For the first three months of 2025, I joined a daily Zoom call with 11 other students and learned how to code. Our trainer took us through the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, introduced us to React and Tailwind, then moved rapidly along to SQL, PHP, and OOP, before finishing up with the magic of Laravel. It was one of the most intense and brilliant three-month periods of my life.
It also felt pretty familiar, in ways I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been writing for theatre since I was in my teens; I celebrated my 20th birthday at the performance of one of my plays. I took the creative path early. And even though the content of my plays revolves around sci-fi, tech, and AI, I still assumed that diving into a STEM subject would feel like a completely different journey.
But as any developer will confirm, coding is creative. So here are some ways writing code feels exactly like writing for theatre (and one way that it doesn’t).
1. It’s hard to call yourself a developer.
When are you allowed to claim a title? People struggle with not feeling legitimate enough to call themselves a playwright because they haven’t had a full production yet, or they’ve never been paid to do it, or they have been paid but only profit-share, not properly, not an actual fee.
Our first project on the software course was to create a portfolio website, and writing the words ‘I’m a software developer’ took me almost as long as wrestling with flexbox. But in the theatre world I would confidently tell anyone that if you’ve written a play, then congrats, you’re a playwright! Even if it’s not been staged yet, even if you’re not getting paid. You’re a playwright now, and even though other people might have opinions on how good you are at it, they certainly can’t say you’re not doing the work. So if I’ve won my flexbox wrestling match and finished an actual project, I hope I get to say I’m a developer.
2. You can’t do it (all) alone.
Playwrighting, and writing in general, is thought of as a solitary artform. The lonely artist, in their freezing garret, scribbling away by candlelight. I’ve certainly spent a lot of time working alone, staring at my notes and the walls and out of the window, wondering when a draft is going to magically finish itself. But the goal is the rehearsal room, where you share that work with a group of people who put it on its feet, test it to its limits, try it a dozen different ways, and get it ready for an audience.
There’s a perception of the solo coder, heroically working alone at their five-screen array in the middle of the night. And again, being able to crack on independently is part of the work. But especially when you’re learning, you are very much not expected to do that work without feedback and support. Our group projects during the course were tough, but they were also the weeks where I learned the most. Like a playscript, it’s all theoretical until you’re putting it on its feet with other people.
3. Your brain carries on working on it, even when you’re not at your desk.
Oh god, the writerly guilt of abandoning your workstation and going for a walk when you should be writing, and the internal argument you have with that guilt: I am writing!! I promise!!
It’s common for playwrights to advise each other sagely that the best way to work through an unsolveable problem is to physically step away from it and do something else. Unfortunately, it’s also a canon event to receive that advice with the suspicion that it’s justifying procrastination, even though we all discover that it’s 100% true.
So it felt very familiar to struggle with a coding problem for hours, only for a solution to come to me in minutes when I finally allowed myself a break. Future Me, please let yourself procrastinate, because I don’t want to waste my one precious life trying the same broken idea over and over when all I actually need is a little walk.
And one way writing code is different to writing a play?
It either works or it doesn’t.
I love making theatre. But over the past few years, it’s worn me down. It’s a spectacularly underfunded artform (aren’t they all), and when everyone’s fighting hard to get anything made, there’s a huge pressure to guarantee what you’re making is great. But how do you guarantee that? What does a great play look like? Annoyingly, charmingly – different to everyone.
Taking three months to write to a computer has been properly, genuinely healing. A computer is not going to interpret what you meant and give you a rating out of five stars. It needs you to be explicit, and clear, and writing the right stuff. You can approach tasks in different ways, but objectively there are right ways and wrong ways.
The code will run, or it won’t. It doesn’t have to be my greatest work – it just needs to work.