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….
