And suddenly his stereo typicalness wasn't a flaw but a critical part of his scheme. My roundabout process of learning to write has a direct parallel to my ability to program. I dreamed about doing it myself, creating a program that did incredible things. But as I became more involved with programming, I discovered some amazing things. It can't make generalizations or assumptions.
Programs are full of bugs, and most of the time they are silly, even obvious, errors.
Slowly, just like with my writing, I realized that there was nothing holy about software. That gave me the courage to try to do things I had no idea how to do. By virtue of necessity I became a programmer. Unfortunately, the printer was so new that no software supported it for graphics. So I wrote my own program that talked to the printer in graphics mode, and could open a WordStar file and print it, and insert graphics at the top, like a letterhead logo.