I think comparing coding to writing works because they both show a flow of thought. How you write and how you code depends on the way thoughts flow from you. I feel that things like verbosity, word choice, sentence structure, etc. are very similar to logic choices and order of operations.

Also, both writers and programmers do a ton of refactoring. Most authors will go over their writing 2 or 3 time, eliminating words and sentences that are unnecessary, combining and shortening sentences to make them more readable, etc. A lot of refactoring happens in both.