I recently read some other lines about maps,

"dimkanovikov
Using a relationships map is very easy - just create characters, configure them (photo, name, story role) and then you can order them on the virtual surface and add relations between them.
What about planning stories - in the current version such tools are unavailable, but we plan to create a lot of useful tools for outlining (beats, cards & timeline) in the future updates." ( https://www.reddit.com/user/dimkanovikov/ )

You know that I have written in this forum, extensively, about "TheBrain" (or whatever they call it currently), and you know that I qualify it "promises not met"...

The above citation isn't but just another proof of "maps are your static trap" - they just represent some situation at point "time 0000:00:00:00" (to follow our Gregorian calendar), and then nothing - if you "follow" maps, you'll be pitied...

And yes, you could do a "suite" of such maps ("snap shots"), and even them would hold-you-back, believe me... (since the members of a choir should sing in sync... (which doesn't imply, unisono) whilst your figures-in-a-landscape should not...)

Thus, in the end, you can just rely on your brain, and its facility to (more or less reliably and/or "impressively", in fact "traceably" for your further thinking) retain "development", in its memory / memories; in other words, relying on maps will even hinder your thinking, instead of fulfilling your dream of "back-up" it.

I also came along, recently, by https://www.pureref.com/ , the developers of which will be happy with your contribution of 5 or 10 bucks, and indeed, if you rely upon e.g. "Ulysses" for your writing, you might have some use for such additional software, whilst in Ultra Recall e.g., you would just insert a "pic" item within your natural "suite" of items, and then UR will, whenever you "activate" that item, provide an in-house pic viewer to admire your "idea / mood pic" - OMG (for both situations)!

Speaking of "Ulysses", my initial appreciation had been guided by my misinterpretation of its title, and indeed, it's NOT a writing tool promising some Ariadne (sic! you learn a lot about language and other things, once you'll open your mind!) to their subscribers - and that had been Theseus, not Ulysses indeed: my fault again! -, but "Ulysses" stands in there just for the same reason as that - aforementioned by me, for some other "writers' app" - "Hemingway mode" exists: it's just there for selling the app, by comforting the buyer, "yeah, you too, dear subscriber, will become immortal in the end! - my "OMG" here being much more clarion than the one above, obviously.

Over there, I suggested that Ul subscribers kindly asked for "tree formatting", and all I got - from a "contributor" whose "contributions" might be qualified a little bit of "stalled", quality-wise, in the end -, was something like "OMG" (I cite from memory) - be it!

Since if you're happy with Ul, everything's fine, even when those hideous "**", etc. are NOT hideable, for the time being, and whenever you wanna see your formatting - and obviously, Ul isn't made for also holding your "material", in numbers, and whatever its developer may pretend about his specific "material" item format.

Also, there ain't no "corkboard" functionality, as it's in "Scrivener", but then, but then, I think that ugly "corkboards" are just needed whenever the tree functionality is sub-standard...

So, let's look at Ul's core functionality, it being the ace (!) frontend for WordPress and similar web site tools, and here, yes indeed, it might be your tool of choice?!

They claim - not owning any Mac, as said, and thus not being able to verify - that Ul not only can POST to WordPress, etc., but that it also enables you to EDIT your WP, etc. posts, and IF they're right, Ul should be THE WP, etc. frontend of your choice indeed.

Thus, you would freely edit, in some Ul tree / file - btw, Ul seems to be multiple-XML (with every Ul "page" being its own XML file on your file system or wherever, haha!), a very interesting IM concept which its developers currently and obviously have not yet followed to its very promising extremes! -, your faithfully replicated - WP web site, with just local "saves", and then, whenever you click on "Reload" (or whatever), Ul would update your web page, wherever that need would apply.

So far, so ideal - for the time being, I doubt that it'll function that way, since for "publishing" (a single item) to web, they have published a vid, whilst I haven't found the corresponding proof for edit sessions' bulk upload...

Whatever: language is your friend, and parallel timelines in / from MS Excel are possible, from Excel tables (but it's not that easy I admit, advanced MS functionality never having been what they call "user-friendly")... whilst e.g. Aeon Timeline is a mess, most such software is subscription now, and Timeline Maker Pro, whilst being "eye-friendly" on first sight - their examples being visually appealing indeed -, seriously lacks functionality, just compare with MS Excel (and what it can do "for free" in that field instead - once you'll have got MS Excel bought / installed anyway, that is).

At the end of the day, everybody, I think, would be happy to pay even $ 100 a month, or more, for some tool that finally enhanced their thinking / imagination, but that isn't to come soon.

Thus, just avoid, at least, all those "apps" that might even hamper what you intend to do, e.g. Ul - just my advice, take it or leave it;

alleged-beauty-by-minimalism on-screen being one thing... some end-product which really comes-to-real-life, i.e. not just being published-and-quickly-forgotten, but revealing itself as to be charming, enchanting... being some quite other category... and thus, you should not deliberately do without the necessary functionality that might help indeed... notwithstanding lazy developers' "elegant visual style" claims of literally no value if you start to think'em over.

P.S. As for the maps, well, even vids won't help: You just have to FEEL the development of figures, of phenomena of all sorts, entrenched within their respective "environment", and then try to "make sense" of those (individual, then "outgrowing") "developments": try to encompass what you feel (the French word being "cerner"), and then balance it up, "match" it with what you've already got, and even more so, with what you can derive-of-it-then:

Pics-n-graphics on-screen won't help; it's the blurred ones in your head which'll do, and let me close with a citation of my beloved, genial Allen (from his - "inferior", just by his (!) standards, "Magic in the Moonlight" - the "proposal scene" of which is pure joy e.g.! - and citing from memory, again:)

"So, it seems like yoghurt, but in fact it's your gone husband."

An'then, especially people who've got nothing to say, should never try to resume many lines within a dozen of letters... just trust me, here again.

Typo: ace (!) > ace (?) - but indeed, if it works, in that specific (but broad) use case, as expected, then for most bloggers and other would-be journalists, it's the ideal "blogging tool", so the developer should optimize this functionality of his alleged "writing" software indeed.

And yes, there might be happy (i.e. fiction) "writers" who like to do all their construction work, all their "material" gathering, outside of their "writing tool"... after all, that had been the way of doing things half a Century ago, hadn't it? ;-) But no, that'd be ok, it's just a totally different way of working... perfectly doable nowadays, with today's screens.

But then again, I wouldn't be that happy with Ul's "alternatives management", (at least that sort of) "writing" less being bound by "archiving", and more by "rewriting", and Ul obviously tends to the former, making the latter quite unwieldy, currently.

I like childish humor, so this made my day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/n1qzo2/is_fade_in_worth/

Penguiye
1 yr. ago
I just use the demo version and then white out the watermarks in microsoft paint.

charon455
1 yr. ago
lol


And here, some contributor found a highly distinct "what will become of my tool?" alternative to the standard "if he gets run over by a bus":

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/rydxhi/is_final_draft_really_the_industry_standard/
239not235
5 mo. ago
Also, the FadeIn Bros don't seem to care that FadeIn is a one-man company, and the guy running it wants to become a film director. So if anything happens to him, including getting a job offer, what's going to happen to FadeIn? Does anyone remember Sophocles?


Soph being another, defunct, tool, of course, and FI costs 80 bucks plus VAT - one time...

When I first decided I needed to learn to love outlines if I wanted decent productivity I went a little crazy.

Now, I've decided that making a hierarchical model is a good way for categorizing facts and not so good for planning the linear experience the reader will have.

I couldn't imagine a day without Devonthink. The model for planning a story for me is a list of notes.

Which, of course, you can achieve in DT or my new favorite, Curio.

Of course, just my opinion on half-price sale at a web browser near you. Probably overpriced.

This thread is a follow-up to the (originally) Ulysses-thread https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/reply/9752/41640


From what I have understoodfrom some third-party web resource, Ul is NOT a db, but a collection (!) of single xml files (together with other xml files for the administration of the former) - whilst even with xml, the regular way of doing things would be / would have been for the program to create BIG xml files, e.g. one per "book" (or whatever they call a collection of them "pages"); thus, if the information I've got is not wrong, there ARE ways to separate your different kinds of stuff, AND they are separated, technically, by the program, it's just that - according to what I interfere from the info I got - the Ul gui is then a general interface to ALL your stuff (probably all in the same "general" parent folder (desktop or web); this then would be a function of its general xml files and indexes, in order to make available search scope, if wanted, over ALL technically distinct data ; in the line of this "philosophy", there should be an "export" function, in order to "export" just SOME / ONE of those "areas" / "books" / whatever to a "new installation" of Ul, but it seems (?) that currently, at least, Ul does not allow for such distinct "installations" to run on the same device.


As for the linked screenshot in the other thread - https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/reply/9752/41640 - some of the SEARCH functionality is helpful indeed ("": include footnodes, annotations, citations, comments / comment blocks, quote...) but others ("": just subheadings of level 1/2/3/4) seem doubtful when applied overall, i.e. the real life use cases where you would want to find text in specific-level subheadings over non-related "books" or whatever seem quite limited to me.

When I see the screenshot / list, I immediately discover that we've got just another case of "what's technically easy, code-wise, I'll offer, may it be useful or not to the user, whilst what's technically complicated or even impossible in my concept, even when it would be of high usefulness, I'll leave out, not even mentioning it":

All the "finer details" in the Ul search ARE easy, because of its XML format, it's just the different xml codes which make all these generically distinct and thus available - on the other hand, I do NOT see any setting to just include "pages" (items) of specific kinds in the search, not even "regular pages" vs. "material pages", and all the less "pages with specific icons" (i.e. those little, colored symbols I spoke of in the aforementioned Ul thread, then hijacked for almost anything else) - on this latter point, I may be mistaken though, since it might be possible that Ul first lets you FILTER for these icons (i.e. for one or several, specific ones), then allows for applying its search settings (as from the screenshot) upon this SELECTION?

It goes without saying that UltraRecall allows for a filtering for its 8 different item "flag" formats (as they are called over there, 7 plus "no flag", and yes, that's less than I would wish it had), in combination with all other, also quite specific search settings;

also, UltraRecall's - more or less detailed - searches can be stored, so I hope for Ul users that they can apply a given set of "Finer Details" (see the screenshot) again and again, without fiddling with the mouse anew, each time.


Today, I read that for the European Union at least, Apple LOST its "exclusive" claim "Think different", for most or all of its hardware, and of course, even to begin with, that had always been a fetish claim (I wrote about that here) in the lines of "this totem will make you think better" or "using Ul can make you as big as James Joyce", since there is no indication of any sort world-wide that using Apple hardware will make you think different, it's just that in general, Apple users have got more money than Windows users, people with money want to distinct themselves, be it by car, by computer hardware or by their jacuzzi, and IQ / inspiration / "gifts" lead to more income, so there is more Apple than Windows output in the entertainment field, but that doesn't come from the hardware make use, but from the fact that Apple has succeeded in convincing even otherwise smart people it was "the best"; if it really was, offices worldwide would have "upgraded" to it, which they obviously have never done.

