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Reflexive outlining with several outliners
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Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 19, 2011 at 06:47 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>- Is there a non-manual way to transfer the outline
>from Scrivener to Bonsai; e.g. as tab-indented text, OPML or whatever?
There are some ways to import and export for both (mostly as text or RTF) but I haven’t tried that and I’m not sure how convenient that would be.
As I’m constructing an outline from scratch, there is nothing to import or export for me. I’m using simple copy and paste between Scrivener, Bonsai and Storybook back and forth to build my outline incrementally and keep them up-to-date. I’m focused on maximising creativity right now, and I’m finding that creativity is helped by being able to distill the messy planning process in Scrivener into a distilled logical outline in Bonsai and a big picture outline in Storybook. Scrivener provides a meso-view (of index card chunks of text), Bonsai provides the micro-view of a logical outline of each idea (which will probably become topic sentences of paragraphs), and Storybook provides the macro-view of the book as a whole.
>- Can you
>explain how you construct the _outline_ in Storybook? With the Stoybook info types I
>would expect that you can get 3-4 levels max, i.e. parts, chapters and scenes, plus the
>parallel strands, is this enough for you?
It’s basically a process of distillation. I come up with some text and structure in Scrivener, I distill it into an idea-by-idea logical outline in Bonsai, and then I zoom out and reconstruct the overall big picture view in Storybook. So the Storybook outline is a very chunky one where each “scene” represents a section in the chapter (a “document” or index card in Scrivener). The main benefits of Storybook so far are 1) the ability to split the “scenes” (Scrivener index card titles) into “strands” and view them side-by-side (I have 3 right now), which is not possible in Scrivener, as it can only display them linearly (one index card after the other). This allows for visualising the complexity of the text better, by making various plot-lines visible. 2) The “Manage chapters and scenes” view is very helpful to see the chapters side by side, while each of them displays all the scenes (which in Scrivener is not possible because it only displays top level index cards, as opposed to index cards contained within index cards, or scenes within scenes). This view also shows the colour coding for the strands, which is also very nice.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 19, 2011 at 06:50 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>>- Can you
>>explain how you construct the
>_outline_ in Storybook? With the Stoybook info types I
>>would expect that you can get
>3-4 levels max, i.e. parts, chapters and scenes, plus the
>>parallel strands, is this
>enough for you?
So to answer your question, I’m not really using it as an outliner in the sense you describe it. I’m using Storybook as a “structure visualiser.”
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 19, 2011 at 07:02 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>As I’m constructing an outline from
>scratch, there is nothing to import or export for me. I’m using simple copy and paste
>between Scrivener, Bonsai and Storybook back and forth to build my outline
>incrementally and keep them up-to-date. I’m focused on maximising creativity right
>now, and I’m finding that creativity is helped by being able to distill the messy
>planning process in Scrivener into a distilled logical outline in Bonsai and a big
>picture outline in Storybook.
>
The point I’m trying to make about “reflexivity” is that as I change one outline in one software, the other two become out of sync, and so as I try to manually update the other two, I realise I can further improve the outline in the other software given its different visualisation, so then I have to return to the first software and update that one and the third one. And for some reason this really seems to work, I’ve never been this productive with writing before. So creativity seems to emerge from the minor disparities between the three outlines, as I keep tinkering and trying to keep them identical. So maybe it’s “recursivity,” rather than “reflexivity.”
Posted by Franz Grieser
Oct 19, 2011 at 07:50 PM
Thanks for sharing, Dr. Andus.
I made the experience that retyping (not copying) the outline elements can also help getting more clarity. Instead of Storybook I used Storylines for a project some time ago. And your post made me think about combining Scrivener with Storylines.
Franz
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 20, 2011 at 04:33 PM
Franz Grieser wrote:
>I made the experience that retyping (not copying)
>the outline elements can also help getting more clarity. Instead of Storybook I used
>Storylines for a project some time ago. And your post made me think about combining
>Scrivener with Storylines.
Thanks for the tip. I took a look at Writer’s Cafe and it does look similar to Storybook. Its StoryLines feature is definitely interesting. I also think that Scrivener is missing a trick by not providing a similar visualisation function.