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  

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.)  

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.