The claim to "think differently" becomes laughable, of course, when "creators" adopt Apple-only software which LIMITS their creativity, and I personally suppose that most "writers" will benefit from NOT "thinking" the way Ul allegedly tries to make them work, by making them accept missing functionality, to be another "feature"... we all know that ages-old Apple claim indeed: whatever you might miss, it's a feature that it's not there. (Research if Apple-over-Windows users might tend more to masochism could be interesting, but then again, people with more money tend to live out their masochism, so such research wouldn't be as easy as it might be be seen at first sight.)

Above, I even read that the (e.g. Ul's) hierarchical concept, according to the contributor, might not be that much appropriate to the (novel's) readers' sequential reading experience, but my impression of Ul rather goes in the opposite direction: It's hierarchical functionality seems, according to me, being quite sub-standard, i.e. if you "work in the hierarchy", you should rather flee this "app", since you wouldn't become happy with it... whilst, on the other hand, if you rather write sequentially, but need just "some little bit more" than e.g. MS Word or Atlantis WP have on offer, hierarchy-wise, you might probably love Ul - for all three latter programs you will have accepted from start that you better put your "material" into some other repository, of course, and none of the three either comes with cloning or some "alternatives / rewrites management" worth of the name (whilst in Ultra Recall and other generic (more-than-one-pane) "outliners", that's easy, in the last-mentioned program not only because of the "flags", but also for its relatively well-implemented transclusion functionality: in a (key) word:

Ul, according to me, is far more adequate for pantsers (so that's the key word here, since pantsers will much less need, much less "touch" the "tree") than for plotters... and then, the "reception" will be "flat" for almost any "literary" work but is not linked to the way the latter will have been created (even some film directors in the past were said to direct strictly in chronological order!), whilst on the other hand, the production of (e.g. technical, medical, legal...) reference works would appear overly complicated nowadays, was it done with a rather "flat and sequential-by-its-nature" tool.

Btw, "folding editors", and - if I'm not mistaken - even KEdit and such (and their above-mentioned and other rtf-etc. counterparts ("text processors"), and most / all (?) one-pane "outliners"), do NOT allow for "filtering" by "just show the titles / subtitles where the text beneath (! and then above the next title/subtitle of course) contains ...", so even Ul is a big step beyond those indeed.

I'm a little lost. The links 22111 posted don't work for me. What is "UI"? User interface? Of what?

If my comments about a reader's experience being sequential where a traditional outline is a hierarchy prompted debate, let me clarify. That's true in my experience and from my point of view. I'm an unpublished wannabe. If your mileage varies, great.

Regarding a complex technical reference work, I would certainly organize my knowledge of the subject in a hierarchy of notes. That's the best way I know to organize facts. I like Devonthink for that because inevitably at least some portions of a knowledge base will fit an alternative hierarchy. Since Devonthink's tags are essentially alternative hierarchies, no problem. My World War II notes could be organized in a hierarchy based on geography at the same time the same notes are in a separate hierarchy of political goals. That's pretty cool, but it doesn't tell a story.

The quickest way for my own technical writing to become pedantic and stuffy is to drill too deep. A chapter in a reference should have a deliberate scope. For instance, a section on the user interface to a software system may have no need to discuss developer APIs even thought the two are fundamentally related.

Without any doubt, I would plan the progression of overview through summation in a technical reference as a sequence of ideas, not as a hierarchy. That''s what an outline is for, actually, to plan a work from start to finish. There are other needs for the writer, though, such as consistent private notes related to more than one place in your work. You can make those notes lower levels in an outline, but if the same note applies to more than one topic in your work your notes are a little less easy to keep consistent and relevant.

I'm delighted with new features in Curio because I can mock up what events tell the story alongside references for why things are happening, particularly since those references can appear as duplicate instances in multiple places.

I suspect Tinderbox would do a better job if I knew the ins and outs of Tinderbox. Or maybe Obsidian.

And why am I bothering to respond? I think some people who hate outlining (like myself) would be better off if they planned what to write. The challenge is to plan in a way that doesn't stifle creativity.

If I plan a story in a way that doesn't tell the story, I'm spinning my wheels.

First of two posts in a row:

Amontillado, you are right, sorry, I meant the Ulysses thread, https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9752/0/ulysses-companions-odyssey-provisional-app-review , and in that thread, there is an out-link (by satis, http://i.imgur.com/nDf6ZmE.png - "I can think of no other apps I own which let me search only in dashed lists for a specific word or phrase, for example." - I commented on this misunderstanding of his, and on his screenshot above) to a Ul search settings screenshot - and Ul stands for "Ulysses.app", just in the line of my other abbreviations, following my first writing-out of the software title; "Arial" on your screen has mislead you, its l being just a single pixel narrower than its I, and yes, some font smiths don't give that much about readability... ;-)

The problem with your abbreviation, which I also took to mean user interface, is that in the san serif font used here a capital I (eye) and a lower case l (L) appear dentical.

22111 wrote:

First of two posts in a row:

Amontillado, you are right, sorry, I meant the Ulysses thread,
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9752/0/ulysses-companions-odyssey-provisional-app-review
, and in that thread, there is an out-link (by satis,
http://i.imgur.com/nDf6ZmE.png - "I can think of no other apps I own
which let me search only in dashed lists for a specific word or phrase,
for example." - I commented on this misunderstanding of his, and on his
screenshot above) to a Ul search settings screenshot - and Ul stands for
"Ulysses.app", just in the line of my other abbreviations, following my
first writing-out of the software title; "Arial" on your screen has
mislead you, its l being just a single pixel narrower than its I, and
yes, some font smiths don't give that much about readability... ;-)

In my previous post the word should be identical. Sorry for the typo.

Post 2 of 2 in a row:

(Luhmann being another blatant example for a person who's known / "renowned" NOT for their real output, but for accessories... in this context, dan7000 here 2012: "Second, looking at those pictures, what NYT calls a “painstaking” and “detailed” outline is nothing compared to outlines I regularly generate. He has 30 pages for a whole book. Yikes. I have outlines 3X that long. His system simply couldn’t accommodate a truly detailed outline. NYT also says that he has filing cabinets full of notes and references. That gets back to efficiency: keeping that stuff in evernote or even searchable PDFs makes it thousands of times faster to find what you need when looking through your references. But again, the guy has all the time he needs." https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods - more about outlines infra, and "has all the time he needs", for Luhmann, would have probably been "personnel", staff...?)

Amontillado: DevonThink would probably be one of two sw people might be switch to Mac, the other one being, for some, Dramatica Story Expert, since their Dramatica Pro - the only one available on Windows - is not a nightmare but an insult... and then, possibly, even FinalDraft might crash less on a Mac than it does on Windows...

This being said, it's interesting that even most "Mac writers" (and as I said above, most writers are "Mac writers", since most of them are lonely, and so they want to be part-of-the-pack) do NOT write in DevonThink... anyway, I have to use what's available on Windows, but without scripting the necessary, additional functionality onto my tools, I would be lost by "factory" Mac software as well...

Btw, doing almost all my work(ings) within just ONE (as said, "apped-up") tool, Ultra Recall in my case, bears the big advantage of having identical functionality identically at my hands (or "fingertips"), at several stages in my workflow ("integrated software"); this is obviously even much better than just assigning the same shortcuts (shortkeys) to identical / similar functions in different tools, and thus, I really have problems to imagine a "smooth workflow" when people use for writing Ulysses e.g., and then other software for their "data" (repository), especially without using, at the very least, some macro tool for smoothing (out) the most obvious glitches.

This being said, people are right in saying that UR (in its "factory" state) "isn't for writing", so I'm sometimes musing what could be done, for DT (of which people say similar things), with the appropriate scripting...

"My World War II notes could be organized in a hierarchy based on geography at the same time the same notes are in a separate hierarchy of political goals. That’s pretty cool, but it doesn’t tell a story." - I in part have already commented on this just here, and of course, you're right, in most cases at least, the data collection doesn't tell a / the "story" yet, but I love to have the "data" "at hand", i.e. in-between the "story" items, or in the same "format", i.e. TWO UR panes, side-by-side, on the same screen, in case with the corresponding inter-db links between the two data bases.

"[1]The quickest way for my own technical writing to become pedantic and stuffy is to drill too deep. [2]A chapter in a reference should have a deliberate scope. For instance, a section on the user interface to a software system may have no need to discuss developer APIs [3]even thought the two are fundamentally related."

1) Right when in combination with 2
2) Right, hence the need for linking, cloning...:
3) q.e.d.

Btw, blogging is very different, hence my hint at Ul probably being very good "bloggers' software" (with the reserve of me not knowing about their blog-update functionality except for their non-specific (!) marketing claims).

"Without any doubt, I would plan the progression of overview through summation in a technical reference as a sequence of ideas, not as a hierarchy. That’‘s what an outline is for, actually, to plan a work from start to finish."

When I say "tree", I mean pseudo-trees, enhanced trees, i.e. with transclusion, AND I'm absolutely on your side when you abhor DEEP indentation, FLAT trees are the way to go, according to me, and it's been years ago that I wrote extensively, in this very forum, about LISTS in such "trees", but manually ORDERED lists, and with grouping by divider lines / separator lines, AND I said this manual order is the big (not inherent but practical: almost all of what we call "outliners", offer such manual sorting) advantage of "trees", over tagging, where the "results" are then ordered by creation date, by order of some other tags, whatever, but not in a predefined, strict order, manually "sorted" by you;

the "tree" allowing you to "look up anything", and then it depends on the subject of that "group" if you have interest in ordering the "members" of that group manually, or by date, even alphabetically in some (sub-) contexts (and all these "items" may then include sub-hierarchies in case)...

It's right btw that this "order", in today's "outliners", is "fixed" in the way that there are no "alternative views", but that's just a technical problem, not a conceptual one, cf. the later versions of askSam, again... (and even them remained very (!) basic in that respect...)

"If I plan a story in a way that doesn’t tell the story, I’m spinning my wheels." - for non-"natives" who'd need to look this up, like I had to: "it's futile"...:

But of course, this is just a misunderstanding, as implied above: Most "data", "material" needs some sort - but, as said, not really deep - of "hierarchy", and fiction output doesn't need but slight "hierarchy" indeed, or even none? Well, that'd be "stream" then, right?

