Juggling Prosthetics

Three new prosthetics have found their way onto my computer. One of them, I have written about, the smartpen. Soon I will blog about the other, which I have also addressed, DEVONthink. New developments abroad in both. However, this column is about an item that’s been around for a while, but never worked for me, until now.

For the past few weeks, I have been acquainting myself text recognition software, MacSpeech. It’s been a revelation. MacSpeech has enabled me to break the fourth wall, a symbolic space filmmakers refer to. The fourth wall separates the actor from the camera and the camera from the audience. It’s where the suspension of belief takes place. When an actor looks at the camera and directly addresses the audience, he is said to be breaking the fourth wall.

In my world, the fourth wall is a glaring white page. Perhaps not the best analogy, but one that works for me. As intellectual prosthetics go, MacSpeech has allowed me to break the fourth wall of composition. As a result, I write more easily, I am more prolific, and I make fewer mistakes.

The truly incredible thing for me in this experience is the accuracy and speed of MacSpeech. Just as important, is the ability the software gives me to separate myself from the tyranny of the keyboard. With MacSpeech I am able to pace around as I “write,” to speak out loud, as nearly perfect text appears on the screen.

What is extraordinary, is the realization that for the first time I am able to translate the words in my mind directly onto the page. One instant there is a thought, the next instant produces the thought on the page. With my cranky cognitive processor, my brain, there is usually many a slip twixt cup and lip or, in this case, between brain and keyboard.

I can remember a time in middle school when I could not understand why it was that the words I had in my mind to write did not translate into the words I wrote. I would be thinking one thing and writing another. What was that? It was an article of faith with me that there should be a direct connection between what I thought and what I penned. There was not. In fact there was many a slip. MacSpeech changes that.

MacSpeech makes thought — intellection — literal. Ideas, instantly evoked. Reflection equals composition. And by combining the varieties of prosthetics available when words atomize into pixels and bytes, I am able to think in new ways. It’s like getting a good massage. By combining different forms of outliners, alternate thought processors (DEVONthink, for instance), and collection tools like Evernote, I gain the freedom to think and compose simultaneously.

The Prosthetic Pen for Less

A surprise from Livescribe smartpen. Maybe more than one… The pen’s been selling at Target, a strange place for sophisticated tech tastes. The other surprise? Until now, smartpen has held its price point — $100/gig. But, yesterday, at Target I discovered at 20 percent price drop. The two-gig pen now sells for $160. While that’s good, I wonder what it means. For a long time, the pen’s price was inviolable. It cost the same at Amazon, Target, name-your-discounter. That gave me confidence in the company, because when a business maintains terms for all comers that signifies strength and stability. Considerable Apple. No one discounts their products. Interestingly, the price at the Livescribe store hasn’t budged. It’s holding at $100 per gig. While there are deals on pre-packs, they are the sort of deals you might see at Amazon, package deals: pen, notes pads, extra refills on sale for $225. Maybe Target realizes they are not the place for leading edge technical prosthetics and they’re clearing out inventory. eBay people might bite on that one.

What’s going on? This pen is hot and evolving. But the pace of innovation can be telling. Look at the growth of apps for the iPhone/iPod. With 25-thousand apps in January, Flurry says that the apps numbered 65-thousand in July. There’s a message in those numbers. Interest. Opportunity. Success! The public is on fire. Not at Livescribe. They need to get the developer community churning.

They could start with notepads. Humble but powerful. The standard notebook that comes with the pen is fine, but a variety of note taking notebooks would be … value added, a little spice in the process. I already break up the page in a modified Cornell Notes style, as I take notes with the smartpen. How about a notebook with no lines, but grids for notes, summaries and questions? The good news is that there’s already buzz among developers about moving to a new line of notepads… But is it real?

A small moleskin-style notebook would be great for the smartpen. A natural. The neat little notebooks on sale now are too thick and clunky for quick-draw writers and note takers.

On the other hand, the pen is not exactly fast on the draw, either. It’s big, which suggests a modified smartpen of the future. A whole new line. How about a smart pen with one flat side to keep it from rolling off the table? In classrooms, many desks are slanted for comfort. That can be dangerous for a delicate $200 writing device.

