I've probably beaten the discussion about linear and non-linear writing methods, wikis, and the computer programing metaphor to the ground and you're all probably tragically bored with this, particularly if you're here for the next crumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming, but no matter, here we are. I listened to the interview with ward cunningham recently, and I've been thinking about these things for a while so it surfaces yet again.

I've said a few times that I have a hard time "writing non-linearly," that I feel as if I'm too story/narrative focused to really be effective in writing stories and essays in a modular or nonlinear sort of way. I've also had a hard time working on using wiki-like software as a personal notebook because alone I don't tend develop ideas and thoughts in the right sort of way to make these systems useful for any meaningful length of time. In fact I think I started this blog (almost a year ago) because I thought that the blog was a format for notebook that mirrored the way that I often thought about things (and indeed my paper notebooks are very blog-like).

But I wanted to cover new ground in this entry. I've been turning over a couple of new ideas in the past few days. First is the notion of "refactoring" in agile/extreme programing. Basically, this is the notion that when writing code, if you're not writing linearly, it's important to go through the code and "refactor" or reevaluate older code to make it more efficient and work better as the larger program changes and develops. Cunningham said (and it's true) that once you've written it once, going back and moving chunks (scenes/objects) around so that they make more sense. I've always thought about editing in terms of passes, and because I've never really written modularly, I don't really edit modularly (which is, near as I can tell the only way to do it.) [1]

The second concept, this comes from wiki "theory" for lack of a better term is the notion that nonlinear documents (like wikis) grow and develop structure as they need it. Cunningham, on the podcast said, "wikis always seem to be as big as they need to be," [2] and while I don't know nearly enough about chaos theory to be fully articulate about this, I think that this is a very bottom-up or "chaotic" system that asserts itself over the larger document is pretty powerful and useful, if you're not fighting it. In my experience wiki's that I've tried to build have all fallen down as I've tried to create structure before creating content, or anticipate my organizational thinking ahead of time. The lesson? Let organizational systems develop organically, even if you don't trust this, and adjust later rather than forcing a system that probably will cause collapse which is in the end more work for less payoff than the first option.

I think both of these lessons (refactor early and often, let nonlinear documents structure themselves) are ones that I can take to both my writing and digital note taking projects in the future. Maybe these were things that you all had figured out already, alas, maybe this is why this is my blog and not yours!

Just saying.

Onward and Upward!

[1]I've read my fair share of books about writing, and many of them clearly say that you should focus on getting something written, because there's time enough in the world for editing. I'm not rejecting the notion that burying yourself in editing too soon is good practice, but an unwritten manuscript is only slightly less likely to get you a book contract than an unedited one.
[2]To be fair, Cunningham spoke a little bit to the complex dynamic between community size, total number of pages, and community age. That for a while wiki communities need to focus on growing so that there is some "there there," but after a while the community/writer needs to attend to deleting and editing the content on old pages, so that it doesn't get stale.