Since even the chapters in a novel, the scenes in a screenplay, are "hierarchy", and that's why Ul has "pages" (and not only "books" or whatever they call'em), and that's why I write in "items", and of course, they are ordered in some manual, provisional, alleged "publication" order, not in the order of the "material", and thus, if there is not a bulk of such "resources data", I like to put that data into the (alleged, provisional,) flat "output tree": it'll be shuffled, in case, together with the alleged "output": resources following their masters, not them becoming data slaves, or if you prefer, the luggage goes where the traveler goes, not the latter running after the former.

And again, we're d'accord! Ironically, most novels just have (but have indeed!) chapters (most of the time not even numbered), and only in rare (and mostly historic) cases, they have / had an additional "tree" level, "books" they were named (i.e. above the chapters of course; cf. the Bible; playwrights have (not necessarily) "acts", then (ditto) "scenes"), and - this is different in television though - movie screenplays may NOT begin a new page with each scene, so writing scenes by "items" in whatever "outliner" is just for creational purposes, whilst the final "output" then then just allows for upper case "new scene" indicators, even bolding those being more or less viewed a "profanity"...

Which means that screenplays tend (i.e. are forced, by the "industry") to HIDE any "hierarchy", and that's probably "magical thinking": the audience (which will never see the screenplay) should not be reminded of any element disjoining the flow of illusion... ("Annie Hall" with Allen addressing the audience directly being one of the more notable, early exceptions to the prevailing rule; cf. the (auctorial or not) narrators in novels);

on the other hand, in novels, I not only remember chapters, but also (in rare cases) title lines for chapters, and sub-chapters, those being separated by something like

*
***
*****

whenever such symbol groups weren't used for the chapters, and if they were, perhaps just some blank lines, in case together with ~~~ or similar - yes, in literary works, there (not necessarily but mostly) is some FLAT hierarchy, so any hierarchy / tree-building WITHIN a given "work" (and for hierarchy and grouping without'em, 3-pane, instead of 2-pane, outliners come really handy indeed, and after all, the "3- instead of 2-pane" paradigm is for distributing (!) one single, then necessarily deeper, hierarchy into two partial hierarchies...).

You can use MS Word instead, or some other "text processor" as they were once called (e.g. "Atlantis", I mentioned that one before): They all come with some sort of "outlining help", in order to facilitate your "navigation" beyond the scene / chapter / whatever (flat, but then, not totally flattened-out) hierarchy level, BUT in their "content" (body / all text) field / pane then, they do NOT separate those, but show your current "element" together with its "environment", and that's why I insist on more-than-1-pane "outliners": only they will "single out" the "element" you're currently working on, but that "freeing your mind" (upon that matter cf. infra).

(Of course, you should not work, for weeks (!), upon a 700-plus-page document, in MS Word (!) on an iPad (sic! incredible I may say!), without at least daily backups, see https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/40882/how-best-to-recover-from-catastrophic-text-loss - he could recover, from some export, some 625 pages, lost another 100, then gots lots of advice recover tool use, and then, at the very end, told his helpers all that occurred onto an iPad - so I did NOT make this horror tale up! (Ain't there no Mac tools to recover data from a connected iPad then?))

I also wrote, in this forum, about continuous numbering in legal text books, i.e. chapters numbered 1...120 or whatever, instead of even doing a "slight", flat hierarchy indeed... but for "technical" works (of all areas), this is obviously not the very best way to do, and thus, I have seen such legal textbooks, with about 120 chapters, courageously counted thru some "parts-and-books" hierarchy, overlaid over that, now obviously having become ridiculous, flat-thru numbering...

Whatever, this forum proves that by "tree", "hierarchy" I understand "just what's really needed, what really makes sense", even having explained here how by introducing "separator lines" (just do an item
____________________
with 20 underscores, and then copy it into wherever you need it, into your text / "content", or then, into your tree, in order to "hold together which belongs together", instead of artificially creating another hierarchy level there, which would not only be unneeded, but most of the time then would even create ambivalence: "did I put item x into subgroup a or b?": it's like placing the kids of some unworthy parents into different foster families, and further problems will arise...


"I think some people who hate outlining (like myself) would be better off if they planned what to write." - you also said, here, in 2019, "Outlining has a bad name. Part of that comes from the pain of looking at a hierarchical topology you’re sick of and morphing it into a sequential exposition." ( https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods )...

So now for some history, since after better evaluating the term "hierarchy", it's time to define "outline":

I had always done outlining, but on paper, and then necessarily tearing those sheets into slips, glueing them afterwards on new sheets, and so on: terrible!

Thus, I tried to become an "early adopter" of ThinkTank (Windows version), and, according to https://jessems.com/outliner-list , that had
Expand / collapse items
Drag and drop items to re-order*
Hoisting

(*=not by mouse, mind you, there was no mouse then; it might have been added later on though)

I don't remember the hoisting, but I remember that I very quickly discarded it, since there was no way to "develop" a little bit, except of course by adding another 1-line child item for the "commentary" or whatever your further ideas, and given the screens of the time, with each line up to 80 chars, this was unusable by my standards.

Now I think I have already developed this idea in this forum, but I'm not sure, whatever: By writing an outline just as a naked outline, you even DROP ideas / elements, instead of collecting and preserving them, for development, since most (i.e. quantitatively at least) ideas / elements within an outline will be developed WITHIN the outline elements, i.e. "further down", HIDDEN BY the (naked) outline, i.e. by "what's in the tree", and an outliner like ThinkTank WAS "tree-only", so it made me LOSE ideas, instead of preserving them, oh my!

Today, that's different, i.e. even the (rare) one-pane outliners all have "room" for "content", but as said, that was not (yet) the case in those times, and those outlines you learn in school, are, we all know that, unfortunately of the ThinkTank type, why? Because, as your schoolmasters (correctly!) said, if you did all the development within the outline (which on paper is possible, cf. supra = just what I've said before), you wouldn't have time left for your body-text!

Yes, they were correct in saying this, but it was utterly misleading though: They misconceived outlining as a preliminary step in some waterfall model, and in class, they forced you to do it that - i.e. their - way...

whilst in reality, outlining - if really you want to give it a name - is just what you, from beginning to end, just jumping around ad libitum, a 100 times, 10,000 times... while writing, be it writing wherever in the "tree" or wherever in whatever "content"... writing, cutting, inserting... in other words, you create a jungle, then swing around in it with the help of the already-created lianas, or the ones you will have to create to "cut" your way... and at some point, it's not really a jungle anymore, but will have become a landscape into which you will have laid a given, determined pathway for the "reader" (i.e. your audience).

Thus, what you will have written up to any given moment, does not lead your further way into some fixed direction, but you may discard elements, creating new ones instead, so calling this "outlining" is really misleading, since if you do writings / changes within the "tree" or the "content" is just a question of level, of "directions" or "details" in case.

The above also implies that "outliners vs. pantsers" is a false dichotomy if you understand both concepts in their traditional - and wrong - meaning which is:

outlining = first create a frame(work), polish it (do a ThinkTank, i.e. naked outline), then fill it up with text (write your novel or whatever)

pantsing = have some idea(s) in your head, then sit down and write, more or less from the beginning to the end of your intended final output ("work")

Thus, the respective allegations between these concepts being, the outliner knows where they are going, they "write by numbers", it's just that themselves created those "numbers" beforehand, instead of buying them from some book (or from Dramatica, hoho!); the pantser has just got some idea(s), but hasn't any, or any very precise, idea where they will be going: at any given time, what they will have written, will "guide" them (i.e. the pantsers) for what they will have to (!) write further down the line...

As you can see, the only difference within those technical stratagems is how much developed the "project" ideas of the two writers where when they start "writing": it's more "I clearly see the pic of ..." for the "outliner", whilst it's more or less "yoghurt", which then "forms itself into ..." for the pantser: both will then try to remain faithful to what they will have written up to then, since nobody wants to throw away up to 90 p.c. of what they will have written, and ironically, it's the "outliner" who will have the much better chances to remain flexible, they will just create less (which then would become) waste in-between, hopefully...

Which brings us to another aspect: The "pantser" obviously need to have already written lots of details, in order to fuel their further inspiration, whilst the "outliner" (in the above definition: waterfall!) MUST have lots of inspiration, even without yet knowing about the details - and since that's simply not the case, even for most "writers", they then fill fervent- and ardently out all those forms in (freaked out) "writers' planning" tools, their monthly subscription price being the real help since "it'll help me. you get what you pay for. amen." (You see here that even those alleged "outliners" go into some "detail", for some "core elements", like "characters"... whilst they don't trust their core concept, they adhere to its waterfall model though...)

Well, I'd say that's real bad timing, both paradigms are, and thus, we should FREE ourselves from such ridiculous concepts, since both HARM your "inspiration" (or whatever you call it), by imposing that (just differently embodied) "first things first" challenge ("first the rack" vs. "chronological writing", which is nothing else then the totally unnecessary claim that for writing chapter 2, chapter 1 should already have been written)...

and yes, "first things first": first, you should learn something about writing (by whatever means, and allow for irony, so Stephen King's writers' manual: "Don't by writers' manuals!", I cite from memory...), but then, swing freely between outline ("tree") and "work" ("body text"), ALL the time!

You will have to finally discard much LESS of your work than most writers identifying as "outliners" AND "pantsers" in the traditional, devoid-of-sense, sense of the terms.

(Ok, I don't know how Danielle Steel works, I just know that she has written about 200 novels, which "made" about 800 millions, and that she has shifted from 4 to 6 novels p.a., that she works 20 hours a day, 7/7 ("my husband and my boys are out of the house, I need almost no sleep, I've got nothing else to do, I don't like hobbies" and so on, I cite from memory), but I suppose her - predominantly female? - readership might love her "numbers"? (Well, her boys certainly will love hers when the day will come... oh, no, that's nasty! writer's envy is a special, ugly thing!)

As for Tinderbox, can't say, but have doubts... Bernstein's expensive StorySpace (always Mac-only, 149$) might be one of the less useless map tools, whilst I can't imagine MindJet and similar (alleged) "mind map" tools being useful for anything but in presentation situations (i.e. after "work").

"Curio (...) particularly since those references can appear as duplicate instances in multiple places." - yes, transclusion is a sine qua non; I personally don't understand how anybody can accept (less alone then evangelize) a writing or other organizational tool (paid by subscription or up-front) coming without.


"A chapter in a reference should have a deliberate scope." - I had intended to comment on that in its context above, but then postponed my comment, except for saying I fully agree. In fact, you speak about the problem of "information atomization and regrouping" here, and that's the conceptual and technical unresolved problem.

So we all have to find intermediate solutions, for our individual means, and for external resources, I do it this way: I download the full text of the resource, together with its url of course, but without all the crap - the broader the audience for the resource, the more crap to discard (even before copying, I have this semi-automated, so it's very quick; I also download graphics, into the text, if I think they are relevant for my means); then, I bolden the text parts I think are important for me, very important parts I then also underline (which in theory leaves the "underline" format for something else, but I have never used it yet); I bolden important entries within the tree; I "blue" tree entries which I want to refer to, e.g. I "blued" some tree entries to "prepare" this forum post; afterwards, I'll put them back into their "original" format (i.e. regular or bold).

