An idea is a nest, is a nest, is a nest… a nest
Can you mingle?
If I were an outliner-vendor-guy, I’d worry about Voodoopad (VDP). What VDP does is Biblical; it breathes life into words. Having said that, Voodoopad’s magic has been around for years. It works off hyperlinks.* (Here, wiki, wiki….) This is what Flying Meat, the company that created VDP, says: “Within …VoodooPad … there is no “natural” sequence of pages. Like the web, any VoodooPad page is a click away on an appropriate hyperlink. And, of course, this is a natural way to organize ideas… This is what helps VoodooPad organize our minds.”
The reason VDP poses a threat to outliners is because it hyperlinks wordsand phrases. With VDP, you don’t need to list notes in any special order, you just hyperlink them by highlight and tapping your mouse. Which is a mixed blessing. On the Hallelujah side, if you hyperlink multiple pages and documents into your notes you crash the static barrier of outliners. And the Dark Side? In the process you sacrifice the hierarchies that are the very reason for outlining and outliners. “Inspiration,” by the way, does it all, and easily: outlining, snapping into visual maps, hyperlinks; but it’s just so, so… cute.
Lots of software programs hyperlink, some better than other. Tinderbox is the king, (assuming I ever come to terms with its weird interface). By contrast, VDP insists on hyperlinking. Best of all, VDP makes hyperlinking easy. The hyperlinks allow you to surf your own thoughts, which is not the same thing as “organizing your thoughts,” as Flying Meat claims. Hyperlinks chiefly offer control in one direction: going forward. That is, creating hyperlinks after the data has grown into dozens of pages and thousands of words is no fun. At least it wasn’t the last time I checked. That means using VDP to its full potential requires planning. Outliner, anyone?
*(A hyperlink is a connection among two or more points, allowing information to be cross-referenced/interconnected: linked.)
Mind Maps
My “mind mapping” experiences have been confined to paper and pencil, and maybe that’s all a writer needs. But a website called “Newsmap” piqued my interest. (http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/). Strictly speaking, this isn’t “mind mapping.” Far from it. This is more “wisdom of the crowd” stuff. The creator of “Newsmap,” Marcos Weskamp, describes his creation as “A Treemap visualization algorithm.” It constantly updates Google News. He believes it accentuates news bias, which was my first reaction, but that may depend on his algorithm. Or Google’s. Or how you look at “Newsmap.” Click on “select all countries,” and while there’s a fight for computer real estate (big headlines get scrunched down to 8 pt. type), a close look demonstrates a variety of editorial viewpoints. Farewell bias; welcome comparative headlining. May I have a larger screen, please?
For writers, visualizing information could, for instance, extend the power of outliners. Programs like Inspiration (Inspiration Software, Inc.) take a baby-step in that direction, instantly alternating between outlines, trees, split-trees, mind-maps… Tinderbox should be the contender, but ugh; writers don’t have the time to become software masters. There are just too many adjustments and fine tunings in Tinderbox to mine its powers. (Still, I haven’t given up; inch by inch…)
In reality, writers need to be able to import (dump!) information into their software or, alternatively, to accrete information as they do with a good database or spreadsheet. Then they can let the software do the heavy lifting: revealing unexpected relationships, discovering new contexts, sussing out hidden associations. Yes, I realize Microsoft Excel has a sharp learning curve, but too many complex programs can send a writer around the bend. The hope would be for programs to evolve new capabilities. DEVONthink is a candidate. Use it, learn it, make it grow new capabilities. Users have been goading the DT people to add visualization to their product. But so far, DT has not been encouraging. Still, the ability of DT to collect information, count words, and produce concordances may be a step in the right direction. The information is already there, now make the software capable of picturing it. Visualization could be a breath away. Or not.
