In the book Salmon of Doubt, a collection of articles written by Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame), one of the articles provides the following description of the writing process of the great English author P.G. Wodehouse:
A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised – its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing – the relentless revising, refining and polishing – that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in.
The iterative nature of the writing process is quite clear. It is interesting to note that P.G. Wodehouse’s structure/story stage is analogous the exploratory stage of Adaptive Iteration and his refinement stage is analogous to assessment stage of Adaptive Iteration. Also the current proponents of ‘lean’ activities would no doubt very much approve of P.G. Wodehouse’s highly visual approach to monitoring the progress of his writing.
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