I went to the end-of-the-event "thank goodness it's over" party for National Novel Writing Month (the Naperville chapter of it, anyway) over the weekend, and picked up a couple more small insights into the ways in which NaNoWriMo reminds me of software projects I'd worked on (I've written two previous posts on the subject; you can read them here and here).
First, I heard from a few people that I'm wrong to assume they start with a blank piece of paper on November 1 and just start writing like mad. Many, it seems, plan for one or two months (some longer than that). They sketch out characters and setting, come up with plot, maybe even outline the whole book so that they're all ready to start hammering out words when the month officially begins. Hmm. At this point NaNo begins to look a lot like the coding step of a software project done under an old-fashioned waterfall model, doesn't it?
Let's look at this for a moment: some forty years ago, Fred Brooks observed that coding accounts for perhaps one-fourth to one-sixth the total effort in a software project. Another quarter-to-third is taken in design and architecture (if the project's being done well), and as much as a half is spent testing and bug-fixing. So, if somebody spends two months before NaNoWriMo planning and outlining (that is, designing), and three months afterward editing (testing and fixing), then producing an actual book that's ready to submit for publication should take about six months. Of course, most NaNo participants admit to banishing all other activities during the month of November, so it might be more accurate to say they get two months' worth of work (at a more "normal" level of activity) done during the NaNo event, which would suggest an overall book cycle of two months planning, two months (at a normal pace) writing the draft, and four to six months for editing and fixing.
So what? Well, probably nothing in the case of NaNoWriMo, as people are just doing this for their own amusement. But perhaps it is a symptom of a human behavior that shows up in projects as well: the tendency to see "the project" as only the stage where something countable is being made, and thereby underestimate its overall size. NaNoWriMo, like the coding stage of a software project, is the part of the iceberg that's above the surface. Perhaps that's why so few NaNo books have made it into print: when participants finish the month of writing and see how much work remains, they just quietly give up. Rather like software projects that get into unit test, only to find out how much work actually remains, and quietly fade away.
Then again, perhaps so many NaNo novels don't ever get through editing simply because their authors aren't interested in editing. Peruse the NaNoWriMo forums, and you'll see a lot of messages in which people are already planning or counting down to next November, already talking about the next novel they're going to write. Rather like people I knew who liked to write code, but didn't particularly like to do design, architecture or testing. Go figure.
So, what's the point? I'm not sure. David Schmaltz thinks I've got enough here for another article, but so far all I've got is a series of observations, particularly observations of similarity. Where's the aha!, the insight, the point? Stay tuned...
Showing posts with label nanowrimo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nanowrimo. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
NaNoWriMo, Revisited
Two whole weeks have now elapsed since I "won" National Novel Writing Month by convincing the automated word counters that I had composed 51,000 alphabetic strings separated by blanks and punctuation. A couple posts down, I compared the NaNoWriMo process to some software projects I've seen (not necessarily successful ones), particularly the emphasis on producing quantity, the intentional avoidance of testing and fixing (that is, re-reading and editing), and the assumption that the quality can be put in later.
Since then, I've had a couple more thoughts about the process. First, I found that I am going to have to do a major restructuring of my NaNoWriMo book if I want to whip it into publishable shape. I organized the major objects (that is, the scenes and chapters) in a more or less chronological order, so the point of view flips around. However, this gives a lot of stuff away too early, and makes it hard to see the characters develop. So I'm probably going to rearrange things, so that the story is told entirely from one character's point of view up through the point where everybody's in the same place together. Then, if I can make it work, I'll go back and catch up the essentials from the other characters' points of view. Hey, if Tolkein could make it work in Lord of the Rings...
Software people have a word for this: refactoring. You've got the right collection of interacting objects, but they're arranged incorrectly. Re-arrange them, adjust the interactions, reorganize the stuff so that it works the way you want it to.