Or what about microphones. I did an interview the other day in a noisy restaurant. Ambient noise can be a problem for the pen. I got around the loud music and louder clientele by using the smartpen’s earphone/microphones like a lavaliere mic, planting them just next to my subject’s fork. It worked great. But why not a lavaliere mic for the smartpen? Add a little Bluetooth device to the pen and connect it through a Bluetooth mic… Farewell unsightly wires. Professionals like me would pay for add-ons that make work easier and more accurate. There are probably dozens of ways to modify existing pens to employ Bluetooth… But any kind of microphone that plugged into the pen would do.

Users like me want to see energy and stability from brilliant and innovative companies with products like the smartpen… And I’m watching for signs.

Prosthetic Pen?

So which statement is most accurate? A smartpen is an intellectual prosthetic. A smartpen is more flexible than a computer. A smartpen redefines non-linear organization. Roll the tape (and don’t forget to click the back button to read the rest of the blog!): The Livescribe paper-based computing platform

I just bought smartpen number two from livescribe for my son who begins high school in two weeks. Smartpen number one is mine. Bet on that. I use it for teaching and for interviewing.

Here’s the deal. Say you’re in a lecture, and you whip out your smartpen. Naturally, you begin taking notes. Your smartpen uses “special” paper (same price as “regular” paper), which allows the pen to simultaneously capture every word on the page as the pen’s microphone records every word in the lecture. Or, in my case, the interview. Back at your desk, you slip the pen into its “cradle,” and everything flows into a free software package. Now for the magic.

Every word in your funky handwritten notes is searchable! Pulse smartpen from Livescribe

And more, if you don’t understand those inky gobs others call your handwritten notes, there’s remedy. You simply touch the pen to the scrambled words and the pen replays the lecture/interview from the garbled blob of cursive in question. Word! Watch how University of Kansas professor, cool Mike Wesch and his class, use the pen: SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool

This is serious stuff with lots of opportunities for those in search of intellectual prosthetics, and we haven’t begun to address the opening questions raised by this blog. Not to mention one or two improvements and a problem-O…

To be continued…

Lost… Without a byte

Driving south on I-147 yesterday, it dawned on me that I could be headed north. Or should have been. After clicking cruise control, I had this inkling that I-147 south might not lead to I-40. And, yes, I had no GPS. I’d loaned it to my daughter. No iPhone, either. I did, however, have an iPod Touch, but roadside wifi isn’t even on the map. Which meant that I was lost, with no directional prosthetic. There was this stubborn overwhelming sense coursing through me that there had to be some digital solution at hand, a button somewhere in the Honda that would help me find my way home. The sensation was palpable and didn’t go away even when I stopped at a gas station for directions. Without sending a message by way of Western Union, something has happened, and there’s no going back: I’ve succomb to technology. Not good. Not bad. Just lost.

The Other Side of the Mirror — Setting Limits

Writing  The Honey Trap: The True Story of Madame Elizabeth Brousse, A/K/A Cynthia has been an awakening, of sorts. Going digital seems to make all the difference in the world to the process of drafting, editing and publishing.

Until now, the idea behind this blog has been to examine the affect of software on the writing process. But now that I’m on the other side of the mirror, which is to say, writing code — in essence, turning the writing into software — I need to reflect on my original aims.

To be brief, coding interferes with writing. It’s just tedious. However, I’m convinced it improves the reading experience, which is crucial, perhaps the whole point. It occurs to me that The History News Network could present a problem (hnn.us/blogs/74.html) because their interface is so limited. It’s really not designed for “digital literary non-fiction.” Comparing The Honey Trap with, say, The Dolly Madison Digital Edition, from UVA can be disheartenting, although it may be missing the point.

Perhaps what I need to do is to set limits, to define what THT can actually achieve digitally.

Here’s one idea: To make the Honey Trap sufficiently interactive that other scholars can employ my links and resources to prove, disprove, augment or even transmute the story of OSS, the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Madame Brousse. Digitizing THT should provide historians with resources to advance the story, beyond what I am able to achieve.

Next up: How using software to produce digital copy changes the art/craft of writing.