Then, when I have got some element from the ("original", "downloaded" i.e. and e.g. text-copied-from-web) "compound" item I want in some other, or in "its own", "context", I cite from there, i.e. I (half-automatically) create a "child" item, with just that passage, and with the original item title, the original url and the original web page title, and with an indication that it's a citation = an excerpt; also, my scriptlet puts a "this/these paragraphs copied for TitleOfTheNewPage", me manually putting an indicator which paragraphs are concerned if more than one; I then put the new child item into whatever context it belongs, and in rare cases, even cloned in several contexts. (The above is not perfected since I leave out the internal, unique itemID of the original item, and in there, I leave out the itemIDs of the "citation" items (alternatively, I could create "links", which I do neither); on the other hand, UR's search being quite good, it's obvious that with my remarks, here and there, i.e. in the "original" and in the "target(s)", I could easily "look up" (i.e. find) both the "original" from the "target(s)", and vice versa, and even other "targets" from any one of them; in practice, that need never arises though, since all the core info is "on both sides".

I postponed these comments because you also wrote, in your next paragraph, "There are other needs for the writer, though, such as consistent private notes related to more than one place in your work. You can make those notes lower levels in an outline, but if the same note applies to more than one topic in your work your notes are a little less easy to keep consistent and relevant." - Here again, you address a core problem: "Where to put items which, more or less for their individual contexts then, would not have to be "cloned" just once or twice, but multiple times?"

It's obvious to me that such notes should placed not, as I understand from your writing, deeper down, but in some "Generalities" parent items' sub-trees, higher-up, and then, when you work upon "things potentially concerned", you just read, and re-read, those higher-up "instructions" (i.e. guidelines to bear in mind, etc.), once a week for example; I don't know any better way since, since repeating "something more or less present" dozens of times (which technically would be easy) and "wherever it might apply" will go on your own nerves: "yes, yes, I know... shove it!"... but then, if you don't remind yourself of those things here and there (e.g. once a week, for important considerations), you might lose sight of them after all... Thus, in practice, and to honor our current context, there might be a higher-up "Allg" for "Writing", but further down another "Allg", for "Writing Thrillers"... "Allg" standing in for "Allgemein", the beauty of that German term being that, contrary to "Generalities", it starts with an "A", so that even in (more-or-less) alphabetically-ordered (otherwise all-English) lists, it appears on top...

And yes, the concepts of atomization, variation and transclusion are intimately linked... well, interwoven... amalgamated in the end...

As for variants - you mentioned them in your second citation of mine here -, I currently (i.e. have always done, up to finding "something better", but that would imply me coding it then, so...) and always preserve the above procedure, i.e. do not fiddle with the citations, but then "comment" them where appropriate, i.e. ADD text beneath the original, copied text chunks, and clearly distinguished from those, so as to not mix up the (in case, contextual) "addition" with the "citation"...

At the end of the day, my "system" is not so much different from "academic citing", where you would, in case, cite the same (your own or third party's) source again and again, just with different text chunks, in different contexts.


Finally, citations from Kühn's (cf. ) defunct blog: ( http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2018/08/popper-on-writing-and-objective.html ), "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" (1919) and Quentin Quencher's "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" ( https://www.achgut.com/artikel/meine_offlinegedanken_ein_experiment ; you could use google translate or something similar):

"Sir Karl Popper made a sharp distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. Subjective knowledge is, he thought, deficient. It is expressive of our concrete mental dispositions and expectations; it consists of concrete world 2 thought processes. Objective knowledge is far superior. But how do we get from subjective to objective knowledge?

Popper believed that objective knowledge comes about by writing ideas down:

"Putting your ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an important difference. For in this way they become criticisable. Before this, they were part of ourselves. We may have had doubts. But we could not criticize them in the way in which we criticize a linguistically formulated proposition or, better still, a written report.""

and

"Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der Mitreisenden im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft (...)
Hier preschte ich nun mit einem Erklärungsansatz heran, der natürlich nicht neu ist, aber auch nur meist als Ausrede gebraucht wird, wenn das Verhalten von Menschen, manchmal gar das eigene, irgendwie unlogisch erscheint: „Die Gefühle bestimmen das Denken, nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der Rechtfertigung.“ (...)
Es könnte ja sein, dass meine Gedanken völliger Humbug sind und andere, längst bewiesene naturwissenschaftlich beschriebene Vorgänge das Denken steuern. (...)
Ist die permanente Selbstüberprüfung förderlich?
Aber ich bin offline, also spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter." (...)
Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es unsere Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen können? (...)
Kann sich Individualismus überhaupt entwickeln in einer Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer permanenten Möglichkeit der Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen Gedanken?"

Now, we are here at the core of creation, and you could translate Kühn's "Objective knowledge is far superior. But how do we get from subjective to objective knowledge?", in our context, into "how to get from the yoghurt to the finished work?", to adapt even that passage to what we're after, and which is,

How to get the yoghurt, the mesh, plasma, shaped, tangible?

Here - https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9759/0/musings-on-tools-for-thought -, I had said, fountain pens ain't fast enough in order to scribble down, the first element, the "yoghurt", and before, I had said, in another thread here, that I use a little, portable dictation device to do that, one with real keys (but you could use your "smartphone" instead if you are sufficiently familiar with it), and then, afterwards, I use dictation (Dragon), from those audio "notes" - it's here that I "think again" about what I had "noted"; here's "time", here now, I could use a fountain pen indeed if it was 1980: it's the first "screen editing time", for (first screen) weighting, selecting, discarding, reformulating (so I listen to my notes in reverse order, in order to not to do unnecessary work onto previous audio passages I had already discarded, "judged inferior" in later audio notes)...

And yes, often in my audio notes, I "derailed": I developed something which appears "impossible" (or "illogical" or whatever), in view of other parts of my "writing"... and I would NOT have noted these passages in other (i.e. screen) circumstances: I would have "known" "this is not possible", etc.

But thus, these "notes" are there, they exist now, and so I have to decide upon them: are they to be discarded because they are "not in sync", or should I "integrate" them, them "bettering" the "work"? Kühn (see in context above): "For in this way they become criticisable. Before this, they were part of ourselves." - NOW we have the "full context" (of what has been "written", devised before), whilst, when "scribbling", human memory problems left out some beacons, signals... but then, were those beacons, signals "good enough" in order to be preserved, or is it rather that we had needed them before, as a "way" of stewing something more valid, while on errance? (new word for "erroneous wandering") - At the end of the day, that's what our heroes do "all the time", so why could we be safely shielded from it? In this context, think again about "outlining" and "pantsing": both concepts will hold you back from doing the necessary adjustments... they might just be too devastating, psychologically, new ideas coming in "too late" to be taken into consideration, so an iterative approach (i.e. tree, content, tree, content... "ad infinitum"... well, up to that certain "finish" beacon (you must find indeed...) seems to me the only valid one?


You will remember that years ago, some experts said that writing on-screen (and even by typewriter, years before) altered "your" style, perhaps even "produced content" - could it be that with handwriting (or with audio notes) you get quite often into that situation where you simply don't remember "important details", "street signs", then go awry, on first sight, and then do rewrites you would never even have thought of, had you been sitting in front of a screen on which "everything" anytime is available by looking it instantly up, or even before a pile of typed pages, but considering visually "going thru" such a pile is quite easy at least in direct comparison with an often much thicker (well, that would not have been the case for Nabokov indeed) pile of handwritten "material" (here meaning "work"), with or without then scribbles of all sorts, making it more or less unreadable in-between, i.e. before (paid) final typing?

Quencher speaks about notes written down when he's just "on his own", i.e. without web (or other) access to any "info", and he says it's the feeling - the wading in the yoghurt in my - well, Allen's - allegory, and then, after having found "something", you "reason", in order to "better shape" them, to make them "presentable" - for a more faithful translation run the citation ("Die Gefühle bestimmen das Denken, nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der Rechtfertigung.") thru the translator of your choice.

And he mentions the limiting character of the presence of "all that's there already", vs. the freeing character of that not being the case, and, just like Kühn, he doesn't speak of literary creation, but of the tangible-tangible, of third-party info (or fake info, whatever, of the "accepted, general knowledge" if I may say so: "Ist die permanente Selbstüberprüfung förderlich? Aber ich bin offline, also spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter."

Then, he asks, how does a situation in which I constantly can check the congruence of my thoughts with the "above" (i.e. "their knowledge"; supra: "Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der Mitreisenden im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft" - "as usual", he says, 80 p.c. of the travelers bent over their smartphones...), alter these? ("Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es unsere Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen können?")

And finally, his (rhetorical?) question: "Kann sich Individualismus überhaupt entwickeln in einer Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer permanenten Möglichkeit der Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen Gedanken?" - What chances for so-called "individualism" to develop in our society in which is now possible for everyone - [and even asked for, from everyone, I might add] - to balance everything anyone thinks [I could have said "match"...] with what "they" might think on that matter? As said, my translations here are very "free" ones, thus my repeated invitations to use google translate...

Oh, and drinking alcohol while "writing" may in part have the same effect, i.e. it not only disinhibits, but it also makes you temporarily forget aspects, and thus may empower you to leave that "highway" of originally "THEIR" thoughts and feelings, and in our context, to leave that "highway" built by your own preceding writings in that "project"...

Or you just take notes anywhere, e.g. just a STEP OUT of the shower in some public bath, and without worrying - which in front of your screen you'd do, inevitably and preconsciously -:

DOES IT FIT?

Since when the priors look right over your shoulder, you don't feel-n-think free anymore.

(And the double entendre in "prior" says it all... and yes, thinking of "Stop! Or My Mum Will Shoot!"'s inevitable now... and whatever they say, it's a very funny movie indeed!)


Here and everywhere, and Chris's right: "Some Rights Reserved" by his forum site indeed - it not being a quarry though anybody'd be free to pillage...

Your drive-by generalization of Luhman is shameful. Luhman was known widely among sociologists and practitioners of other disciplines for his academic output numbering approximately 30 books, plus learned articles.

For those of us who have become familiar with Luhmann through the popularization of his notetaking system, most probably know about his high volume of academic articles and books.

Contrary to your assumption that Luhmann had the cadres of academic staff a lot of profs have, such was not the case.

It is ludicrous comparing the length of one of Luhmann's relatively short outlines with one of yours, and certainly no one would accuse you of brevity. Luhmann's Zettlelkasten system, and the way he utilized his "slip notes" (analagous to what we call index cards) reduced his dependency on and/or need for lengthy outlines.

