Iterative book explained

[SirClickAlot]

One of my other hobbies : being creative , resulted in the notion of an iterative book :

Any comments are welcome.

Regards.

[nathanscribe]

You haven't said what kind of writing you're dealing with.  Fiction?  Non-fiction?  If the former, I'd say (with respect) that it's useless.  If the latter, many educational texts do this already, don't they - with chapter summaries, etc.?

Regarding fiction, the reason for my opinion is that your model does not account for the gradual accretion of meaning (for want of a better word) and the pleasure (yes, the purpose of a book is also that) that comes from a piece being its "best" length.  A short story is a short story, a novel is a novel.  Try to cut a novel and you end up with a mess.  The point is not simply the "story", but the whole shape of the thing, its symbols, patterns, and the gaps between the parts.  Reduce it and those are diminished.

Having to write a sales pitch for a book is bad enough, it's like saying to Bach "OK, you've got 5 seconds.  The Whatenburg?"

I have seen models like yours recommended for  use in the creation process of a piece of work, but not as a mode of presentation, except for the purpose of selling (blurb, synopsis, 1st 3 chapters etc).

If I'm missing the point, feel free to disambiguate!

[SirClickAlot]

Disambiguate! Excellent! Let me reciprocate :-)

I agree with the fact that an iterative story is useless for fiction. As I believe the whole point of reading a fictional book is to be entertained and knowing the plot in advance kills the experience. I might want to make this clearer in the second iteration of my presentation. By the way : the process I am using to get to higher quality idea realization is called Ready Fire Aim ( where Aim stands for Agile Innovation Management ). Shoot, see how far you are off your goal and aim according to the measured deviation. It's like tracer bullets.


For non-fiction ( i.e. educational purposes ) iterative books could prove to be of value. You could iterate having the divider on abstract/concrete level or you could iterate on the time level. The latter could be useful for instance for cook books -> make pasta if you have 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour. So the recipe changes depending on the amount of time you have available to cook.
Also, for non-fictional books that want to teach  you something, the amount of iterations resemble the rehearsals you'd normally have in order to commit that knowledge to memory. Normally it would take me 2 to 3 reads of a book in order to commit the stuff to memory. When viewed in contrast to the iteration pyramid this re-reading resembles a square. Every single iteration takes the same amount of time. In theory using iterative books could half the time you would normally need to commit stuff to memory.

Regards.

[nathanscribe]

OK, that makes more sense.  To some extent it's already in place, with chapter overviews, summaries etc., but I've not seen it the way you describe it.  I think it's a good idea.  There are too many badly-written and confusingly structured manuals out there.

[Nataj]

Are you planing to write something with that format . Cause it really sounds interesting . Or are you trying to to make a new writing style ?

[BucklingSpring]

I think you are entering the world of cognitive ergonomics for teaching/learning processes.

[stupefaction]

The idea sounds interesting. As others have said, I'd like to see you give it a shot. I'm interested in whether you're really going to implement every level of the pyramid, or if you end up discarding some of them in order to avoid redundancy.

[SirClickAlot]

I thought they taught this in Journalism 101?  The Inverted Pyramid.

This pyramid resembles the one I'm describing but the dividers are different....( plus it is inverted )

Regards.

[SirClickAlot]

Are you planing to write something with that format . Cause it really sounds interesting . Or are you trying to to make a new writing style ?

I have written something in this format : follow http://www.skilowi.com and check the forum. It is a first aim -> the story is written iteratively but I didn't find the time to implement the lower layers of the pyramid ( the 1 hour and 10 hour story ) but it should make the concept of writing iteratively clear.

As for creating a new writing style -> this style could work nicely for non-fictional books/stories.

Regards.