Twice failed

Twice now, I’ve tried to coax facebook into working as a writing slate. Once, after two martinis, I pumped out an on-the-run review of a Jonathan Stratham chase-movie, “Transporter III.” I could hardly keep up. The facebook review process failed for a single simple reason: in order to follow a running review, the reader had to continuously update his/her page to see my status(es). Too much dedication from readers required, particularly from a social network site. But, nice try, nonetheless.

More recently, I tried to produce dialogue via facebook status lines, but failed because the continuity was lost, except on my own page (and who reads that?). There was a worse problem, though. One I can’t fix. My dialogue ran in reverse order. Egad. But, nice try, nonetheless.

I have two thoughts about my failures, maybe three. I can’t be the first person to have tried this. Second, it’s not yet possible to create live self-updating contiguous posts via social networks. Too bad. Any developers listening? This should be possible, a value-added feature. Mr. Zuckerman? There’s poetry to be done, songs to be written, short stories…

Second point (or is this the third?), the prosthetic element of Web 2.0 social software played no role in the “creative” process, no symbiosis, no synergy, no ghost in the machine, just chatter and clutter. In fact, the social network software got in the way. (I may try this with a Hash (#) Twitter, we’ll see. It could work.) Worse, no one gave a damn, but what else is new? No difference to me.

Time to make a statement:

Social networking should offer a new twist on publishing, something live and interactive and available to readers — if there are any (left) — to comment and possibly drive the story. See my post below on the Japanese women who write novels on their cell phones. What am I missing? What is social networking missing (a simple, intuitive way to reverse order status lines)? What have those Japanese thumbsters got that I ain’t got?

The Prosthetic Editor

My last blog entry literally ended on the word “editor.” I concluded that I just might need an actual human being with a red pencil to help me through my writing. But wait! How to reconcile intellectual prosthetics with professionals dragging red pencils? Well it’s not easy and, as it turns out, it’s not necessary. Not if you’re a Mac user. Which is the reason that I continue using MS Word on my Mac, instead of switching over to Google.docs. My Editor. On any given day, my editor could be Alex, Bruce, Kathy, Princess, Zorvox. Zorvox?

Who are these characters? They’re the synthesized voices of my Mac.

I’ve actually been using Princess for some time now, but I’ve just discovered Alex, a new voice that comes with Leopard. He’s really pretty good. Unlike other synthesizers, Alex will actually breathe as he reads, which is a nice touch. In some ways (read: my fragile ego), Alex is better than an editor, which is why I parted ways with my most recent red-pencil type. Synthetic Alex. He supplies the electronic prosthetic I most need as a writer.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got a processing defect in the CPU-between-my-ears. It means I not only don’t realize when I’m leaving out words, misspelling them or barfing-up sentences. It’s actually worse than that. I fail completely when it comes to proofing my own copy. I can’t see a word I write, or fail to write.

The difference is Alex. He’ll read everything I write just as I write it. He’s one cold dude. And more, when he speaks I listen. And when I listen, I hear the errors I fail to read.

Good-bye red pencils. Thank you, Alex, you intellectual prosthetic you. And did I mention Alex doesn’t charge for his services?

Small Change

The blog started out as a way to examine a book project — a biography I had been working on about an American woman who spied for the British during World War II — as writing developed though the use of intellectual prosthetics: software.

Then my publisher went belly up. http://tinyurl.com/rdg7k5

That was 18 months ago. Last summer, I got the idea of contacting Rick Shenkman http://home.sprynet.com/~rshenkman/ and asking him if the History News Network would be interested in turning the biography I had been writing into a "digital biography." Rick's quite a guy. He was enthusiastic, and I underestimated the challenge. The project turned into a portmanteau word — part slow plodding, and some occasional progress: plodgress.

Fortunately my friend, Jay Ballenger, was around to help me. He built the solution to the problem, a companion web page that links to HNN and functions like the back matter in a scholarly text, hosting the bibliography, the notes, etc. The page is still under construction, and I hope it will continue to be. In fact, one difference between a digital biography and a book is that while I intend to reach a conclusion, I don't foresee the project really ending. As I learned from my first book, the unfortunate business about traditional publication is that it's over when it's done. Not so on the WWW. There's always time and room for augmentation, elaboration, discovery. A digital (i.e., hyper-linked) writing project is open to others, to some degree. Comments are invited. The curious thing is that HNN project — THE HONEY TRAP: THE TRUE STORY OF MADAME ELIZABETH BROUSSE, A/K/A "CYNTHIA" (http://hnn.us/blogs/74.html) feels like the top tenth of the iceberg, whereas the page Jay helped me create –www.madamebrousse.com — feels like all that underwater mass lurking beneath the iceberg. (No, this is not an allusion to the Titanic, at least I hope it's not.)

