Writing as Making

In my profile, I talk about composing music, words, and code; about the deep similarity I see in those activities. All of those endeavours are good ways to explore making, but in this conversation I'm going to focus on writing.

Rather like the three bears' porridge, software is too hot because there are a great many practitioners and the approach I plan to take is not sufficiently technical; music is too cold because as a largely self-taught composer I'm not well-enough versed in the conversation to have much to add; but writing is just right: it's something with which most people have some familiarity as both producers and consumers.

There are many kinds of writing. We'll focus here on long-form fiction (novels) where there's sufficient scope to make something non-trivial.