5 Reasons Why Writers Should Learn to Code

I know, I didn’t believe it either.

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

I began coding mainly out of curiosity. A lot of the friends that share my coworking space are web developers, and I wanted to finally understand their conversations. Plus, one of them had mentioned Codecademy as being like Duolingo for programming languages, and I am a sucker for a gamified learning app.

I began an intro to Javascript course, not expecting to finish it, but I quickly got hooked. It felt like a good way of procrastinating, a daily puzzle for my brain. Soon though, I realized the unexpected advantages that coding could have for my career as a writer, things I had never thought about before.

1 — It will help your writing career

In this day and age, the majority of writing is destined for an online audience. This means that writing can be enriched with an entire wealth of digital features. Learning to program means that you are personally capable of combining multimedia sources to create a compelling story. Especially as a journalist, I am excited to use my developing skills to analyse data, to build web documentaries and interactive online stories. Programming opens up a world of new narrative structures that I am looking forward to playing around with. I will always love the written world, but…