I'm still stuck on the idea that it ought to be possible to write the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo without simply ignoring quality, though. This leads me to wonder if I could apply the principles of agile software development to a book-writing sprint. The relevant concepts are these:
Since then, I've had a couple more thoughts about the process. First, I found that I am going to have to do a major restructuring of my NaNoWriMo book if I want to whip it into publishable shape. I organized the major objects (that is, the scenes and chapters) in a more or less chronological order, so the point of view flips around. However, this gives a lot of stuff away too early, and makes it hard to see the characters develop. So I'm probably going to rearrange things, so that the story is told entirely from one character's point of view up through the point where everybody's in the same place together. Then, if I can make it work, I'll go back and catch up the essentials from the other characters' points of view. Hey, if Tolkein could make it work in Lord of the Rings...
Software people have a word for this: refactoring. You've got the right collection of interacting objects, but they're arranged incorrectly. Re-arrange them, adjust the interactions, reorganize the stuff so that it works the way you want it to.
I'm still stuck on the idea that it ought to be possible to write the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo without simply ignoring quality, though. This leads me to wonder if I could apply the principles of agile software development to a book-writing sprint. The relevant concepts are these:
- You build incrementally. Each new addition represents a meaningful new "story."
- At all times, the thing you've built is functional. In the case of software, this means that you always have a working system; each addition simply extends the set of things it'll do. In the case of growing a novel, it means (I think) that you start with a simple story or scene, which is a complete tale in itself, but which grows in the telling.
- You test continually. Each new feature is accompanied by tests to assure that all the old stuff still works. I think for a high-speed novel, this would require working in teams--I read yours while you read mine, every day.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
National Novel Writing Month as a Software Project
Well, my National Novel Writing
Month project crossed the finish line the day before Thanksgiving: 50,000 words in the file (lovingly counted by NaNoWriMo's computers), a beginning, middle and end (lovingly checked by me), and something resembling a plot, characters and setting. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a "winner," though all it entitles me to is the little graphic (at right) saying I'm a winner. I'd rather have a nice fat publishing contract... Oh, wait, I already have one of those--and if I'd been paying more attention to what I should be doing, I'd have spent the month promoting The Last Protector. Oh well, writing, especially in a sort of social event context, is more fun.
Okay, so I put fifty thousand words, most of them in more-or-less grammatical sentences, into a document that (I think) tells at least the rudiments of a story. So what? To be honest, I'm not sure myself. Certainly, I don't have a novel here, at least not yet. Maybe not at all. For one thing, a novel is longer than 50K words (The Last Protector weighs in at about three times that). The Shape of Things (my current working title, subject to further change) will need to at least double in size before I consider it worthy of trying to sell.
More important, before I'd be willing to toss a manuscript at a
publisher or agent, I'd need to believe it really tells a story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, interesting characters and situations, puzzles and solutions, conflict and resolution, sin and redemption... y'know, all those things that make a novel a novel and not just a collection of unrelated events. And that's a place in which the whole NaNoWriMo philosophy sort of lets me down. The NaNo system stresses only producing a large number of words on a short schedule. The "plan" includes a quota of 1667 words a day; do this for thirty days and you'll cross the finish line on the last day. There's a nice animated display on the website, showing your daily progress. Attend one of the "write-in" events, where people gather to urge each other on toward the elusive goal, and you'll be swept up in "word wars," races to see who can create the most words in a fixed period. Fabulous (your valuation may vary) prizes await!
But what about quality? The words are counted by a machine, and if the machine counts over 50,000, you're a "winner." That's that. Matter of fact, the NaNo pep-talk emails remind the writer to avoid time-wasting things like editing, revising, even going back and seeing if the stuff you wrote yesterday makes any sense at all. "Never look back! November is for writing, you can edit in December." In part, this is a simple technical issue: the only thing the software at NaNoWriMo World Domination Headquarters can actually measure is the number of words you wrote. It can't determine whether those words are put together into actual sentences, let alone whether those sentences fit together to tell a story. (In truth, the software doesn't actually count words; it counts clumps of characters separated by spaces and punctuation. To a word-counting program, "xyzzy" is a word.)
