On the next day, which was Saturday, Travis decided put his earlier plan for deciding the genre for his novel into action. He was confident that he would be able to zero in on a genre (or genres) before the day was over.
The approach they followed to solve tricky problems at work, was to start with a brainstorming session, wherein every team member would contribute at least one idea. The main purpose of this was to think from all possible angles, rather than restricting oneself to a particular approach or strategy. At this stage, the focus was more on quantity rather than quality. This left them with a list of possible solutions for the problem.
Then began the evaluation process. Here, they evaluated each of the solutions obtained from the brainstorming session with respect to different metrics like time required, costs involved, how much the end users (or developers in case it was a library or toolkit being built for use within the organisation) would love or hate it and how relevant or useful a particular solution would be a few years down the line. They would assign a score for each metric to each of the alternatives. The alternative which had the highest total score would be chosen as the one to implement.
The challenging part in this process was assigning the right score. Things like time and cost were not that difficult to estimate. It was some of the other things, like the long term benefits of the approach, or the degree of user acceptance, which required care during estimation.
For starters, it would never be possible to get feedback from the entire spectrum of the end users. And it was not that easy to predict what technology, or which paradigm might become the next big thing that everyone would want to use, and how that would influence the way existing software works. Accounting for the effect of these factors required a great deal of experience and a good understanding of the context in which the solution will be used.
Travis knew that for a task as simple as his, he would not need to go in-depth into topics like how a particular genre would evolve (or degrade) over the years, or what style of storytelling will become more and more mainstream. His main objective behind the analysis was to identify a genre on which he could enjoy writing a novel (which, may or may not exceed fifty thousand words) inside of a month, and his meagre knowledge about the art of writing was sufficient for the purpose. The thing which now required thought was how to define the metrics for evaluating a particular genre.
At work, when they evaluated the different alternatives, their metrics would broadly fall into three main categories. These were Desirability, Feasibility and Viability. Here, Desirability represented the extent of requirement of having a particular feature or solution, Feasibility referred to the ease of implementation and Viability was an indicator of the business value. Travis decided to use these three main areas for evaluating each genre, as they represented the basic rubrics which we human beings, either consciously or sub-consciously, used in our everyday lives. Whether it was buying groceries, planning a vacation or switching your job, desirability, feasibility and viability were always considered in one way or another to aid the decision making process. Next, he had to identify what each of these attributes actually meant in the context of writing a novel.
The first one, Desirability, was easy. He would use something similar to what they use for software, i.e. the degree of interest in writing a novel.
The next one, Feasibility, was slightly more tricky. Unlike software, writing does not need any substantial investment of money or infrastructure. All you need is pen and paper, or, in this digital age, a mobile device. The real investment that is required is the time spent in coming up with good characters and plots, and making them believable and interesting. So, Travis decided that feasibility here should refer to the ease with which he could write the story.
The last one, Viability, was equally difficult to quantify. His main aim behind participating in NaNoWriMo was to write a novel and enjoy the process. So, unlike software, there was no "business value" that needed to be considered here. But there was still left to consider the rate at which new content that would be created for a novel of a particular genre. This, he realised, fit nicely with the concept of viability, as it indicated how slow or fast would the novel grow and develop over the course of the month.
Having thus arrived at the definitions of the three rubrics in the context of his NaNoWriMo project, Travis briefly summarised them on his notebook, adding questions that he felt would help him assign a score, as below:
Desirability: Interest in writing a story for a particular genre (How much do I look forward to writing a story of this genre?)
Feasibility: Ease with which a story of a genre can be written (How much time and efforts are required to come up with a good (or average) idea? What are the efforts required to obtain reference material? How much effort do I need to put in for character development and world building? In case there is a deadline, will I be able to meet it?)
Viability: Likelihood that the author will keep getting new content to the story, once he/she has started writing it (Will I remain enthusiastic enough to finish what I started? How often do I see myself writing a new chapter for a story of this genre?)
Then, on a separate sheet, he prepared a new table. The column headings comprised of these three attributes with another column for the total score. He added the names of the genres which he had thought about on the day before as rows of the table. He decided to assign a score, on a scale of one to five, to the three characteristics for each of the genres. He started evaluating them one by one.
The first one on his list was Mystery. It was one of his favourite genres, so it got a high desirability score. He thought it was average on feasibility, as coming up with believable and suspenseful incidents required considerable thought and time, and he had only a month in which he had to finish the story. As far as viability went, he thought that to be high, as it was a genre he enjoyed writing about.