Now comes the confession. For all the software I've thrown at this project, over many years, I still can't figure out the first 1,000 words. I simply don't know what the reader needs to know about Madame Brousse, and in what order. Where's the focus? Do I play for hype? Sex? Hell, the woman does a strip tease in the Vichy French embassy located twenty minutes from the White House while Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt are smoking in the Map Room trying to figure out whether to invade France's colonies in North Africa.

The one wise adjustment I've made is to limit the scope of the project. Instead of wringing out my character's entire life, I'm focusing on just one eventful period in her career as a spy, a perfect moment — consequential, little examined (how can that be?), revelatory (where are all the graduate students, they should be on this like white on rice), and a historical turning point.

But I'm stuck on the second sentence, which I write and rewrite and then start over again. And again. No, I'm not turning into Jack Torrance. Maybe I need a better intellectual prosthetic. Or an editor.

So I’m not alone…

http://gridskipper.com/343491/keeping-your-laptop-lewdness-safe-from-border-security

Judge Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court in Los Angeles threw out evidence that had been seized from a laptop on the grounds that our computers are inside our minds, man:

Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory, they are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.

Unsurprisingly, Judge Pregerson’s kooky mind-meld ruling is expected to be reversed on appeal.

For better or for worse?

The Intellectual Prosthetic and Billboard

Let's try this notion a slightly different way — the "Intellectual Prosthetic" as a connection machine, a billboard, and advertisement for myself, the new era of publication, from words to pixels and bytes. Thus, the intellectual prosthetic morphs the word and the language. Exploring we go!

Tap, Tap, Tap… Who’s there, the Raven or Marshall McLuhan?

An article in Sunday’s NY Times describes a Japanese tech phenomenon called “cellphone novels”: bodice-rippers (obi-rippers?) tapped out on thumb-pads.  These packet-sized “books” have proved to be a huge success in Japan, eventually being reformatted into hardcover best-sellers resold through standard outlets. However, a crisis has arisen among authors, most of whom are young women who go by one name; the example used by the Times was a 21-year-old with the nomme de phone, Rin. What’s wrong with Rin? It seems that cellphone authors are up-in-thumbs about the gestalt of cellphoning. They worry that some typers may be tapping their tales on a computer instead of their iPhones, which not only violates the rules of the game but the essence of the “genre.” In other words, the medium is the text message.  Quoth the Times: “When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone. Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.” Oh-hiyo gozi-emashta! Welcome to BentWrite. How does the writing tool affect the act/art of writing? Good question. Can a cellphone be an intellectual prosthetic? Indeed it can. One writes by any means necessary, although there may be a ghost in the machine: the medium certainly involves the message. A young cellphone author who was forced to switch to a computer because of ingrown thumbnails — too much tapping — has evolved beyond the emoticons of cellphone novels composed of pin-prick sentences, and bonsai paragraphs, according to her publisher. Says the New York Times:  “Since she’s switched to a computer her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.” Surely the end is near.

The plan

The latest chapter of my biography began with a flash of insight, not software.  Over the weekend, as I edited one chapter, I was searching for a theme for my next. I knew that I needed to make a narrative leap, which would entail a hard cut back into the day-to-day life of my character. However, there were lots of mechanical details that got in the way of the seemingly simple business of moving the story forward. The problem was finding the right place to return to the action, a place that would grab the reader’s attention. My final decision, I knew, had to be driven by timing, pacing and development. I expected software to be usefel, because I assumed that logic would lead the way, but I surprised myself. Somehow I got my  mojo working. There, in a flash, was the solution. Inspiration (not the software by the same name) beats thinking any day. There’s something special about magic. It validates the creative process.  What happened was simple. I suddenly realized that I could leap over all the mechanical details and drop my character into an arresting environment: Territet Switzerland, near Montreux on the coast of Lake Geneva. This is where my young spy attended finishing school at age 13, and every good spy needs to know their way around Switzerland, right?