Luhmann worked very well without the benefits of software we have today. A perusal of his publications and a familiarity of how he used his note system demonstrates this fact. A key part of Zettlelkasten is Luhmann's cross referencing system which predates today's programs with linking, backlinking, and tagging.

Luhmann's approach to academic notetaking was a significant paradign shift. Much, if not all, early note taking software created for computers an electronic version reflecting prevailing ideas about notetaking and outlines. That, of course, is changing, and now in the 21st century, we have software which allows those who wish to, to emulate Luhmann's Zettlelkasten which, in case it remains less than obvious, predated by decades the emergence of personal computers in the latter part of the 20th century.

22111 wrote:

Post 2 of 2 in a row:

(Luhmann being another blatant example for a person who's known /
"renowned" NOT for their real output, but for accessories... in this
context, dan7000 here 2012: "Second, looking at those pictures, what NYT
calls a “painstaking” and “detailed” outline is
nothing compared to outlines I regularly generate. He has 30 pages for
a whole book. Yikes. I have outlines 3X that long. His system simply
couldn’t accommodate a truly detailed outline. NYT also says that
he has filing cabinets full of notes and references. That gets back to
efficiency: keeping that stuff in evernote or even searchable PDFs makes
it thousands of times faster to find what you need when looking through
your references. But again, the guy has all the time he needs."
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods
- more about outlines infra, and "has all the time he needs", for
Luhmann, would have probably been "personnel", staff...?)

Amontillado: DevonThink would probably be one of two sw people might be
switch to Mac, the other one being, for some, Dramatica Story Expert,
since their Dramatica Pro - the only one available on Windows - is not a
nightmare but an insult... and then, possibly, even FinalDraft might
crash less on a Mac than it does on Windows...

This being said, it's interesting that even most "Mac writers" (and as I
said above, most writers are "Mac writers", since most of them are
lonely, and so they want to be part-of-the-pack) do NOT write in
DevonThink... anyway, I have to use what's available on Windows, but
without scripting the necessary, additional functionality onto my tools,
I would be lost by "factory" Mac software as well...

Btw, doing almost all my work(ings) within just ONE (as said,
"apped-up") tool, Ultra Recall in my case, bears the big advantage of
having identical functionality identically at my hands (or
"fingertips"), at several stages in my workflow ("integrated software");
this is obviously even much better than just assigning the same
shortcuts (shortkeys) to identical / similar functions in different
tools, and thus, I really have problems to imagine a "smooth workflow"
when people use for writing Ulysses e.g., and then other software for
their "data" (repository), especially without using, at the very least,
some macro tool for smoothing (out) the most obvious glitches.

This being said, people are right in saying that UR (in its "factory"
state) "isn't for writing", so I'm sometimes musing what could be done,
for DT (of which people say similar things), with the appropriate
scripting...

"My World War II notes could be organized in a hierarchy based on
geography at the same time the same notes are in a separate hierarchy of
political goals. That’s pretty cool, but it doesn’t tell a
story." - I in part have already commented on this just here, and of
course, you're right, in most cases at least, the data collection
doesn't tell a / the "story" yet, but I love to have the "data" "at
hand", i.e. in-between the "story" items, or in the same "format", i.e.
TWO UR panes, side-by-side, on the same screen, in case with the
corresponding inter-db links between the two data bases.

"[1]The quickest way for my own technical writing to become pedantic and
stuffy is to drill too deep. [2]A chapter in a reference should have a
deliberate scope. For instance, a section on the user interface to a
software system may have no need to discuss developer APIs [3]even
thought the two are fundamentally related."

1) Right when in combination with 2
2) Right, hence the need for linking, cloning...:
3) q.e.d.

Btw, blogging is very different, hence my hint at Ul probably being very
good "bloggers' software" (with the reserve of me not knowing about
their blog-update functionality except for their non-specific (!)
marketing claims).

"Without any doubt, I would plan the progression of overview through
summation in a technical reference as a sequence of ideas, not as a
hierarchy. That’‘s what an outline is for, actually, to plan
a work from start to finish."

When I say "tree", I mean pseudo-trees, enhanced trees, i.e. with
transclusion, AND I'm absolutely on your side when you abhor DEEP
indentation, FLAT trees are the way to go, according to me, and it's
been years ago that I wrote extensively, in this very forum, about LISTS
in such "trees", but manually ORDERED lists, and with grouping by
divider lines / separator lines, AND I said this manual order is the big
(not inherent but practical: almost all of what we call "outliners",
offer such manual sorting) advantage of "trees", over tagging, where the
"results" are then ordered by creation date, by order of some other
tags, whatever, but not in a predefined, strict order, manually "sorted"
by you;

the "tree" allowing you to "look up anything", and then it depends on
the subject of that "group" if you have interest in ordering the
"members" of that group manually, or by date, even alphabetically in
some (sub-) contexts (and all these "items" may then include
sub-hierarchies in case)...

It's right btw that this "order", in today's "outliners", is "fixed" in
the way that there are no "alternative views", but that's just a
technical problem, not a conceptual one, cf. the later versions of
askSam, again... (and even them remained very (!) basic in that
respect...)

"If I plan a story in a way that doesn’t tell the story, I’m
spinning my wheels." - for non-"natives" who'd need to look this up,
like I had to: "it's futile"...:

But of course, this is just a misunderstanding, as implied above: Most
"data", "material" needs some sort - but, as said, not really deep - of
"hierarchy", and fiction output doesn't need but slight "hierarchy"
indeed, or even none? Well, that'd be "stream" then, right?

Since even the chapters in a novel, the scenes in a screenplay, are
"hierarchy", and that's why Ul has "pages" (and not only "books" or
whatever they call'em), and that's why I write in "items", and of
course, they are ordered in some manual, provisional, alleged
"publication" order, not in the order of the "material", and thus, if
there is not a bulk of such "resources data", I like to put that data
into the (alleged, provisional,) flat "output tree": it'll be shuffled,
in case, together with the alleged "output": resources following their
masters, not them becoming data slaves, or if you prefer, the luggage
goes where the traveler goes, not the latter running after the former.

And again, we're d'accord! Ironically, most novels just have (but have
indeed!) chapters (most of the time not even numbered), and only in rare
(and mostly historic) cases, they have / had an additional "tree" level,
"books" they were named (i.e. above the chapters of course; cf. the
Bible; playwrights have (not necessarily) "acts", then (ditto)
"scenes"), and - this is different in television though - movie
screenplays may NOT begin a new page with each scene, so writing scenes
by "items" in whatever "outliner" is just for creational purposes,
whilst the final "output" then then just allows for upper case "new
scene" indicators, even bolding those being more or less viewed a
"profanity"...

Which means that screenplays tend (i.e. are forced, by the "industry")
to HIDE any "hierarchy", and that's probably "magical thinking": the
audience (which will never see the screenplay) should not be reminded of
any element disjoining the flow of illusion... ("Annie Hall" with Allen
addressing the audience directly being one of the more notable, early
exceptions to the prevailing rule; cf. the (auctorial or not) narrators
in novels);

on the other hand, in novels, I not only remember chapters, but also (in
rare cases) title lines for chapters, and sub-chapters, those being
separated by something like

*
***
*****

whenever such symbol groups weren't used for the chapters, and if they
were, perhaps just some blank lines, in case together with ~~~ or
similar - yes, in literary works, there (not necessarily but mostly) is
some FLAT hierarchy, so any hierarchy / tree-building WITHIN a given
"work" (and for hierarchy and grouping without'em, 3-pane, instead of
2-pane, outliners come really handy indeed, and after all, the "3-
instead of 2-pane" paradigm is for distributing (!) one single, then
necessarily deeper, hierarchy into two partial hierarchies...).

You can use MS Word instead, or some other "text processor" as they were
once called (e.g. "Atlantis", I mentioned that one before): They all
come with some sort of "outlining help", in order to facilitate your
"navigation" beyond the scene / chapter / whatever (flat, but then, not
totally flattened-out) hierarchy level, BUT in their "content" (body /
all text) field / pane then, they do NOT separate those, but show your
current "element" together with its "environment", and that's why I
insist on more-than-1-pane "outliners": only they will "single out" the
"element" you're currently working on, but that "freeing your mind"
(upon that matter cf. infra).

(Of course, you should not work, for weeks (!), upon a 700-plus-page
document, in MS Word (!) on an iPad (sic! incredible I may say!),
without at least daily backups, see
https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/40882/how-best-to-recover-from-catastrophic-text-loss
- he could recover, from some export, some 625 pages, lost another 100,
then gots lots of advice recover tool use, and then, at the very end,
told his helpers all that occurred onto an iPad - so I did NOT make this
horror tale up! (Ain't there no Mac tools to recover data from a
connected iPad then?))

I also wrote, in this forum, about continuous numbering in legal text
books, i.e. chapters numbered 1...120 or whatever, instead of even doing
a "slight", flat hierarchy indeed... but for "technical" works (of all
areas), this is obviously not the very best way to do, and thus, I have
seen such legal textbooks, with about 120 chapters, courageously counted
thru some "parts-and-books" hierarchy, overlaid over that, now obviously
having become ridiculous, flat-thru numbering...

Whatever, this forum proves that by "tree", "hierarchy" I understand
"just what's really needed, what really makes sense", even having
explained here how by introducing "separator lines" (just do an item
____________________
with 20 underscores, and then copy it into wherever you need it, into
your text / "content", or then, into your tree, in order to "hold
together which belongs together", instead of artificially creating
another hierarchy level there, which would not only be unneeded, but
most of the time then would even create ambivalence: "did I put item x
into subgroup a or b?": it's like placing the kids of some unworthy
parents into different foster families, and further problems will
arise...


"I think some people who hate outlining (like myself) would be better
off if they planned what to write." - you also said, here, in 2019,
"Outlining has a bad name. Part of that comes from the pain of looking
at a hierarchical topology you’re sick of and morphing it into a
sequential exposition." (
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods
)...

So now for some history, since after better evaluating the term
"hierarchy", it's time to define "outline":

I had always done outlining, but on paper, and then necessarily tearing
those sheets into slips, glueing them afterwards on new sheets, and so
on: terrible!

Thus, I tried to become an "early adopter" of ThinkTank (Windows
version), and, according to https://jessems.com/outliner-list , that had
Expand / collapse items
Drag and drop items to re-order*
Hoisting

(*=not by mouse, mind you, there was no mouse then; it might have been
added later on though)

I don't remember the hoisting, but I remember that I very quickly
discarded it, since there was no way to "develop" a little bit, except
of course by adding another 1-line child item for the "commentary" or
whatever your further ideas, and given the screens of the time, with
each line up to 80 chars, this was unusable by my standards.

