Agile and art — Stencia

By Will Braynen

As a writer in residence at Ox-Bow, and later at Jentel, an author of literary short fiction, Rose Lambert-Sluder, decided to apply Agile Scrum to her writing. (Agile is an iterative processes for developing software, one that in industry in the last ten years has replaced the sequential process called Waterfall.) There are two ways to do Agile: Scrum and Kanban. Wishing to apply the pressure of self-imposed weekly deadlines to herself, it is Agile Scrum that Ms. Lambert-Sluder decided to try out.

At Ox-Bow, Ms. Lambert-Sluder was working on three different short stories:

“Primley”
“Sugar and Salt”
And a story she hasn’t named yet, to which she referred as “New story”

She broke things up into what a software developer or a Scrum Master might call stories, but which, to avoid name collision, she called tasks. Or maybe the three stories were the stories and these really were the tasks that made up the execution of these stories. Unclear. But a todo list either way, with more or less points assigned by her to each task depending on her estimate of the complexity of its execution:

Backlog at Ox-Bow. (Fibonacci or linear? Doesn’t matter when you don’t go above three!)

First, she groomed the backlog. Or refined rather, if to avoid offending a British ear. Then she planned her sprint. Because she was only going to be at the residency for only a few weeks, she opted for one-week sprints instead of the traditional two weeks. Then she executed:

Same chart as above, but with different annotations

One of the results was “Patience”, a story recently published in the Kenyon Review, on which Ms. Lambert-Sluder worked while at Jentel. Don’t know if this qualifies as having cross-disciplinary flare, but pretty neat either way.

Selected short fiction by Rose Lambert-Sluder

Patience, Kenyon Review, Nov/Dec 2018 issue [read online]

We Learn to Keep Our Dignity, The Greensboro Review, Issue 102 [PDF]