It’s always been about art.

Almost everything I’ve done in my life and career has been about art.

This realization finally made its way into my thick skull only after the suffering of writing a few hundred thousand words. Before taking writing seriously, I’d always classified myself as the ‘technologist’ or ‘forever entrepreneur’.

This is certainly not true now, and if I reflect carefully, perhaps was never true.

Indeed, professionally, I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade now (even though my degrees are in mechanical engineering and physics). But engineering? Software? How can these be forms of art? I am thoroughly convinced now that any activity or profession can be treated as art. Mind you, this should probably not be at all times and in all cases. Some forms of labor don’t have to be (or shouldn’t be?), and I’ll be the first person to argue how annoying it is when something is trying to be art and it gets in the way of simple functionality.

But when we think about the upper echelons of any given craft—Messi playing soccer, Rothfuss writing The Name of the Wind, Hobb crafting the mind-boggling 16-volume (not a typo) series within the Realm of the Elderlings, Le Guin writing in an elevated register for every single line within A Wizard of Earthsea—these are all examples of craft operating at the highest levels of human achievement. To me, there is more than just ‘profession’ going on here. These are examples of the culmination of experience and decision making that is operating at both a conscious and unconscious level.

Within my software career, no matter the project or product I’ve worked on, it’s always been about the decisions, the refinements, the iterations made, in some cases, over years, on a project. Those decisions, that time taken, that is the craft. The art. Within my other endeavors, this too has been true: my prints, my photography, my multi-mountain or multi-city bike trips, those too were for the experiences of immersion; attempted expressions of forms of mastery. The analogy of engineering to art is perhaps easy to see in the form of a well-designed UI or website. But an elegant solution on a backend? A simple two-key JSON structure that forms the bedrock of an entire and extensive framework like CodeVideo? These are also forms of art in their own right.

This aspect of my philosophy—that to approach mastery and perfection in art can only be done through accumulated decisions and time—inevitably is revealed through the prose in my books. Through Ferrin’s honesty and obsession with craft, through Jor’s determination and obsession with technique... they tell the tale of what the books themselves are trying to represent.

There is a dark side to this way of thinking, however. Art is an ideal, and ‘perfect’ art is something we can strive for, but never achieve. What do I mean by this? Take the artform that is the novel for example. There are books that have sold millions, or even billions (looking at you, Harry), but who is to say among those hundreds of thousands of words (I’m saying this for any book here) that one noun, one word ordering, one piece of dialogue could have been changed just so to make the overall book better?

Certainly not me.

Even if I were to say that, perhaps another reader would prefer yet another literary variation of said piece of text. When we think about the combinations of word orderings at even novella length of 40K words... I’ve done the math, many times. The potential combinations become uncountable beyond the first few sentences¹, let alone the entire manuscript. Therefore, within the artistic expression form that is the novel, I believe to retain one’s sanity, one can only refer to an entire book and the overall experience it provides as the real benchmark. Sentence-level work, to me, is very important, but it is an impossibility to expect every single sentence in a manuscript to ever be ‘perfect’. It can only be—infuriatingly—‘good enough’.

But there is another side to this argument, a much darker question that arises out of this mindset: within art, is there truly such a level of mastery? Of perfection? In the true definitions of those words, perhaps not. And certainly not in the sense those words are achieved by the characters in some of our very novels! But perhaps that is also exactly what gives art its meaning: for any given work, it won’t (and can’t) be enjoyed by everyone, but it may be cherished absolutely by a select few.

But this focus on craft, art, and countless decisions over time is what has always driven me, regardless of vocation.

Because it’s always been about art.

Allowing fragments, punctuation, and dialogue, the arrangements of a single set of just 10 words in English reach into the millions. ↩

Footnotes