Abstract:

The writing and study of written documents, from literature to journalism, are popular subjects that, for historical tradition, have their own tools and methods. However, new technologies and methodologies from other disciplines, such as project management (PM), can be applied. Quite a few novels and research reports follow concepts from PM: a process of creation and development that uses informative resources to attain an objective. Furthermore, “literary and journalism programming” can help not only to analyze and understand novels and research reports but also to create them, keeping in mind that talent and work are still more relevant to success.

As a work in progress, this paper presents different subjects related to the use of PM techniques in the creative writing of infotexts applied to best sellers or research reports. Some subjects have not only been used by the author as a professor of PM at the University of Girona, but were also introduced at the II International Congress on Didactics, Girona 2010 (paper and workshop). Further technical approaches will follow at the XIV International Congress on Project Engineering, Madrid 2010.

First of all, any text can be broken down into infotexts, groups of words that provide a single piece of information. The concept is similar to a task from PM and can be applied to any communication media. Five categories of infotext can be proposed. Then, whenever you want to develop a research report (about an unknown person or a surprising fact) you start with the journal kept during the research process with its sudden changes. Once you obtain the research results, the journal can be transformed into a research report: a text with the most relevant parts of the research journal complemented with new elements to facilitate the comprehension of the potential reader. Infotexts, to a great extent, can help. Examples are taken from a research report, Bonifaci Marín, an investigation of the medical practice of Marín, an “emboscat” (hidden person) deep in Catalonia between 1940 and 1960.

The Gantt diagram, the most widely used graphical element from PM, shows the project schedule as a bar chart. Research reports can have two diagrams: the research process Gantt diagram, which shows the information progress through the research actions, and the document diagram as the research report diagram with its infotexts. This structure is very simple and understandable. Whenever you continue with more creative writing, new, more complicated diagrams have to be defined. This methodology allows you to play with different infotext elements like characters (human resources in PM terminology) to develop daring texts. The paper presents a story of different characters chronologically developed with a magic overlapping.

Finally, this paper presents the progress of the analyses, with Gantt diagrams and PM concepts, of best sellers from authors such as Stieg Larsson or Paul Auster. In the Millennium series, Larsson presents a linked multi-part story with two main characters. In The Book of Illusions, Auster plays with the investigator and the objective of his research, the life of a comedian. Both show spectacular mastery—playing with time, hiding information—in order to create intrigues. Screenwriters like Guillermo Arriaga (movie Babel) do as well.

Keywords:

research report, creative writing, project management, Gantt diagram, Stieg Larsson, Paul Auster, Guillermo Arriaga.