Bashers and Swoopers – How the tools we use for writing are letting us down

Bashers and Swoopers – How the tools we use for writing are letting us down(medium.com)

9 points by oliebol 10 years ago | 9 comments

yoo1I 10 years ago |

To sum up this "article":

Some fluffy paragraphs about linear writing.

Fewer fluffy paragraphs about non-linear writing.

Leading question: Can you relate to this?

Convenient link to the author's product, which is, you guessed it, a non-linear writing application.

This is just an advertisement.

ivansavz 10 years ago |

A good "outliner" can take you very far. You can start with a good, logical outline for what you want to write, then just fill in what you need.

There are also tools like https://gingkoapp.com which helps with structured writing and allow to move or "reattach" entire subtrees of a document.

My personal favourite is to use lots of separate text files (.md or .tex) and a top level "main file" which includes the desired sections. I find a single level of includes works best since you can see exactly what is going on in the main file, whereas if you include files that include other files, things get complicated real quick!

Pro tip for working with multiple .tex files: if you start each of the included .tex files with

    %!TEX root = mainfile.tex

the multi-file authoring experience becomes much better ;)

AstralStorm 10 years ago | |

An outline forces a high level sequential structure. You just moved the problem one level up.

eximius 10 years ago |

This seems like a forced false dichotomy (perhaps for rhetorical purposes, but then it isn't as important as it claims to be).

What I mean is that I somewhat doubt most people fall into either of these two camps. I would bet most work linearly, keeping in mind vague parts and ideas for elsewhere - maybe keeping notes in AN extra document, but also not limiting themselves to working strictly forwards.

Until there is a medium of non-linear consumption, I am skeptical of the need for serious tooling around non-linear documents besides what we already have (mind maps, graphs, etc - all things with products for them but ultimately the biggest thing keeping this from translating well to the computer is the mouse and keyboard, not the software)

egjerlow 10 years ago |

I'm a bit confused by this - I cannot even imagine how you would think in a way that is not linear when thinking about a story. Sure you might be thinking of various aspects that you want to include and you don't know where in the overarching story they will fit in, but still these aspects can be expressed in an order that is either linear or able to be broken down into smaller chunks that are also linear. Seems this article is talking about something different than this again..

Could someone enlighten me?

AstralStorm 10 years ago | |

Let's start with an episodic structure. You can think of a few cool episodes or themes right? Then you expand on the episodes or themes while thinking on an overarching story. Afterwards you could fix continuity mistakes, fill in the blanks, expand or condense it.

This is bottom up design instead of top down. An episode is good if it can stand on its own, but there is no need to work on them in any particular order.

Think about it like a process of discovery. You can get an idea for a different part of the whole while working on something completely unrelated. Current note taking tools do not help with this - dumb post it notes are better.

oliebol 10 years ago | |

I think the fundamental issue is that humans are spatial thinkers - i.e. we think about things in 2 or 3 dimensions, not just one. There's something about being able to see everything mapped out in front of you (with post-its or similar) that just works better.

So while eventually every story becomes linear, the thinking required to get there works best with more dimensions.

mpbm 10 years ago |

Aw yeah, this is the stuff I'm working on.

Did you know writing is literally stone age technology? True story.

The serialized list of symbols we use to exchange thoughts doesn't have enough features for the modern world. It takes too much effort to serialize (write) and deserialize (read) information. The knowledge should be separated from the way it happens to be displayed to each individual person.

AstralStorm 10 years ago |

The example shown in the photo with the writer of a detective model is a crude version of mind map. There are a few tools to handle those well, but none integrated with a good word processor.