A question for nerdly creators

[mmcirvin]

Has anyone ever used a version-control system like CVS to manage the writing of fiction? If so, is it helpful?

I suppose this would only work well for people who like to keep their working text in plain ASCII or something close to it. Fortunately, I am in that category.

Update: Cursory poking around on Google Groups reveals that many people have had this thought in the world of interactive fiction, which I suppose figures since it really is software development. I haven't yet come upon a case of people using programmer's source-control tools for ordinary-type fiction, but the more I think about it, the more surprised I'd be to find that nobody had seriously considered it before. Cory Doctorow must have had the thought more than once.

It's quite possible that the mental overhead and administrative effort are too great for the benefit to a lone fiction author, but I could also see a much greater benefit for projects involving collaboration between multiple authors. It would also go a long way toward addressing the complaint of literary critics and historians that the paper trail involved in the creation of a work has vanished in the age of electronic writing.

Update: This person seems to have put some fiction in a CVS repository, though there isn't much version history there.

Comments

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

Hmm...interesting. Source-code control isn't really an ideal tool for general document management. For one thing, source code control is line-based, and fiction isn't. (Inserting a word which affected word-wrap should show up in the change history as a one-word change, not as a multi-line change)

There *are* tools for managing versions of text documents, such as contracts under negotiation. That came up in a consulting job at one point; I think Oracle sells one. (Oracle sells one of most things, so that's a reasonable guess anyway)

A fiction tool should probably understand objects like "plot events" and "characters", and be able to track changes to them...that kind of tool could be hard to develop without understanding the way people approach the writing process.

On a side note, I would love love love to see people gravitate away from CVS, which is hacky and notoriously hard to maintain. CVS is a definite case of the good being the enemy of the best. (Or rather, the shitty-but-usable being the enemy of the good...)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The point about fiction being not line-based is a good one. Still, if the checked-in files have line breaks, the change from a reflow is going to be limited to a paragraph or less.

I know that there are tools for writing that actually do worry about things like plot events and characters, but I think that, for me, that would be overengineering.

And you're right about the many pitfalls of CVS. It has a certain haphazard, undesigned quality in the design of its commands and the way it handles directories and sparse branches. Also, I prefer systems that encourage you through permissions to check files out explicitly before modifying them, and make it easy to get a list of files you've checked out! But CVS is free, and many of its good competitors are not.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

Subversion is a pretty good shot at fixing CVS.
http://subversion.tigris.org/

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks, you might have just told me something very, very useful...

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I've used CVS on my short-story writing, mostly because it was there and I was used to using it, and the idea of not having extensive backups of something I'd put so much work into made me itch. Plus, it's kind of nice to have a log file with dates in it.

It works fine. Yes, word-wrapping means whole paragraphs get changed on a single-word edit, but so what, really. Paragraphs are a sensible chunking unit of story-writing, and I can't really see why I'd need to be able to locate a change more closely than that.

Is it necessary at all? Well, probably not. But used within Emacs, the mental overhead is negligible.