It reminded me of working in the software industry, where I often saw projects that "managed" (and I put the word in quotes for a reason) by setting arbitrary goals (like 50,000 words in a month; or 300,000 non-commentary source lines by four programmers in one year), making a linear schedule (1667 words a day, or 375 source lines per programmer per day), and obsessively counting the one thing they can count (words, or lines that pass the compiler's syntax checks). Testing can be done later; this part of the schedule is for filling up files. Next month (or next year), we'll find out if any of the stuff worked. Or, to be a bit cruder, both NaNo and the software industry seem at times a lot like toilet training: you don't care how much the stuff stinks; all that matters is where, when and how much gets produced (thanks to Jerry Weinberg for that pungent metaphor).
In defense of NaNoWriMo (but not of software projects), I should probably note that a lot of people who take the "50K in 30 days" challenge are people who haven't been taught how to write a long piece, and for whom the greatest challenge is to get past the terror of the blank page. The "never look back, never edit" advice does at least keep writers from spending the whole month re-doing the first two paragraphs in search of impossible perfection. (Of course, there's something to be said for getting the first few paragraphs as perfect as possible--they're the first thing that agents, publishers, editors and often readers are going to look at. If you don't hook 'em here, you won't hook 'em at all, and it won't matter how good the rest of your book is. That's why the opening of The Last Protector got rewritten close to a dozen times.)
Nevertheless, the problem remains the same: just as you can't test quality into fundamentally bad software (though this doesn't stop a lot of projects from trying), I don't think you can edit quality into a crappy novel. Unless your "editing" ends up being a complete, end-to-end replacement of plot, characters, setting, dialogue--the equivalent of the old auto-repair advice to unscrew the radiator cap and drive a new car under it.
I found I couldn't stick to the NaNoWriMo discipline of "never look back, never edit." I kept going back and changing things when I wrote something on page 57 that required a specific setup back on page 35. And then I discovered what wretched crap page 35 was--what was I thinking when I wrote this--and so I rewrote a few hundred words to make them even marginally decent.
Anyway, the experiment in high-speed writing is over for now. I have some loose ends to tidy up, a few stub scenes to flesh out, and then I'm going to put the thing away for at least a couple months. With any luck, I'll be able to concentrate on selling a few more copies of the book I have in print, so that my publisher will want to consider the follow-on book (which I also didn't work on during November because I was doing NaNo, sigh). When I come back to it in February, I'll decide whether it's the seed of a real book or just a dead raccoon in the middle of the roadway.
Speaking of the roadway, perhaps the nicest thing about finishing the NaNoWriMo project yesterday is that I got to spend today out on the road on my Harley. Sunshine, pretty-nice-for-late-November temperatures, and $1.57-per-gallon gas made for a lot more fun than sitting in front of a keyboard sticking words together. (And it's supposed to be equally nice tomorrow. Whoopee!!)
---------------------
CONSUMER ADVISORY: the book advertised for sale on this page was not created using the NaNoWriMo Method. I did The Last Protector the old-fashioned way, lovingly crafting, writing and rewriting every word over a nine-year period.
Month project crossed the finish line the day before Thanksgiving: 50,000 words in the file (lovingly counted by NaNoWriMo's computers), a beginning, middle and end (lovingly checked by me), and something resembling a plot, characters and setting. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a "winner," though all it entitles me to is the little graphic (at right) saying I'm a winner. I'd rather have a nice fat publishing contract... Oh, wait, I already have one of those--and if I'd been paying more attention to what I should be doing, I'd have spent the month promoting The Last Protector. Oh well, writing, especially in a sort of social event context, is more fun.Okay, so I put fifty thousand words, most of them in more-or-less grammatical sentences, into a document that (I think) tells at least the rudiments of a story. So what? To be honest, I'm not sure myself. Certainly, I don't have a novel here, at least not yet. Maybe not at all. For one thing, a novel is longer than 50K words (The Last Protector weighs in at about three times that). The Shape of Things (my current working title, subject to further change) will need to at least double in size before I consider it worthy of trying to sell.