Then, there’s “Many Eyes.” (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home) It’s a creature of IBM that’s at the root of “Newsmap.” It’s worth the time to study and possibly another blog. There’s always data to be crunched, and a better way to crunch it. I think there’s a bumper sticker here for writers who are heavy software users: Crunch Before Writing. My thanks to my friend Adam Blumenthal for making me aware of “Newsmap” and for introducing me to Christopher Perrien, who led me to “Many Eyes.” Here’s looking at you, guys.
Some quick housekeeping:
Item 1. Great article accidentally written about writing in yesterday’s NY Times Book Review, by P.J. O’Rourke (16 December 2007), reviewing Starbucked, by Taylor Clark. In sum, O’Rourke hated the book, loved the writer and turned out to be a generous reader. What interested this writer was O’Rourke’s explanation about how he approaches book reviews: collecting items and notes into a general folder, then working those bits into his actual notations on the book, which produces his writing outline. By the way, he did not say he used a “software outliner” in his review. No computer talk. I suppose that a writer with his chops doesn’t need software. Not only does he have perfect diction (as musicians have perfect pitch), he can afford to hire slaves if he wants to. Here’s the URL to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/O-Rourke-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref. Or try searching the review under “books” on the New York Times web page.
Item 2. A question I would pose to those who comment on the blog: When using a particularly valuable piece of software to study and organize information, have you ever recognized the software designer’s algorithms or heuristics (ouch, big word) influencing your approach to own your material? If so, what are you thoughts about those influences? Have you seen research on the subject? Who else has been thinking about this idea?
Kitchen or tool shed?
Discussing the “mental kitchen,” the December 2007 issue of Harper’s quotes poet W.H. Auden: “…few labor saving devices have been introduced into the [writer's] mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc., — but these mechanisms are very crude… Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything is done by hand.” Too bad Auden died before discovering marijuana or modern software. Not that I know anything about marijuana; I’ll leave that to wiser men like Bill Maher. However, I do know a little bit about the “mental kitchen,” the “cyber tool shed” where I work. So I’m going to take a few blogs to go over the software you might find there.
DEVONthink is the Big Foot on my desktop. It’s my goto program apart from WORD. I use it to hold all my research, and there’s the rub. It’s grown too big and slow. So while its virtue lies in its capacity, so do its problems. It’s like the story of the omnipotent man who built a house too large to live in. Here’s what’s going on. DEVONthink (DT) is a database, but not any database. It’s a place to store and clip your work, anything on the computer, even Quicktime (I think). What makes DT unique is that it can function as a brainstorming assistant. The people who developed the software for DT like to say that it offers artificial intelligence, which it does depending on your definition of A.I. Having said that, no other database I know does what DT does. For instance, it’s canny. It has the ability to make connections. It can suggest a hierarchy of files where newly imported information might be filed. It can also connect highlighted paragraphs (in the database) to related information stored elsewhere its file system. That’s a leap. That makes it more than a memory aide or sophisticated filing system. The program will make associations that might not otherwise be apparent to the writer. It has the potential for dialogue, at least among its stored parts. Unfortunately, it needs a computer with more than 3 gigs of RAM to make it live up to its potential.