Now I think I have already developed this idea in this forum, but I'm
not sure, whatever: By writing an outline just as a naked outline, you
even DROP ideas / elements, instead of collecting and preserving them,
for development, since most (i.e. quantitatively at least) ideas /
elements within an outline will be developed WITHIN the outline
elements, i.e. "further down", HIDDEN BY the (naked) outline, i.e. by
"what's in the tree", and an outliner like ThinkTank WAS "tree-only", so
it made me LOSE ideas, instead of preserving them, oh my!

Today, that's different, i.e. even the (rare) one-pane outliners all
have "room" for "content", but as said, that was not (yet) the case in
those times, and those outlines you learn in school, are, we all know
that, unfortunately of the ThinkTank type, why? Because, as your
schoolmasters (correctly!) said, if you did all the development within
the outline (which on paper is possible, cf. supra = just what I've said
before), you wouldn't have time left for your body-text!

Yes, they were correct in saying this, but it was utterly misleading
though: They misconceived outlining as a preliminary step in some
waterfall model, and in class, they forced you to do it that - i.e.
their - way...

whilst in reality, outlining - if really you want to give it a name - is
just what you, from beginning to end, just jumping around ad libitum, a
100 times, 10,000 times... while writing, be it writing wherever in the
"tree" or wherever in whatever "content"... writing, cutting,
inserting... in other words, you create a jungle, then swing around in
it with the help of the already-created lianas, or the ones you will
have to create to "cut" your way... and at some point, it's not really a
jungle anymore, but will have become a landscape into which you will
have laid a given, determined pathway for the "reader" (i.e. your
audience).

Thus, what you will have written up to any given moment, does not lead
your further way into some fixed direction, but you may discard
elements, creating new ones instead, so calling this "outlining" is
really misleading, since if you do writings / changes within the "tree"
or the "content" is just a question of level, of "directions" or
"details" in case.

The above also implies that "outliners vs. pantsers" is a false
dichotomy if you understand both concepts in their traditional - and
wrong - meaning which is:

outlining = first create a frame(work), polish it (do a ThinkTank, i.e.
naked outline), then fill it up with text (write your novel or whatever)

pantsing = have some idea(s) in your head, then sit down and write, more
or less from the beginning to the end of your intended final output
("work")

Thus, the respective allegations between these concepts being, the
outliner knows where they are going, they "write by numbers", it's just
that themselves created those "numbers" beforehand, instead of buying
them from some book (or from Dramatica, hoho!); the pantser has just got
some idea(s), but hasn't any, or any very precise, idea where they will
be going: at any given time, what they will have written, will "guide"
them (i.e. the pantsers) for what they will have to (!) write further
down the line...

As you can see, the only difference within those technical stratagems is
how much developed the "project" ideas of the two writers where when
they start "writing": it's more "I clearly see the pic of ..." for the
"outliner", whilst it's more or less "yoghurt", which then "forms itself
into ..." for the pantser: both will then try to remain faithful to what
they will have written up to then, since nobody wants to throw away up
to 90 p.c. of what they will have written, and ironically, it's the
"outliner" who will have the much better chances to remain flexible,
they will just create less (which then would become) waste in-between,
hopefully...

Which brings us to another aspect: The "pantser" obviously need to have
already written lots of details, in order to fuel their further
inspiration, whilst the "outliner" (in the above definition: waterfall!)
MUST have lots of inspiration, even without yet knowing about the
details - and since that's simply not the case, even for most "writers",
they then fill fervent- and ardently out all those forms in (freaked
out) "writers' planning" tools, their monthly subscription price being
the real help since "it'll help me. you get what you pay for. amen."
(You see here that even those alleged "outliners" go into some "detail",
for some "core elements", like "characters"... whilst they don't trust
their core concept, they adhere to its waterfall model though...)

Well, I'd say that's real bad timing, both paradigms are, and thus, we
should FREE ourselves from such ridiculous concepts, since both HARM
your "inspiration" (or whatever you call it), by imposing that (just
differently embodied) "first things first" challenge ("first the rack"
vs. "chronological writing", which is nothing else then the totally
unnecessary claim that for writing chapter 2, chapter 1 should already
have been written)...

and yes, "first things first": first, you should learn something about
writing (by whatever means, and allow for irony, so Stephen King's
writers' manual: "Don't by writers' manuals!", I cite from memory...),
but then, swing freely between outline ("tree") and "work" ("body
text"), ALL the time!

You will have to finally discard much LESS of your work than most
writers identifying as "outliners" AND "pantsers" in the traditional,
devoid-of-sense, sense of the terms.

(Ok, I don't know how Danielle Steel works, I just know that she has
written about 200 novels, which "made" about 800 millions, and that she
has shifted from 4 to 6 novels p.a., that she works 20 hours a day, 7/7
("my husband and my boys are out of the house, I need almost no sleep,
I've got nothing else to do, I don't like hobbies" and so on, I cite
from memory), but I suppose her - predominantly female? - readership
might love her "numbers"? (Well, her boys certainly will love hers when
the day will come... oh, no, that's nasty! writer's envy is a special,
ugly thing!)

As for Tinderbox, can't say, but have doubts... Bernstein's expensive
StorySpace (always Mac-only, 149$) might be one of the less useless map
tools, whilst I can't imagine MindJet and similar (alleged) "mind map"
tools being useful for anything but in presentation situations (i.e.
after "work").

"Curio (...) particularly since those references can appear as duplicate
instances in multiple places." - yes, transclusion is a sine qua non; I
personally don't understand how anybody can accept (less alone then
evangelize) a writing or other organizational tool (paid by subscription
or up-front) coming without.


"A chapter in a reference should have a deliberate scope." - I had
intended to comment on that in its context above, but then postponed my
comment, except for saying I fully agree. In fact, you speak about the
problem of "information atomization and regrouping" here, and that's the
conceptual and technical unresolved problem.

So we all have to find intermediate solutions, for our individual means,
and for external resources, I do it this way: I download the full text
of the resource, together with its url of course, but without all the
crap - the broader the audience for the resource, the more crap to
discard (even before copying, I have this semi-automated, so it's very
quick; I also download graphics, into the text, if I think they are
relevant for my means); then, I bolden the text parts I think are
important for me, very important parts I then also underline (which in
theory leaves the "underline" format for something else, but I have
never used it yet); I bolden important entries within the tree; I "blue"
tree entries which I want to refer to, e.g. I "blued" some tree entries
to "prepare" this forum post; afterwards, I'll put them back into their
"original" format (i.e. regular or bold).

Then, when I have got some element from the ("original", "downloaded"
i.e. and e.g. text-copied-from-web) "compound" item I want in some
other, or in "its own", "context", I cite from there, i.e. I
(half-automatically) create a "child" item, with just that passage, and
with the original item title, the original url and the original web page
title, and with an indication that it's a citation = an excerpt; also,
my scriptlet puts a "this/these paragraphs copied for
TitleOfTheNewPage", me manually putting an indicator which paragraphs
are concerned if more than one; I then put the new child item into
whatever context it belongs, and in rare cases, even cloned in several
contexts. (The above is not perfected since I leave out the internal,
unique itemID of the original item, and in there, I leave out the
itemIDs of the "citation" items (alternatively, I could create "links",
which I do neither); on the other hand, UR's search being quite good,
it's obvious that with my remarks, here and there, i.e. in the
"original" and in the "target(s)", I could easily "look up" (i.e. find)
both the "original" from the "target(s)", and vice versa, and even other
"targets" from any one of them; in practice, that need never arises
though, since all the core info is "on both sides".

I postponed these comments because you also wrote, in your next
paragraph, "There are other needs for the writer, though, such as
consistent private notes related to more than one place in your work.
You can make those notes lower levels in an outline, but if the same
note applies to more than one topic in your work your notes are a little
less easy to keep consistent and relevant." - Here again, you address a
core problem: "Where to put items which, more or less for their
individual contexts then, would not have to be "cloned" just once or
twice, but multiple times?"

It's obvious to me that such notes should placed not, as I understand
from your writing, deeper down, but in some "Generalities" parent items'
sub-trees, higher-up, and then, when you work upon "things potentially
concerned", you just read, and re-read, those higher-up "instructions"
(i.e. guidelines to bear in mind, etc.), once a week for example; I
don't know any better way since, since repeating "something more or less
present" dozens of times (which technically would be easy) and "wherever
it might apply" will go on your own nerves: "yes, yes, I know... shove
it!"... but then, if you don't remind yourself of those things here and
there (e.g. once a week, for important considerations), you might lose
sight of them after all... Thus, in practice, and to honor our current
context, there might be a higher-up "Allg" for "Writing", but further
down another "Allg", for "Writing Thrillers"... "Allg" standing in for
"Allgemein", the beauty of that German term being that, contrary to
"Generalities", it starts with an "A", so that even in (more-or-less)
alphabetically-ordered (otherwise all-English) lists, it appears on
top...

And yes, the concepts of atomization, variation and transclusion are
intimately linked... well, interwoven... amalgamated in the end...

As for variants - you mentioned them in your second citation of mine
here -, I currently (i.e. have always done, up to finding "something
better", but that would imply me coding it then, so...) and always
preserve the above procedure, i.e. do not fiddle with the citations, but
then "comment" them where appropriate, i.e. ADD text beneath the
original, copied text chunks, and clearly distinguished from those, so
as to not mix up the (in case, contextual) "addition" with the
"citation"...

At the end of the day, my "system" is not so much different from
"academic citing", where you would, in case, cite the same (your own or
third party's) source again and again, just with different text chunks,
in different contexts.


Finally, citations from Kühn's (cf. ) defunct blog: (
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2018/08/popper-on-writing-and-objective.html
), "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" (1919) and Quentin
Quencher's "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" (
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/meine_offlinegedanken_ein_experiment ;
you could use google translate or something similar):

"Sir Karl Popper made a sharp distinction between subjective and
objective knowledge. Subjective knowledge is, he thought, deficient. It
is expressive of our concrete mental dispositions and expectations; it
consists of concrete world 2 thought processes. Objective knowledge is
far superior. But how do we get from subjective to objective knowledge?

Popper believed that objective knowledge comes about by writing ideas
down:

"Putting your ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an
important difference. For in this way they become criticisable. Before
this, they were part of ourselves. We may have had doubts. But we could
not criticize them in the way in which we criticize a linguistically
formulated proposition or, better still, a written report.""

and

"Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der Mitreisenden
im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft (...)
Hier preschte ich nun mit einem Erklärungsansatz heran, der
natürlich nicht neu ist, aber auch nur meist als Ausrede gebraucht
wird, wenn das Verhalten von Menschen, manchmal gar das eigene,
irgendwie unlogisch erscheint: „Die Gefühle bestimmen das
Denken, nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der
Rechtfertigung.“ (...)
Es könnte ja sein, dass meine Gedanken völliger Humbug sind
und andere, längst bewiesene naturwissenschaftlich beschriebene
Vorgänge das Denken steuern. (...)
Ist die permanente Selbstüberprüfung förderlich?
Aber ich bin offline, also spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter." (...)
Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es unsere
Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen können?
(...)
Kann sich Individualismus überhaupt entwickeln in einer
Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer permanenten Möglichkeit der
Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen Gedanken?"