More important, before I'd be willing to toss a manuscript at a
publisher or agent, I'd need to believe it really tells a story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, interesting characters and situations, puzzles and solutions, conflict and resolution, sin and redemption... y'know, all those things that make a novel a novel and not just a collection of unrelated events. And that's a place in which the whole NaNoWriMo philosophy sort of lets me down. The NaNo system stresses only producing a large number of words on a short schedule. The "plan" includes a quota of 1667 words a day; do this for thirty days and you'll cross the finish line on the last day. There's a nice animated display on the website, showing your daily progress. Attend one of the "write-in" events, where people gather to urge each other on toward the elusive goal, and you'll be swept up in "word wars," races to see who can create the most words in a fixed period. Fabulous (your valuation may vary) prizes await!But what about quality? The words are counted by a machine, and if the machine counts over 50,000, you're a "winner." That's that. Matter of fact, the NaNo pep-talk emails remind the writer to avoid time-wasting things like editing, revising, even going back and seeing if the stuff you wrote yesterday makes any sense at all. "Never look back! November is for writing, you can edit in December." In part, this is a simple technical issue: the only thing the software at NaNoWriMo World Domination Headquarters can actually measure is the number of words you wrote. It can't determine whether those words are put together into actual sentences, let alone whether those sentences fit together to tell a story. (In truth, the software doesn't actually count words; it counts clumps of characters separated by spaces and punctuation. To a word-counting program, "xyzzy" is a word.)
It reminded me of working in the software industry, where I often saw projects that "managed" (and I put the word in quotes for a reason) by setting arbitrary goals (like 50,000 words in a month; or 300,000 non-commentary source lines by four programmers in one year), making a linear schedule (1667 words a day, or 375 source lines per programmer per day), and obsessively counting the one thing they can count (words, or lines that pass the compiler's syntax checks). Testing can be done later; this part of the schedule is for filling up files. Next month (or next year), we'll find out if any of the stuff worked. Or, to be a bit cruder, both NaNo and the software industry seem at times a lot like toilet training: you don't care how much the stuff stinks; all that matters is where, when and how much gets produced (thanks to Jerry Weinberg for that pungent metaphor).
In defense of NaNoWriMo (but not of software projects), I should probably note that a lot of people who take the "50K in 30 days" challenge are people who haven't been taught how to write a long piece, and for whom the greatest challenge is to get past the terror of the blank page. The "never look back, never edit" advice does at least keep writers from spending the whole month re-doing the first two paragraphs in search of impossible perfection. (Of course, there's something to be said for getting the first few paragraphs as perfect as possible--they're the first thing that agents, publishers, editors and often readers are going to look at. If you don't hook 'em here, you won't hook 'em at all, and it won't matter how good the rest of your book is. That's why the opening of The Last Protector got rewritten close to a dozen times.)
Nevertheless, the problem remains the same: just as you can't test quality into fundamentally bad software (though this doesn't stop a lot of projects from trying), I don't think you can edit quality into a crappy novel. Unless your "editing" ends up being a complete, end-to-end replacement of plot, characters, setting, dialogue--the equivalent of the old auto-repair advice to unscrew the radiator cap and drive a new car under it.
I found I couldn't stick to the NaNoWriMo discipline of "never look back, never edit." I kept going back and changing things when I wrote something on page 57 that required a specific setup back on page 35. And then I discovered what wretched crap page 35 was--what was I thinking when I wrote this--and so I rewrote a few hundred words to make them even marginally decent.
Anyway, the experiment in high-speed writing is over for now. I have some loose ends to tidy up, a few stub scenes to flesh out, and then I'm going to put the thing away for at least a couple months. With any luck, I'll be able to concentrate on selling a few more copies of the book I have in print, so that my publisher will want to consider the follow-on book (which I also didn't work on during November because I was doing NaNo, sigh). When I come back to it in February, I'll decide whether it's the seed of a real book or just a dead raccoon in the middle of the roadway.
Speaking of the roadway, perhaps the nicest thing about finishing the NaNoWriMo project yesterday is that I got to spend today out on the road on my Harley. Sunshine, pretty-nice-for-late-November temperatures, and $1.57-per-gallon gas made for a lot more fun than sitting in front of a keyboard sticking words together. (And it's supposed to be equally nice tomorrow. Whoopee!!)
---------------------
CONSUMER ADVISORY: the book advertised for sale on this page was not created using the NaNoWriMo Method. I did The Last Protector the old-fashioned way, lovingly crafting, writing and rewriting every word over a nine-year period.
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