Info collection/use; authoring ideas, organization, composition - my personal approach

Posted by Derek Cornish
Oct 21, 2007 at 01:09 AM

Cassius -

Like you, I used GV extensively for all my work - still do, actually, although I have flirted with NoteMap, Inspiration (clunky somehow, as you say) and PocketThinker. Brainstorm, too, although I find it unaccountably constraining - claustrophobic almost during prolonged use. I think this is more a result of having used GV for so long, rather than anything intrinsically wrong with Brainstorm, although its aerial view does need to be made editable IMO.

As for GV’s category features, I never made much use of these, although I recall that Steve Cohen and Steve Zeoli did. While a great fan of GV, I don’t think it bears much comparison with Zoot’s capabilities in this regard. However, the two work very well together, in this way:

I use Zoot mainly for collecting information, as a receptacle for random brainstorming thoughts, and for organising and categorizing via its virtual folders, keywords, and delimited fields in items. GV (or it could be NoteMap, etc) I use for developing arguments. There is a lot of interchange between Zoot and GV at this point, as I may insert ideas from Zoot into GV and vice versa.

Once I have an outlined argument - and often a considerable amount of drafted text - I replicate the main points of the argument in Zoot itself - in the folder tree - and use Zoot’s incomparable powers of organising data to marshal its contents in order to enlarge, develop and support the argument I am making (or narrative I am constructing).

When I am happy with what I’ve got - or usually when I am just plain tired of working in an outliner or in Zoot - I move to a separate drafting program. Most recently I’ve been using a plain-text editor, NoteTab Pro, which has a primitive outlining feature: essentially, it acts as a rudimentary two-pane outliner. I use the outlining “tree” as a simple table-of-contents based on my argument, and start proper drafting. The main benefit of a two-pane outliner at this stage is that it enables me to use the TOC as a simple means of navigating around the document. (Of course, I could use MS-Word at this point, but I refer something simpler.)

None of this is altogether satisfactory, and there is a lot of overlap - without much corresponding integration amongst programs. But I think this reflects the fact that although it is useful to see the whole creative process as a series of stages, one is always going back to earlier stages - improving the outline, searching and collecting more information, organising and re-organising, even as one is drafting something. It is these feedback loops that make the whole process messier but more dynamic than a simple workflow diagram might suggest.

Just my take on it.

Derek