Oh, That was Yesterday
Okay, last post was a homage to “Orphan Annie” and today’s post is a homage to Paul McCartney (“Yesterday… yada-yada…”) Last visit, I was trying to think of software that would solve a problem(s) for me, a book’s start-up problems, nothing unexpected. There’s always difficulties at the beginning of anything, which is why I experiment with software. Here’s what I learned this time, starting with the situation. I had several programs open on the desktop. There was Word with the document I was working on, plus several open documents for reference; then, there was all 1.83 gigs of information in DEVONthink at the ready; and Scrivener, which I’m re-studying in my free time and finding increasingly interesting. Unfortunately I’ve allowed its system to fall into disarray. I had Tinderbox in waiting; Entourage in the background, just in case my ship came in; and, what else? Doesn’t matter. My focus was on Word and the chapter I had been working on, which had reached a decision point. Here comes the bad news. There was no obvious way that I could use my high-power software hanging in the background to help. My problem required a decision, not a decision-tree. Even if I white-boarded all the issues I faced all the way out to the edges, that wouldn’t be enough. I’d still have to make a leap of faith, and go beyond the frame. That’s not my style, however, and that raised a question. Was there a limit to what software can do for a writer? Or, for this writer? Logically, there are lots of things software can do. That’s the purpose of the blog. But software can’t make you write. It can’t create a best-seller, let alone a book that will sell. What it can do, I realized, is to alter thought processes, to re-train the mind, over time. As I labored forward on the chapter, making all those damn choices, I found that I employed a style of thinking that came from working with my software set. In other words, this cocktail of software on my desktop altered my logic; not its direction, but its application. The software had re-trained my mind. My logic had been atomized and ordered. So, while the software did not help me make choices, let alone directly effect the outcome of the chapter, it caused me to sift my choices down to their parts. Ironically, I turned to a pencil and paper to sort through the last bits of logic that I needed to get going. After that came the leap of faith.
Today is Another Tomorrow
Leaving the title of today’s blog to “Orphan Annie” (“Tomorrow, tomorrow…”), I find I have the same problem as yesterday, how do I write Chapter One? Since I’m writing about a spy, that requires some explanation. But because I’m dealing with a spy, the information I have about her is both limited and not always credible. However, I have succeeded in locating her childhood diaries, which is valuable because she was a smart kid. The diaries cover her life roughly from ages 10 to 14. This is the first real solid in-depth information that I’ve been able to collect about her early years, and its good. So here I am at the beginning of the biography, which naturally lends itself to chronology, and I’ve got two working elements: a spy, and a 10-year-old. Putting the two together into a chapter will require some narrative legerdemain. Got software? Dunno. What I already understand as I progress into the day’s work is that I must make some difficult and crucial decisions, and I really doubt that there’s any software that will help me. On the other hand, maybe I should have a look at some story-writing software. Which is the moral of today’s blog. Am I going to spend time software shopping, learning the intricacies of the software that are necessary to make it truly effective, even revelatory. Or am I going to write?
Writing Bent
The idea of cybernetic aides for prose writers– I don’t want to call it software, because it promises to be more — has been parsed long enough to be understood by theorists and used consciously or unconsciously by working writers. Author James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine (Breaking the News, and Blind Into Iraq) and Steven Berlin Johnson, who wrote Everything Bad is Good for You, come to mind. They’re both advocates of CyberTools for writers. I associate Fallows and Johnson with DEVONthink, which is part of my tool kit. Other programs in the kit — to name a few — are Scrivener, Tinderbox, Inspiration (yes, Inspiration). The purpose of each is slightly different, but in general they help me to write lucidly and creatively — with insights that might have escaped me while I was working on my Remington portable. (Incidentally, I am composing the blog on the fly, so to speak, for now. No software, not yet. But that will change. I am beginning to pluck out a blog tool on Tinderbox. Scrivener may also get some work, as well as Yojimbo.) Today, I “lensed” my way through a balky chapter in my book with Tinderbox. But I used it to work backwards. Instead of outlining and then writing; I wrote the chapter, first. Then I broke it down into a simple-simple Tinderbox outline (simple because Tinderbox can get complex). That helped me see the “movement,” if you will, of the chapter: the way it progressed from scene, to exposition, to supporting detail, etc. Strangely, in the end, the process flipped back to good old fashioned intuition. I saw that analyzing the chapter with Tinderbox, breaking it down, merely revealed its parts. I was surprised that it did not help me to separate the trees from the forest. And, more, it did not help me see the chapter through the eyes of my reader. That is, I was not able to use the software to identify the “order” in which my reader needed to learn about my character and her situation. Tinderbox helped to be sure, and it allowed me to see a progression but, in the end, experience trumped software. I fell back on my intuition. Or did I? More tomorrow….
