Engineers Writing Fiction: Do We Think Differently?

I’ve spent most of my life around code.

When something doesn’t work, you don’t argue with it. You don’t try to emotionally justify it. You run it through a compiler, a linter, a test suite, and the system tells you — very plainly — where it breaks. Sometimes, on the good days, it even tells you why.

I’ve realised that I approach parts of writing in the same way.

When I’ve handed drafts to beta readers, I’ve said some version of this almost verbatim:

If you like it, that’s great. But if something doesn’t work, please tell me. I’m too close to the source material — my brain fills in gaps that aren’t actually on the page.

That’s a classic failure mode. When you’ve lived inside a world long enough, you stop seeing what’s actually written and start seeing what you meant to write. Fresh readers act a bit like external validators: they don’t know the internal state, so they can only react to what’s actually observable.

That’s incredibly valuable.

Broken Code, Broken Ideas

In software, anything that doesn’t work eventually gets thrown out and replaced with something that does. You might salvage a function or an algorithm, but the system itself has to pass its checks.

I tend to treat story ideas the same way — with one small concession to sentimentality.

If something breaks under scrutiny, I don’t try to make it work or pile explanation on top of it. I cut it.

The difference is that instead of deleting it outright, it goes into a folder. Scenes, concepts, half-built worlds — all archived in case there’s a piece worth reusing later. Not because the idea was “almost right,” but because it might be right in a different system.

That instinct — to discard rather than rationalise — feels very natural to me. And it’s one of the places where I suspect engineering and writing sometimes pull in different directions.

Different Instincts Under Uncertainty

A lot of writers I admire are willing to live with ambiguity for a long time. They’ll follow emotional payoff first and trust revision to reconcile the logic later. That approach still makes me uneasy.

Engineers tend to do the opposite.

We’re trained to look for failure modes early. To ask: What assumptions does this require? What breaks if someone pokes it over here? What only works if you don’t look too closely?

Neither approach is better. They just optimise for different things.

But living in the overlap can be uncomfortable.

An idea might feel right — thematically strong, emotionally resonant — and still violate a constraint badly enough that I can’t ignore it. When that happens, the engineer part of my brain wins. The idea goes.

Not because it lacks heart, but because I can’t build on a system that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny for very long.

Background Noise (and Imposter Syndrome)

I don’t come from a traditional writing background. I don’t have an English degree. Most of my day-to-day prose practice, historically, looked more like:

“At your convenience, could you please test X and let me know if you encounter any issues.”

Imposter syndrome shows up from time to time.

But I do have a lot of practice thinking about systems, constraints, and long-term consequences. And I’ve spent years running tabletop role-playing campaigns that stretched across years — tracking cause and effect, delayed payoffs, and decisions that only matter many sessions later.

That kind of thinking transfers surprisingly well.

Why Hard Sci-Fi Fits

I like science. I like rules. I like worlds where consequences propagate instead of evaporating.

Hard science fiction gives me a framework where constraints aren’t a burden — they’re the point. The story isn’t about clever technology so much as what happens when people push against real limits and have to live with the outcomes.

That’s the space where my instincts feel aligned rather than at odds.

An Open Question

I’ve been curious whether others feel this same friction.

Do people who come from engineering, science, or programming notice different instincts kicking in when they write fiction? Do they kill ideas earlier? Do broken concepts bother them more than rough prose?

And do people from more traditional writing backgrounds find this way of thinking alien — or does it sound familiar under a different name?

I don’t think there’s a right answer here. But I do think the overlap is an interesting place to work — and an uncomfortable one in ways that might be useful.

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