I have been interested in merging the writing cycle into the Software Development Life Cycle for quite some time now. I started this post in 2009, but never got to finish it. But now, I think I should give it another whirl. One of the most important things of SDLC is to catch problems earlier; the earlier, the better. If you see something wrong in the first phase and correct it there, it will cost way less then correcting it a phase or even a couple of phases away. Same logic should also apply for book writing. If the plan you have is error-free, you will have lesser problems later.
So how does the SDLC run. It has various stages which are bidirectional. You can move from any phase to a phase before or after it. Lets start with the first stage.
1. Requirements: For an actual software company, this is the craziest phase. One has to make sure everything is covered and there are no loopholes. It requires making sense of a whole buttload of non-sense. However, for book writing, this is going to be the simplest thing ever. At the end of the phase, you need to have an idea and a setting. If you write fantasy, a basic structure of the magic of your world, what kind of a story would it be, who would be the target audience. Basically, the kernel around which your whole book will reside. If that idea is not good enough to work with, don't even move to phase 2.
2. Planning: This is important. In this phase, you will sketch out everything: your characters, the working of your world, the rules that every entity in the book will follow, and most importantly, a start and an end. Make sure everything gels together, because once you are past this, changing even a little thing might require massive changes in the latter phases. You cant mess this up, or be prepared to rewrite chapter after chapter after chapter.
3. Development: This is the actual writing part and the longest part. You will pick up the basic blocks that you had from planning and meld them together. You could write in as much detail as you want, or keep tags for work that will come later. You will make sure that whatever start and end you had in mind seems correct when you put it on paper. Once done, you have the first draft.
4. Testing: This would be the first revision of the document. You could put in a few more chapters to make things right, patch up all the missing descriptions, remove the unnecessary fluff and have a book that seems complete. This is the second draft. Then you go back and run grammar and spelling checks to make sure things are correct. You print out and read the book, marking errors and inconsistencies to ensure that they get corrected later after you are done reading. You will know how your book feels when read as a whole rather than part by part. You do whatever you feel necessary, as at the end of this phase, your book should be as ready as it will ever be for publishing.
5. Maintenance: A book is never quite done. Nor is software. There will be constant maintenance cycles where you will remember a stupid thing you did and go back to either phase 2 or phase 3 and continue on from there. This is an endless process, or at least it will last till you get tired of your book.
If you make sure to achieve the objective of each phase before moving to the next, you might have to do a lot less rework. I know, I wrote almost a whole book which I cant use, before I got to a draft I was satisfied with.
So how does the SDLC run. It has various stages which are bidirectional. You can move from any phase to a phase before or after it. Lets start with the first stage.
1. Requirements: For an actual software company, this is the craziest phase. One has to make sure everything is covered and there are no loopholes. It requires making sense of a whole buttload of non-sense. However, for book writing, this is going to be the simplest thing ever. At the end of the phase, you need to have an idea and a setting. If you write fantasy, a basic structure of the magic of your world, what kind of a story would it be, who would be the target audience. Basically, the kernel around which your whole book will reside. If that idea is not good enough to work with, don't even move to phase 2.
2. Planning: This is important. In this phase, you will sketch out everything: your characters, the working of your world, the rules that every entity in the book will follow, and most importantly, a start and an end. Make sure everything gels together, because once you are past this, changing even a little thing might require massive changes in the latter phases. You cant mess this up, or be prepared to rewrite chapter after chapter after chapter.
3. Development: This is the actual writing part and the longest part. You will pick up the basic blocks that you had from planning and meld them together. You could write in as much detail as you want, or keep tags for work that will come later. You will make sure that whatever start and end you had in mind seems correct when you put it on paper. Once done, you have the first draft.
4. Testing: This would be the first revision of the document. You could put in a few more chapters to make things right, patch up all the missing descriptions, remove the unnecessary fluff and have a book that seems complete. This is the second draft. Then you go back and run grammar and spelling checks to make sure things are correct. You print out and read the book, marking errors and inconsistencies to ensure that they get corrected later after you are done reading. You will know how your book feels when read as a whole rather than part by part. You do whatever you feel necessary, as at the end of this phase, your book should be as ready as it will ever be for publishing.
5. Maintenance: A book is never quite done. Nor is software. There will be constant maintenance cycles where you will remember a stupid thing you did and go back to either phase 2 or phase 3 and continue on from there. This is an endless process, or at least it will last till you get tired of your book.
If you make sure to achieve the objective of each phase before moving to the next, you might have to do a lot less rework. I know, I wrote almost a whole book which I cant use, before I got to a draft I was satisfied with.
