Ben Scofield

I had a thought the other day… I wonder if the demise of correspondence via letters has resulted in a reduction in significant thought. Here’s the idea:

When long-form letter writing was the predominant means of long-distance communication, you had some astounding exchanges (Descartes’ correspondence with pretty much everyone, for instance). Many great thinkers first detailed their theories in these long letters, and I wonder if the form itself made that more likely. Think about it – when you’re corresponding via letter, longer messages are more efficient (whereas the opposite is true today, with email, IM, and tweets). Longer messages mean more time writing, and more time writing means more time thinking through what you want to say. As a result, then, writing long letters may have helped people think through their ideas more fully before making them public.

If that’s the case, then it very well might be the case that today’s preponderance of short-form communication makes it much less likely that anyone will release a complex idea fully-formed – but the greater frequency (and reach) of their interactions with other people may overcome that deficit. Could it be that letter-writing was waterfall, and email, IM, and Twitter are agile?

(And might this post play into that precise analogy, being far from presenting a fully-formed theory itself?)

We’re rapidly approaching November, which means that another NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. NaNo’s provided that last little push for tens of thousands of novelists over the past ten years. Given its success, I’m very excited to see that some people are experimenting with the format, and are trying to bring some of that inspiration to other disciplines.

The most recent issue of the Pragmatic Programmers‘ magazine contains one of those experiments: PragProWriMo. Instead of 200k words of a novel, participants in PragProWriMo are asked to commit to writing 80 pages of a technical book. The scope’s a little smaller than NaNo, but it’s still a significant challenge for people willing to undertake it – and it could possibly result in some exciting new technical books down the road.

There’s also been a bit of chatter on Twitter about something like a NaOSSWriMo – starting and releasing a substantial open source project in November. I’m really excited that people might undertake this challenge, as we’ve seen what talented individuals can do in two days before… what more could someone accomplish with thirty days of intense effort on a single project?

So, if you’ve got the time in November, why don’t you rise to the challenge of one of these projects? Or, if you’ve got something else in mind, start posting about it now, since you never know who else might get excited by it and join you for the month.