The work plan for the day required browsing and reading through my subject’s diary entries, which I had digitally photographed at the Churchill College Archive Center in Cambridge England. I used iPhoto to view the images and WORD to make notes. Eventually, I will use Inspiration (the software) to structure the chapter, creating lists and hierarchies as tools to find story turns. For me, this very mechanical process is the equivalent of  ”finger exercises” on a piano. Down the road, I can juxtapose my subject’s diary entries against letters written by her father during this same period. That material was  collected for me by a researcher, Jason Eckert at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Thanks, Jason. To add breadth and perspective to the chapter, I picked up some useful artifacts on the Internet:  a postcard of the drawing room (circa 1920) where my character studied in Switzerland, which I found on eBay. Sometimes researching is not different from visiting the flea-market. In addition, I used views from Google Earth to establish my character’s phyisical world — Monteux, Territet, Lake Geneva. I also found floor plans for the Institution des Essarts, where she lived.

Today’s tools were iPhoto, WORD, Google Earth, a digital camera and eBay.

Pass it on…

Here’s a double recommendation for the New Year. First, the BBC’s writing site, and then an interview on the BBC’s writing site with Neil Cross, author of Mr. In-between. Cross  turns out to be a fan of Scrivener, and discusses how the program was developed, why it works for him, and how he uses it. This recommendation will be a twofer, containing both the site and the interview together. Good reading. Love the Beeb!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/insight/neil_cross.shtml  

An idea is a nest, is a nest, is a nest… a nest

In 1983, the software program called “Framework” and its chief developer Robert Carr were already talking about integrated productivity software. That’s a quarter century ago, and the rest of the world is still catching up. Or playing the same game on a different field. While Microsoft uses identical commands across its office software, no one has captured the outlining genius of Framework and its Fred programming language.  (Applescript comes close, but it’s not as simple as FRED.) The essential and outstanding difference between Framework and all other outlining programs is the radical (and obvious) concept of “nests.” Framework’s outlines actually nested into each other. Yes, they were “sibs,” but they were more than brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles. They were actual containers, and what they contained was a free-flowing stream of thoughts. Hey, it was the age of “go with the flow.” Framework’s nests didn’t just sit side-by-side or one on top of the other. Each idea lived inside the other, preserving hierarchies while allowing penetration. Penetration? Yes, as in: penetrating ideas. By nesting the outline structure, a writer could dig down into his own best thoughts. Then, he or she could simply tap the “insert” key and open another new and “deeper” frame, allowing him to go further inside his original “frame” of thought It was like Tupperware for the mind. It didn’t take up space in the tool shed and it kept your thinking fresh. Framework wasn’t just an outliner; it was a thinking tool that lured the user out of the list, and out of the hierarchy and down into the “foul rag and bone shop” of creation. (Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”) And, after such a revery, a single click snapped your notes back into a hierarchy, where — ah-ha! — a full-blown piece of rational, expository thinking emerged as if by magic. After that, the outline could be manipulated to more fully express the idea writer endeavored to evoke. Forgive this bit of nostalgia, please.

 

Incidentally, Framework lives on for PCs, but I can’t vouch for it, or for its price. http://www.framework.com/ Yes, it has the world’s ugliest, most loathsome and most utterly workable GUI left in computerdom; it’s an unkempt but highly serviceable artifact of the late, great breakthrough Intel 386 chip.  

 

News you can use: At DEVONthink the buzz is that there will be an early 2008 release of Version 2.0. The new release has been a long time coming, no doubt complicated by the emergence of (ho-hum) Leopard. DTP 2.0 will probably contain tags and visualizations, but as always the developers are playing it close to the vest. Also, the DEVONfolks are coming out with a new product, something they promise will be Big, really beeeeg. So far, they are not saying much, just teasing their new offering with an image of a maze, an English garden maze. My guess? The new DEVONthing will be a Getting Things Done productivity tool that points you through the daily maze of information collection and production.  Price point, guessing again, $79.95 if it really works, $59.95 if it will work within a year of release. Smile!

 

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….