The looniest meta-writing idea EVER!

[elfs]

I had what must be the looniest meta-writing idea ever. Meta-writing is when you write about writing, when you plot out your story, or do the index card thing where you write down plot events and character notes and so on.

On the other hand, as a user experience developer, one of the principle tools is something called a "story card." I typically have those as post-it notes across the top of my desk's upper shelf, where I keep my copies of the dictionary and DHTML in a Nutshell and so forth. A programmer story card describes what a person coming to the site should experience:

• A subscriber sees a story on the home page and wants to read it now.
• A non-subscriber sees a story on the home page and wants to read it now.
• A subscriber comments on a stoy
• A subscriber sees if anyone has replied to his comment
• An author reviews how many people have read her story in the past week
• An author elects to receive a weekly email update of readership

... and so on. A programmer's job is to write code that satifies a story, but does so in a way that does not block the development of other stories.

I wonder if you could write "story cards" for a story from the reader's point of view? "The reader gets a laugh." "The reader receives a clue about the twist ending," and so on. Now that would be looney.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What? Language is language. Java and Ruby and even JCL have subjects, verbs, objects, subordinate claws (ouch!) ... if we can translate storytelling to silicon-based languages, why can't we translate coding to storytelling?

Of course, it could be argued that Agile and friends have *not* contributed to the quality of code (my main issue with Agile is SCOPE CREEP! because of the lack of nailed-down functional spec), so why would the other way?

OTOH, *I* write prose that way... if I can't come up with what comes next, but I know what comes after that, I just say

[***FIXME*** Do X here, figure this out later]

and plow on.... dunno if storytellin', ur doin' it rong, or not, but...

Further research is indicated. :)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The point of story cards is to prevent scope creep or, at the very least, to segment it off into rational components. An entire block of cards about real-time chat get segmented off into "4.2" components because they surely ain't goin' out in 4.0.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

See, this is exactly the sort of frontal lobe masturbation that Peter Watts says vampires don't waste time on.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm under the impression that vampires don't waste time on masturbation. I also get the impression they don't waste time on pleasure.