Now, we are here at the core of creation, and you could translate
Kühn's "Objective knowledge is far superior. But how do we get from
subjective to objective knowledge?", in our context, into "how to get
from the yoghurt to the finished work?", to adapt even that passage to
what we're after, and which is,

How to get the yoghurt, the mesh, plasma, shaped, tangible?

Here -
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9759/0/musings-on-tools-for-thought
-, I had said, fountain pens ain't fast enough in order to scribble
down, the first element, the "yoghurt", and before, I had said, in
another thread here, that I use a little, portable dictation device to
do that, one with real keys (but you could use your "smartphone" instead
if you are sufficiently familiar with it), and then, afterwards, I use
dictation (Dragon), from those audio "notes" - it's here that I "think
again" about what I had "noted"; here's "time", here now, I could use a
fountain pen indeed if it was 1980: it's the first "screen editing
time", for (first screen) weighting, selecting, discarding,
reformulating (so I listen to my notes in reverse order, in order to not
to do unnecessary work onto previous audio passages I had already
discarded, "judged inferior" in later audio notes)...

And yes, often in my audio notes, I "derailed": I developed something
which appears "impossible" (or "illogical" or whatever), in view of
other parts of my "writing"... and I would NOT have noted these passages
in other (i.e. screen) circumstances: I would have "known" "this is not
possible", etc.

But thus, these "notes" are there, they exist now, and so I have to
decide upon them: are they to be discarded because they are "not in
sync", or should I "integrate" them, them "bettering" the "work"?
Kühn (see in context above): "For in this way they become
criticisable. Before this, they were part of ourselves." - NOW we have
the "full context" (of what has been "written", devised before), whilst,
when "scribbling", human memory problems left out some beacons,
signals... but then, were those beacons, signals "good enough" in order
to be preserved, or is it rather that we had needed them before, as a
"way" of stewing something more valid, while on errance? (new word for
"erroneous wandering") - At the end of the day, that's what our heroes
do "all the time", so why could we be safely shielded from it? In this
context, think again about "outlining" and "pantsing": both concepts
will hold you back from doing the necessary adjustments... they might
just be too devastating, psychologically, new ideas coming in "too late"
to be taken into consideration, so an iterative approach (i.e. tree,
content, tree, content... "ad infinitum"... well, up to that certain
"finish" beacon (you must find indeed...) seems to me the only valid
one?


You will remember that years ago, some experts said that writing
on-screen (and even by typewriter, years before) altered "your" style,
perhaps even "produced content" - could it be that with handwriting (or
with audio notes) you get quite often into that situation where you
simply don't remember "important details", "street signs", then go awry,
on first sight, and then do rewrites you would never even have thought
of, had you been sitting in front of a screen on which "everything"
anytime is available by looking it instantly up, or even before a pile
of typed pages, but considering visually "going thru" such a pile is
quite easy at least in direct comparison with an often much thicker
(well, that would not have been the case for Nabokov indeed) pile of
handwritten "material" (here meaning "work"), with or without then
scribbles of all sorts, making it more or less unreadable in-between,
i.e. before (paid) final typing?

Quencher speaks about notes written down when he's just "on his own",
i.e. without web (or other) access to any "info", and he says it's the
feeling - the wading in the yoghurt in my - well, Allen's - allegory,
and then, after having found "something", you "reason", in order to
"better shape" them, to make them "presentable" - for a more faithful
translation run the citation ("Die Gefühle bestimmen das Denken,
nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der Rechtfertigung.") thru
the translator of your choice.

And he mentions the limiting character of the presence of "all that's
there already", vs. the freeing character of that not being the case,
and, just like Kühn, he doesn't speak of literary creation, but of
the tangible-tangible, of third-party info (or fake info, whatever, of
the "accepted, general knowledge" if I may say so: "Ist die permanente
Selbstüberprüfung förderlich? Aber ich bin offline, also
spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter."

Then, he asks, how does a situation in which I constantly can check the
congruence of my thoughts with the "above" (i.e. "their knowledge";
supra: "Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der
Mitreisenden im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft" - "as usual", he
says, 80 p.c. of the travelers bent over their smartphones...), alter
these? ("Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es
unsere Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen
können?")

And finally, his (rhetorical?) question: "Kann sich Individualismus
überhaupt entwickeln in einer Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer
permanenten Möglichkeit der Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen
Gedanken?" - What chances for so-called "individualism" to develop in
our society in which is now possible for everyone - [and even asked for,
from everyone, I might add] - to balance everything anyone thinks [I
could have said "match"...] with what "they" might think on that matter?
As said, my translations here are very "free" ones, thus my repeated
invitations to use google translate...

Oh, and drinking alcohol while "writing" may in part have the same
effect, i.e. it not only disinhibits, but it also makes you temporarily
forget aspects, and thus may empower you to leave that "highway" of
originally "THEIR" thoughts and feelings, and in our context, to leave
that "highway" built by your own preceding writings in that "project"...

Or you just take notes anywhere, e.g. just a STEP OUT of the shower in
some public bath, and without worrying - which in front of your screen
you'd do, inevitably and preconsciously -:

DOES IT FIT?

Since when the priors look right over your shoulder, you don't
feel-n-think free anymore.

(And the double entendre in "prior" says it all... and yes, thinking of
"Stop! Or My Mum Will Shoot!"'s inevitable now... and whatever they say,
it's a very funny movie indeed!)


Here and everywhere, and Chris's right: "Some Rights Reserved" by his
forum site indeed - it not being a quarry though anybody'd be free to
pillage...

Linear writing vs. Erratic writing

Linear writing: which follows in the "work" is determined what precedes it (or you will have to throw away large parts of your "work" in case)

Erratic writing: as before, but also, "earlier" things are determined by "later" things, "earlier" and "later" meaning "by page count", "in your "work"", not necessarily (but most of the time, more or less...) also by plot's chronology

More gifted writers may much more have (among other things) what I'd call the "presence of the opportunities", i.e. they might "know" quite early the respective list of "options" for the "plot developments", on the "macro level" - by which I mean additional or alternative "details", but which may deeply affect the further "goings" / developments. Therefore, their decisions which are the respective "alternatives" to follow might be better "weighted", which means that after writing another 30 or 100 pages, they will only rarely then discover new "alternatives" which would then make their "work" much "better"... but while invalidating 80 p.c. of what the will have written in-between...

Also, people really and more or less "writing by (their own) numbers" will probably have some "schema" and don't deviate from that anyway, even if they've get further "inspiration" for "things already set": a question of "good-enough quality", and their alleged reaction to such after-thoughts: "I have to do a certain output, quantity-wise, and I'll do it better next time, will develop something that idea then, will not integrate it in here, since that would me cost "n" days / weeks of work.

Writers who sit for years, working on one novel, see this differently, obviously: They are ready to throw away parts of their work in order to optimize the final output... and it's obvious that those writers would be interested in having to throw away the strict minimum, too, so "erratic" working, not linear working, might be the best way of working, for them.

Above, I have presented the idea that "pantsers" and "outliners" (in the traditional sense for "outline") do the same thing, at the end of the day: They are both "linear writers", they both are BOUND what they will have written before, at any given moment, unless they are willing to throw away large parts of what they will already have written, it's just that the "pantser" writes, and "sees where it goes", whilst the "outliner" tries to foresee such "I took the bad junction" problems, and tries to hopefully eliminate them, by "outlining", i.e. by early discovering the respective consequences, from the structure, without investing too much detail work which then would be invalidated but unwanted ramifications: They try to be "efficient"... and they fall for the same fallacy as do "forced outliners" do in school:

It's in (later-on) details that you see the (preceding) outline's misses and "errors". (This is obviously very different in most technical and legal writing, where you will have "given frameworks" for any "situation", which will then, at the most (i.e. if ever), present some "specifics", "frameworks with minor variations" that is.

Whilst literary writing has NO such framework, or at least should not have, and sometimes, I'm amused by the self-concept of IT professionals who see themselves as "software architects" - I know what they mean, of course: they are the "planners", within a given framework, e.g. it's the "system analysts" who build a certain framework, from their analysis of (organizational) reality (be that in administration, in finance (banks), in manufactory...), and then they plan the technical realization: They are proud to do the higher-up work, above the ("mechanical", subordinate) "coding"... but just as most (original) "architects" (in civil engineering), they are engineers indeed, they work within a given framework, and very rare are those who invent something ("something new" would be a pleonasm).

Now what the French call "littérature de gare" ou "roman de (hall de) gare", here again the English do it short-and-crisp (and that's a tautology, a literary device): pulp, or pulp fiction... and sometimes, some author has such an output that you ain't so sure what to think about that output: should you dare defame it, or just accept the author is very much gifted indeed? (You encounter the same - there not so rare - phenomenon in music, I mean on the composers' side of course...)

Thus, I use an "extended outliner" (i.e. the kind that gives access to the outline AND any "level" of real detail ("body text"), the only species that has survived as a software tool - and as explained above, for good reason!), in order to do "erratic writing"... but if "you" are highly gifted, or then would want to write by numbers (nobody here would want that, right? of course!), you might do linear writing indeed...

But of course, when I read some "high professional"'s interview where they say they had away to throw away 3 or 4 times the final page count of their published work, in the process, I ineluctably wonder if their alleged linear, or traditional "outlined" writing (which would not be any other than more or less linear writing indeed, following ("waterfall") their outlining, i.e. their - individual here - "numbers"), if their traditional writing methods, beyond giving them some feel of "security" allegedly, are really their very best choice indeed?

Ok, some (highly or then less gifted) writers need a lot of "hard work", so that the final product can emerge in the end, they "need" their more or less completed errancies ("drain the cup"?), but then:

I never have "inspiration" in front of a screen, or hunched above a sheet of paper, so perhaps for other people, that sought way of doings things isn't that ideal either, after all?

Above, I said (/implied) I take audio notes, in order to not lose ideas (anymore), speaking much faster than writing (or then, I couldn't decipher those scribbles anymore), but it goes without saying that there are also lots of situations where writing wouldn't be realistic: in your car for example (they lately criminalized this "all over" Europe, so you have to take measures against their cameras...), or then in bed, simply because turning on a light and jotting down some notes wouldn't be impossible, you're deadbeat... but even then, taking some audio notes is possible, not even opening your eyes, but the device faithfully waiting under your pillow, and safely guiding you with its specific beeps in the dark.

