As to can a writer really not release his work until he's ready - no, not really, unless he or she is already an established name, and can dictate the terms of a contract.

But one key difference is that _every_ writer is expected to do rewrites. Typical development (as I judge from talking to my writer friends) is something like this: You write a first draft, getting the ideas on the page. Some writers do it mostly as one pass, while some continually go back and revise earlier sections as the story demands change. But once it's done, you do a little dance, and go have a nice dinner, and the next day you go through it again, identify clunky sections, and do a bunch of rewriting. And only then do you consider it ready to send in to your publisher. (Selling the book is a different process, that tends to go off of outlines and rougher chapters, particularly for new authors, which I'm ignoring.) Then, the editor reads it, and sends back the redline version, which could call for extensive rewrites. Their ideas and feedback could be quite helpful, so usually there's another rewrite period. There might be another round of feedback and polish if that was extensive. And then, finally, it hits shelves.

So, I'd say a typical novel has 2-4 rewrites before we see it.

Code, on the other hand, tends to have the first pass. You might be lucky enough to rewrite some earlier sessions if your needs and understanding of the problem change. If you're really lucky, you'll get a code review and have time to make some changes. (The editor step.) And then it's live, and you get to do bug fixes for eternity, but rarely a real rewrite.

I don't think that the typical novelist development model really is well suited to software, mind you - the gains of a full rewrite process before the software is released is not nearly as substantial as for a novel, and the cost of patches is much less for software than for a novel (especially logistically) - but the basic moral is there. The fiction industry understands the value of revision and review, and the software industry needs to as well.

-- Kirby, WhitePages.com

In reply to Re^2: rewrite: in literature and in coding by kirbyk
in thread rewrite: in literature and in coding by johnnywang

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