Learning to code (lol) has meant learning a lot of terms for concepts I was familiar with but didn’t know had actual names. Chief among these is “refactoring” — basically, when you’ve already got a piece of code that does what you want it to (say, make your character walk around) but you go back and change the way it’s written without affecting the end result. You might do this simply because it’s messy, or it somehow interferes with a different system you’re working on, or so many reasons I’m not even aware of because I still know so little about all of this. But the idea is that you’re tinkering under the hood in a way that anyone other than you will ideally never notice; kind of antithetical to making things in the first place, right?
Wrong!!! I’m a process-loving bitch and I always have been, especially when it comes to crafting. I’ve knitted literally dozens of sweaters for myself in the past two decades, and plenty I’ve never worn out once. Not because they’re not comfortable or don’t fit well (although there are some lumpen wonders), nor because I’m not proud of them, but because the work was already the best part. I wanted to know I could make the sweater in front of me, and I could, and I did. Sometimes I give those sweaters away; other times I frog them for their yarn; more often than not, though, they hang in my closet as sort of talismans, these sums of my time and my coaxing and my puzzle-solving. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it’s how I’ve always operated.
Over the past few weeks I improv-crocheted a slutty little top. It’s the first time I’ve done a full crochet project in years, and honestly one of a handful of times I’ve crocheted a garment — I tend to reserve it for more structural or sculptural items, like toys and blankets.
The whole time, I realized, I was refactoring, figuring out the process by which I’d put the entire thing, which was made of individual squares, together, and adjusting and reworking each time I realized something wouldn’t quite work. The actual crocheting, the depositing of stitches one after the other, probably took about half the total working time; the rest was determining how to arrange, where and how to seam for stability and clean lines, if the thing actually fit me in the first place. I had to undo and redo virtually every choice I made, because I was not even attempting someone else’s pattern but instead letting myself feel my way toward whatever this wanted to be. The work was already the best part.
It’s possible to refactor yourself into oblivion, which is what I think I can do with writing. You can tweak and rearrange and polish to the point where nobody ever sees a word, so concerned with precision that you decline to see the alchemy that happens when it hits the open air. I can sense this impulse creeping in as I learn to make games, watch myself spending weeks working on streamlining tools and creative processes instead of just sitting down and making the thing, a thing, anything. But even figuring all of that out has felt so good and so satisfying, and I’m still so new, that I’m trying to be patient and let the shape of the thing, whatever it may be, emerge naturally.
I guess what I want for myself the precision of writing without its sharp edges, the freehand of crafting with far more focus. I’m starting to see what that could look like; I’ve been slamming a bunch of very smart people’s open-source tools and libraries together over the past few weeks and getting very excited about what I’m able to make with them. It feels like when your eyes begin to adjust in the dark, when shapes all of a sudden have outlines and mass.
The top I crocheted, incidentally, might actually turn out to be better as a sort of market bag, but I don’t need to decide that right now.