Next up was Horror. It was also something he would have loved to write, but not much as Mystery, so it ended up with a lower score for desirability. Here again, considerable effort was needed to develop the characters and plot twists in order to make the scares work. So, as far as other things went, it was more or less as feasible as writing a Mystery.
As far as Fan-Fiction went, he realised that he was neither interested nor disinterested in writing it. A major point against it was the in depth knowledge of the characters and their story arcs in the source material , something which he did not possess. That meant that even if began writing a fan-fiction themed story, it would be almost impossible to finish it.
The next contender on the list was Science-Fiction. This was another one of his favourite genres, so motivation to write was not a problem. The effort in writing a sci-fi stories varied considerably, depending on how much of the story was rooted in reality. Overall, he thought it to be slightly more demanding than writing a mystery story, but enjoyable nonetheless.
If writing Science-Fiction was tough, Historical Fiction was even tougher. Particularly because it required a good and accurate knowledge of historical events to cleverly mix fiction with fact.Travis was pretty sure that one month would not be enough for him to finish a historical fiction novel.
Fantasy was another genre he had thought about. Though he was keen on writing a fantasy themed story, he knew that, though creatively satisfying, it would again need considerable amount of thought to come up with a believable setting for the story. And unlike science fiction, where you could at least make partial use of existing facts and theories as a basis for your fictitious inventions and discoveries, the realm of fantasy offered little room for such things.
Which brought him to the last two genres on his list, Comedy and Drama. Drama was something he was not keen to write, as it would require a thorough understanding of how human beings think, feel and react. This itself would require at least a month of study to come up with believable characters, leave alone writing a story. Comedy, something which we would have loved to write, was also not feasible as coming up with situations that are really funny is hard. And moreover, the jokes work only when they do not appear as forced to the reader. Maybe if he had more time to prepare, he would have thought about it.
This completed the initial review of his list of genres. Travis went over the list again, reviewing the scores he had assigned and adjusting them by comparing the genres relative to each other. When he was finished, he calculated the totals. This was what he ended up with:
Mystery: Desirability: 5, Feasibility: 3, Viability: 4, Total: 121064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlockBbgRKG
Horror: Desirability: 4, Feasibility: 3, Viability: 4, Total: 111064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2DHqz1xmQg
Fan-Fiction: Desirability: 3, Feasibility: 2, Viability: 2, Total: 71064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcKu35E8Uk0
Sci-Fi: Desirability: 5, Feasibility: 3, Viability: 4, Total: 121064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡh72nYABw2O
Historical Fiction: Desirability: 4, Feasibility: 1, Viability: 4, Total: 91064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBVNyFjRFJX
Fantasy: Desirability: 3, Feasibility: 4, Viability: 3, Total: 101064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡy470ZBDzyB
Comedy: Desirability: 5, Feasibility: 2, Viability: 4, Total: 111064Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡamnmwgdyEe
Drama: Desirability: 3, Feasibility: 2, Viability: 2, Total: 7
Clearly, Mystery and Sci-Fi were the two which in he was likely to write a complete novel for NaNoWriMo. Now he began thinking which of these should be his final choice.
He loved the idea of writing a mystery as much as a sci-fi story. He knew from previous experience that in a month, he could come up with one, or maximum two, good plot points. So, writing a story in serial format, such as the adventures of a detective, was out of the question. Science-Fiction on the other hand, could make do with a single problem which the protagonist has to solve. So he thought it would be better to write a story that was a science-fiction mystery.
Satisfied with this decision, Travis decided to devote the remainder of the day working on his side project, which was learning PHP. Travis had learnt PHP and used it a bit during college. He had not gotten a chance to work on it after that. Now that the language had improved and was making a comeback of sorts, he thought that it would be the right time to pick it up again. So, he had started taking a self-paced online course for revising his basic concepts. After his decision to participate in NaNoWriMo, he thought it better to finish the remaining units in the current module before November, so that the one month break would not require him to relearn the whole module when he resumed.
There were, however, a couple more things left to do, thought Travis as he put away his notebook and pen. He still had to decide upon a plot and a title for his story, and also whether he should write the story online, or write it first offline and then upload it when a chapter was complete. These two he planned to finalise by the end of next week.
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