I've found some Cool New Software! Which should enable me to waste WEEKS re-organizing my notes into absolutely perfect, multiply-cross-indexed little notelets, which I imagine as being something like chiclets, all perfectly lined up, alphabetized, cross-linked, and absolutely everything but, you know, actually being an article. Brushing, combing and massaging your notes, that's the ticket to endless weeks of happy non-productivity that somehow feels as if you're getting something done. Without actually, you know, getting anything out the door ...The new software I refer to is Circus Ponies "Notebook" (only for Mac, I think). I found a blog, "Organizing Creativity", that gave a two-step process for automatically turning all your research into articles without human intervention of any kind, or that was my hopeful reconstruction of what he describes. Essentially, he takes all his notes in "Notebook", whose strengths he describes here, and also uses "Notebook" to produce a detailed outline which includes all of the secondary literature he will be referring to, with links to those notes. (The strength of "Notebook" is that it automagically produces multiple links and cross-indexings). Then he uses "Scrivener", of which I'm already a huge fan, to actually write the article., with the "Notebook" file open beside the "Scrivener" window. He has another post here that discusses how to use Scrivener to write dissertations, or any lengthy project.
Image viaWikipedia
One touch I particularly liked is that he suggests that you use checkboxes in your outline. Why? So that once you've actually written something, you can check it off, and the text will grey out, and you will feel happy because you are accomplishing stuff.
Until now I had thought of "Notebook" and "Scrivener" as essentially duplicating each others' functions - or, at least, largely overlapping. But "Notebook" does seem to keep everything much better organized than "Scrivener" does. Though, I have to say, all this really produces is that illusion of control to which writers are so prone to succumb. Surely "control" (of the subject, of the literature, of the whatever) is not the highest virtue to which writers should aspire?
However, the hell. For now, I can play with my new software, and pretend that I will soon have control! really! Control of eVERYTHING I'm supposed to have read! And then it will magically all turn itself into finished texts! While I sleep! Circus Ponies will mate with Scriveners and produce studious little centaurs of polished pieces, which will gallop off to publication in happy frolicking herds. I can dream.
Related articles
- Scrivener - Writing the old way is crazy (all-things-andy-gavin.com)
- Review: Literature and Latte Scrivener 2.0.2 (macworld.com)
- Scrivener Hits Mac App Store (themactrack.com)
- Meet the love of my life: Scrivener! (angelikadevlyn.wordpress.com)
