Did you know that before he "arrived" as a writer of fiction (thanks to the Edgar Sawtelle phenomenon) David Wroblewski earned his living as a writer and developer of software? I don't think many of us--even those of us who earn a living typing words into computers--appreciate that there is a creative connection between the two disciplines, but, thanks to an interview with Mr. Wroblewski, conducted by Gil Adamson (you can find it at the back of the paperback edition of the novel), I have a new appreciation for the common imaginative ground between these two types of writing.
In the interview, Wroblewski makes a startling observation (startling, at least, to those of us non-techies): "every piece of software that's ever been developed is posed in terms of metaphor." That's to say, programmers explain new pieces of software metaphorically not only to consumers (the example he gives: here is your "desktop") but also to each other.
Wroblewski confesses that, whether it's writing software or fiction, he is "addicted to metaphor," which helps explain, in part, where the book's shimmering imagery comes from. I think he's an great example of the ideal that Vladamir Nabokov (who also excelled in another discipline--in his case, lepidoptera, the study of moths and butterflies) articulated a long time ago: "A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist"--a nice reversal, that, of the received ideas we have of what C.P. Snow used to call "the two cultures."
Expect more arresting insights and imagery when David Wroblewski reads Monday night.
Posted on
Mon, January 25, 2010
by Robert Cremins