bones, by Maggie Smith, at the Poetry Foundation website.

The Things We Don’t Tell Our Children

It starts with the things we don’t tell our children. Smith talks about the things she keeps from her children four times in seventeen lines. She keeps the things she did and doesn’t want them to know about. She hides that the world is at least half terrible. There’s a quiet desperation there: the world is bad and I’m part of it. I’m terrible too. I’d rather my children not know that.

Why is the world terrible?

“For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.” What an apt metaphor.

“For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.” Jesus fucking Christ. No wonder you don’t tell your children. While this is literally hyperbole, figuratively it feels true. If we take everything out there in the world and put it all on the scales of good and evil, does it balance out? An awful lot of the time it feels like it doesn’t.

Selling Something Broken

At the end, there’s a twist: “I’m trying to sell them the world.”

As parents, that’s what we do. Children ask a lot of questions, and all too often they’re asking about why things seem to be so awful. We each have our own internal parenting algorithm, refined over time, to provide information, sometimes truth, sometimes opinion. Maybe even lies, when we feel backed into a corner.

We tell our kids about the world, but we can’t resist “selling” it. We want them to be happy. We want them to make things better, even when we helped cause the problems and failed to clean them up ourselves. We need them to have hope, even when we ourselves don’t have any.

“This place could be beautiful. You could make this place beautiful.”

The Moral of the Story

Every time I read this poem, I change my mind about whether it’s supposed to be hopeful or despairing. Of course, it doesn’t have to be entirely one or the other, but I feel like I ought to be able to suss out an opinion. This is what keeps the oft-derided field of literary criticism alive: that feeling that we need to figure out what the work is “trying” to say.

Ultimately, I think the poem may not have an opinion. It’s just describing the way things are. There might be a lesson in there for us. When you write about something, you don’t have to inject your opinion, positive or negative. Sometimes you can just tell it like it is, a reporter on a made-up world. Leave it to the reader to decide how they should feel about it.

Great Writing — Can You Say Hero?

Sometimes a piece of writing just punches me in the gut. Tom Junod’s 1998 article for Esquire Magazine, a sort of biography of Fred Rogers titled “Can You Say Hero,” is one of those pieces.

Go read it.

(Or you can go here if you’d prefer to pay Esquire for the privilege.)

I think it’s probably my favorite bit of non-fiction writing, and it’s written in a way that fiction writers can still learn plenty from. While it has the advantage of profiling a wholly remarkable man, it’s not really about Mr. Rogers. Sneakily, it’s about Tom himself, and the profound impact that spending time with Mr. Rogers had on him.

Junod is a craftsman writer. A lot of the magic of this story lies in the technical execution — the structure and the choice of words — at least as much as the actual content they’re conveying.

The Hook

We’ve looked before at great hooks and how they can pull the reader inexorably into a story. This one is phenomenal.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy’s brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as “Young Rabbit,” or even “Rabbit”; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn’t know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray.

It starts with the classic storybook opening, and a simple declaration: there’s a little boy, and he loves Old Rabbit.

That leads to the vast, meandering second sentence, eight commas- and semicolons-worth of evocative description of Old Rabbit through the boy’s eyes. In that sentence, I know what Old Rabbit looks like. I know how it would feel, held close; how it would smell.

The last sentence of the opening paragraph introduces the conflict and the tension of the story. It’s a tension that won’t be resolved until the final paragraph.

Once Upon A Time

The story is littered with the trappings of children’s stories. Junod uses the phrase “once upon a time” liberally, to the point where he gives it a bit of a nod and a wink with “ON DECEMBER 1, 1997—oh, heck, once upon a time.”

He gives the impression of a breathless child’s rambling story by starting sentences with conjunctions and piling clauses upon clauses. Like Lemony Snicket, Junod helpfully defines words for his audience, doing it as much as an excuse for poetic emphasis as for actual definition.

Thunderstruck means that you can’t talk, because something has happened that’s as sudden and as miraculous and maybe as scary as a bolt of lightning, and all you can do is listen to the rumble.

These little things are responsible for a lot of the voice, but they’re surface ornamentation. The deep structure of the story is that of puzzle pieces, slowly fitted together to form a larger picture.

The story is a sequence of short vignettes – some from Tom’s time with Mr. Rogers, some from his past, some from stories about Mr. Rogers, picked up along the way. But these strands weave together, one referencing another, referencing another; building up in layers.

When we get to the end, it makes perfect sense. It fits. Every part of the story fed into that moment, in the same way it feels like all of Tom’s time with Mr. Rogers led to that moment in his own life.

The Frame

The story doesn’t begin with Mr. Rogers. It begins with a boy who has lost his stuffed rabbit, and prays that it will return to him. The first time, the rabbit is found. The second time, it is not. A microcosm, perhaps, for how people fall out of faith.

It’s only when Mr. Rogers asks Tom if he ever had a puppet or toy or stuffed animal that we learn (or confirm our suspicion) that the boy at the start of the story is Tom himself. The rabbit becomes the through-line of the story.

We’re reminded of it a third time, when Mr. Rogers talks to a little girl with a stuffed Rabbit. Junod makes sure it’s front-of-mind. It’s the same reason he leaves the question unanswered, “What kind of prayer has only three words?”

We don’t find out until the very end; the end of the story that started with the boy and the rabbit.

The Words

While I appreciate the structure of the story, it would be negligent to not mention the joy to be found in Junod’s delightful little turns of phrase.

The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds…

And then, in the dark room, there was a wallop of white light, and Mister Rogers disappeared behind it.

…this skinny old man dressed in a gray suit and a bow tie, with his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo, like a dance instructor—there was some kind of wiggly jazz in his legs, and he went flying all around the outside of the house…

 …in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

What is grace? I’m not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella.