A writer's honest look at a culture that talks in pull requests, and the slow discovery that words still have a place in it.
When someone asks what I do, I say I'm a writer, and I watch their face adjust. Sometimes the adjustment is polite interest. Sometimes it's a small, almost invisible step back, as if they've just realized I'm not the person they should be talking to. Then comes the follow-up question, and it's almost always the same one: "Oh, so are you working on an app?" or "Are you in tech?"
I usually laugh and say, "Sort of." The honest answer is that I write for founders, coaches, and B2B tech and AI companies. I ghostwrite their articles and newsletters, help shape their ideas into something readable, and turn their expertise into words other people will trust. But the moment I mention technology, the conversation tilts. The attention drifts toward the people who build the product, and I become the person who describes it afterward.
I want to be clear that I don't resent the engineers. Some of the people I respect most can take a tangled problem and make it work. But there is a particular ache that comes from living in a world where the most celebrated skill is the one you don't have, and where your own craft is sometimes treated as decoration added after the real work is done.
The Scoreboard Problem
Coding gives people a scoreboard. A program either runs or it doesn't. A bug is found, fixed, and marked closed. There's a satisfying clarity to it, a green checkmark that tells you something is true.
Writing offers no such clarity. I can spend three weeks on a chapter, read it back, feel that it works, and still wonder whether anyone will care. A good sentence doesn't compile. A paragraph that makes someone cry doesn't trigger a notification. The results of my work often arrive quietly, weeks or months later, in the form of an email from a client saying, "This is exactly what I meant," or a reader writing that they stayed up too late finishing a story.
For a long time, I measured my value by the loudness of the room I was in. In rooms full of developers, my work looked soft. In rooms full of founders talking about AI, I felt like the person who arrived after the revolution to write the press release. That comparison did real damage, because it made me forget what I actually bring.
Why I Studied What I Studied
I studied Mass Communication, and I chose it because I was fascinated by how messages move. Why does one story spread and another vanish? Why does a company's announcement feel cold while another feels like a conversation with a friend? Why do some people trust a voice immediately while others have to be convinced?
When I was younger, I thought the answers to these questions were a bit academic, the kind of thing you study and then leave behind when you enter "the real world." I was wrong. The real world runs on messages. Every product, no matter how technical, has to be explained to somebody. Every system needs a name, a manual, an onboarding flow, a reason for a stranger to click the button in the first place.
Behind every great piece of software is someone who had to decide what to say about it.
The Night Shift of a Fiction Writer
Here is something I don't always tell people at networking events. I write fiction too, and I do most of it at night.
Ghostwriting pays the bills, and it's meaningful work, but it's also work with a shape that belongs to someone else. I'm writing in another person's voice, toward their goals, with their name on the byline. Fiction is different. It's the place where the voice is mine, the stakes are mine, and the questions are the ones I can't answer any other way.
On some nights I sit at my desk after a long day of client drafts and wonder if I'm wasting time. There are moments when the novel I'm writing feels like a private hobby in a world that rewards only what can be shipped, sold, or scaled. A romance manuscript doesn't look like innovation on a slide deck. A story about a grieving character doesn't have a dashboard.
And yet, when I reread a scene that finally works, the feeling is unmistakable. It's the same feeling a developer must get when a stubborn function finally returns the right value, except mine comes with a lump in my throat. Maybe that's the thing about writing: it asks you to feel your way through the problem, and the answer is not always something you can measure.
Where I Have Found My Place
The most useful thing I've learned is that writers and coders are not really rivals. We are often working on the same problem from opposite ends.
An engineer can build a tool that does something remarkable. But someone still has to explain why it matters to the person who will use it. Someone has to write the sentence that makes a skeptical founder lean forward. Someone has to take a feature list and turn it into a story a customer can see themselves in. When a company's technology is brilliant but its message is confusing, people walk away. When the message is clear, the technology finally gets the attention it deserves.
This is where I've found belonging. Not at the center of the loudest conversation about code, but in the spaces where complicated things become understandable. In the newsletter that helps a founder think out loud. In the article that gives a reader a clear next step. In the ebook that teaches someone a skill they didn't know they could learn. In the novel that reminds a reader why stories still matter in an age of automation.
I have also come to see that the world doesn't only need more code. It needs more clarity, more empathy, and more people who can hold a difficult idea long enough to explain it honestly. Those are writerly virtues, and they are becoming more valuable, not less, as technology accelerates. The faster the machines move, the more people need someone who can slow things down and make sense of them.
The Honest Tension
I don't want to pretend this resolves neatly. There are still days when I feel like the odd one out. There are still moments when I hear a conversation about the future that assumes the only important work is technical, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from correcting it.
I've also made peace with the fact that I'm not going to become someone else to fit the room. I'm not going to pretend that a sentence is secretly a function, or that a story is just data waiting to be parsed. Those comparisons flatten both disciplines. Code is elegant in its own way. Language is elegant in a different way. Neither needs to be a ranking.
What I've decided is that my worth doesn't depend on whether I'm impressive to people who measure everything in lines of code. It depends on whether the people I write for feel understood, whether the readers I write for feel moved, and whether my own work keeps asking the questions that matter to me.
Where I Belong
So where do I belong? I used to think the answer was a place, a company, a community, or a particular kind of room. Now I think it's closer to a practice. I belong wherever meaning is being made, and that happens in many more places than the tech industry's loudest stages would have you believe.
I belong in the editing pass where a messy idea becomes clear. I belong in the quiet hour when a character finally says the thing she has been avoiding for three hundred pages. I belong in the client call where a founder admits, "I don't know how to say this," and I help them find the words. I belong in every space where someone needs a voice to carry what they can't carry alone.
If you are a writer who feels out of place in a world that seems to worship code, I want you to know that you are not imagining the tension. It's real. But it doesn't mean you are behind, or that your craft is smaller than the one getting all the attention. Someone has to explain the future, and someone has to remember what it's for.
That someone can be you. It has been me, more often than I expected, and it keeps getting clearer with every page I write.
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