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
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.