And, obviously, above, when I spoke of regular, bold, and blue tree entries, I meant "data", "material", for "work" / output I use all the 8 tree entry formats ("flags") I had spoken of previously; similarly, when I use a somewhat deeper hierarchy than explained above (project, scenes*), that's just for navigational purposes, my ("landscape") screen visualizing some 45 list entries concurrently, not more, and including "comment" entries, so you need "chapters" (or whatever you call them) in order to avoid "endless" scrolling, and, as said, I also like to put "data", "material" "where it belongs", and that, in some cases, may then take another 1-2 indentation level, so then some "material" might be at level 5, but that's rare: It's the listing, and the flat hierarchizing capabilities of modern software that tremendously helps in organizing your things - as for inspiration, you should look elsewhere, i.e. into facilitating life situations: the computer - Mac or PC! - is an organizational device, one that makes your "piles of sheets" manageable - nothing more (and thus, "Musings on tools for thought" are more or less wishful thinking), but then, even at that task, most tools fail quite largely, from what I see.

MS Word, together with add-ins then (!), seems to be the "best" writing tool if you need intra-linking, simply because the (regularly 1-seat) developers of what we call "outliners" don't have the means to implement the necessary code, but yes, as I see it, the foremost element of the - here ever recurring! - subject of "distraction-free" would not be the masking of buttons / menus / etc., but would have been the automatic hiding of the body text before, and after, the body text you're writing on, which is NOT of course, a single line, but the body text between the previous and the next (sub-) heading - today, in order to achieve that, you will (as far as I see it) need to use an "outliner", since none (?) of today's "text processors" provide that functionality, with all their navigational functions (headings, etc. in an additional tree view) they may added in-between.

22111, I'm happy to see some consistency between my 2019 and 2022 selves, but count me more as a pilgrim than an oracle. I continue to seek paths that work. Frankly, I hope that never changes.

In my advice re fountain pens - https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9759/30 - I forgot to mention that I also had a (14k) Montblanc one in those times, which I then resold after some months(' heavy use) - that one wasn't good enough either, in comparison with the "149" (as said, 18k); perhaps, they now also offer 18 with other models, but that wasn't the case at the time.

Since I mentioned StorySpace (149$ plus VAT, so that'll be near 200€) above, let me also mention Causality, which for the time being - that might change anytime for future versions, of course, but it's desktop, too, not web, so... - remains free for users who just use its "graphics", and they are very elaborate, see (among other YT vids) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxzXcKWgzWg - thus, for people who like / need such graphic tools, it may be an absolute "steal"; the developers aim it at screenwriting, but it might come (in the "right hands" then) to splendid use for any fiction writing.

Similar, just the other way round, for "The Novel Factory" ("factory", ha-ha...), not only for novels, then, but on their "Pricing" page ( https://www.novel-software.com/buy-novel-writing-software/ ), they first ask you, "Are you ready to finally finish the book you’ve been dreaming of?", in order to sufficiently frame their subscription, since that's a whopping 75 to 600 bucks (probably plus VAT, and if not, that'll make YOU a "criminal", by European Union law) annually, and even about 20 p.c. more than that if you pay per month...

and don't count about writing more than just ONE novel or whatever for the 75 bucks each year, then you're automatically in for 198, and don't count to store more than just a little bit of "materials" within in, since exceeding half a GB (which isn't anything anymore nowadays) brings you to 600 (or 720 in 12 installments).

We're clearly in fairy tale country here ("totem") where women of my age pay $1,000 for a pot of smear (half an ounce) since that would make us "young" again for half of an evening.

But then, it - the subscription, not the smear pot - comes with "The Ultimate Character Questionnaire", so...

Regarding Mont Blanc pens, I'm not in that crowd. Truth to tell, I've got a desk set of four TWSBI Vac 700's in fine, medium, broad, and stub, plus three Opus 88's for my backpack in fine, medium, and stub. I've got a third of a single bespoke pen invested. :-)

I find steel nibs acceptable and mine are all very smooth writers. At least I graduated from Bic pens. Which, actually, will craft the same prose as anything else.

Thanks for the link to Causality. I suspect it's a great tool, but it's also planning by "this happened, then this happened." Necessary in any story, but the planning for me has to focus on meaning.

That's not to say I don't appreciate the food for thought.

Aeon Timeline offers timeline and spreadsheet views, which are pretty much time-dictated, and you can also create multiple mind maps either before or after defining times and durations. Also, there is a narrative view. That's where you can borrow timeline events to stack into chapters, acts, scenes, whatever.

Causality is also not dissimilar to Plottr, although Plottr is bound to a grid without freedom to adjust events within cells.

Regarding my current obsession, Curio, I see how a story could be presented Causality-style.

Curio doesn't support swimlanes. At least a pale shadow of something similar is possible.

Pinboards in Curio are somewhat like magnetic shapes in Scapple. You can put multiple text blocks (figures, in Curio-speak) in a pinboard like you might add events in a cell in Causality.

Those pinboards can then be moved around.

Where there's a will there's a way, and purpose-built tools are very nice. Budget enters the picture at some point, although I try to keep my personal financial leash loose when it comes to software and writing tools.

I personally find swimlanes essential for planning, but kanban boards are not something I've yet wanted to pay for. The board I've seen with swimlanes and free tiers include zenkit, quire, swiftkanban, jira and kanbantool. A few like kanbanize and planview used to have free tiers but no longer do.

One intriguing opton is Microsoft's DevOps platform, which I've bookmarked but not played with yet, is free for indivuduals and small groups and has a seemingly nice kanban product with swimlanes.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/boards/

Amontillado, I have to admit my only knowledge from Aeon is from its version 1 - which I found so terrible that I never touched it again - it might have become much better in-between, perhaps one-sided, Mac-sided that is, in particular? Also, "import-export" (i.e. both) is important, and Aeon provides this with Scrivener (and perhaps other tools), so my "judgement" isn't up-to-date.

For presentation purposes (i.e. for export only, from any other tool to timeline), what newer MS Excel versions (at least from 2016) can do, from csv data (which is easy to create, from any human-readable format), is incredibly, but technically demanding (there are several third-party instructions in the web).

Whilst my fountain pens are mostly from Parker, I'd bought the complete Cross sterling silver set then (fountain pen, felt-tip pen, ball-pen, 2 lead pencils (broad and fine line) - all these have been residing in some (not: desk) drawer for more than 20 years, untouched, and I write, when I write, with either a Staedtler 2 HB pencil (which are the original, wooden brown, not the lacquered Faber-Castell green), or a Bic (the regular ones; both the pencils and the Bics, I buy by 20) - back to the roots in a way... - and when I used fountain pens, I had to change the cartridges much too often - I would never ever buy another cartridge fountain pen again, and in my Cross fountain pen, I even have a cartridge which fills by inkpot (I always have the inkpots, too) - so much for nostalgia vs. practical use in my case - but if you're fine with a fountain pen, that's perfect: "perfect" in the sense of "optimized", of having found the tool that "works" best for "you", i.e. that's individual; for me, it's the audio recorder now but many of us obviously have in common that we need some OTHER tool than the screen ONLY, and that seems the core point here.

You say, "but the planning for me has to focus on meaning".

Strike! And that's another argument for me to prefer a generic tool like UR, and which allows for several tree (i.e. "enhanced list") item formats: I've got lots of reminders of what I want to achieve, to express, incl. considerations, variants, considerations re variants, and so on: "meta data" of my own, and with specific colors / formats (italics, sometimes bold), I organize all this quite fine, with lots of information in the tree already, i.e. always visible, at least in its broader context (considerations for act II.1 in that "chapter", those "chapters" or "acts" or whatever being just artificial divisions in order to facilitate navigation within such broader context whilst minimizing scrolling needs), whilst that "meta data" not visually overwhelming your "real data" (intended "output").

It's obvious that UR and some others are "ideal" for this way of working, "within your own reminders and guidelines" if I may so so, whilst Ulysses and some others lend themselves much less to this working style; as for "special writers' software", each of them follow their specific concept... whilst I desire to implement my own, with the least possible hindrance from the tool designer, and in general, we all should prefer that organizational tool which forces us the least possible amount to adapt to what the tool designer had in mind; thus, I think it's a bit steep when the Devonthink developers kill one pane out of three:

Since with 3 panes, you can distribute the tree's "depth" into 2 panes, for much more clarity, and with the "area" and "project" level in pane 1, the specifics of just ONE project then in pane 2; with just 2 panes altogether, you will have to create additional databases in case, in order to just gain a little bit of more clarity, the whole tree being "mixed up" with all the details in a single tree pane... - so they invented hoisting, which would not have been really necessary otherwise, according to me...

As for using MS Word "styles" instead of just jotting down, I'm not that much convinced, since the question of formatting could only arise with regards to (whatever) plays, and then, "Fountain" is the way to go; it's explained in detail here, https://fountain.io/syntax but if you just remember it's

INT or EXT = HEADING

SPEAKER
Dialog

Action

And even that is action again

you do in fact 99.5 p.c. of all your formatting with the return, and the shift, keys, i.e. manual corrections after import (it's the standard import format and can also be used for stage plays) will be minimal, and fiddling-with-form is, whatever McKee here correctly says about the final "draft", just another form of procrastination, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaP_j9AHdRE - how ever I might mock specific "author's software", good books about writing are another thing altogether, and McKee's "Story"'s one of the very, very best - and then Vogler and Truby (who's very greedy though: see his site, and again with terrible software...) and some others - and then there's a whole library full of material for procrastination again...

There's this 1997 Patucci album, "One More Angel" (from dire background indeed: poor girl!) - I like to say

"one more angle"

(i.e. one more precise, pertinent angle) instead, and one more, and one more... I just don't find them from the outset, e.g. from a catalog page, like my beautiful but inept Cross writing set, and thus my erratic way of writing, since even sort of,

Planning comes after subtext, in order to mould it into its ideal form.

wouldn't be right: it's not waterfall, neither in the "usual" order, nor the other way round.

It's a mesh, and subtext and mould have got to mesh, one bearing further developments in its own field, and in the other - and yes, why shouldn't a serious writer, writing more or less linearily, NOT then throw away 3 times the "publishing" output, if that's the way they write best?

At the end of the day, the important thing is that they don't stop midway, for weariness of all the "unnecessary work" on top that would imply, and which, if they go that way, will not have been unnecessary at all, from a quality pov.

Yesterday, I viewed "10 Days Without Mum(my) ("10 jours sans maman", a piece of crap from France, with a French star of today) - in less than 10 minutes, it was obvious for me that this was to become one more "Sunday evening TV movie" (understood: for the whole family), so I knew:
- it was crap
- it would make money

And correct, 1.2m tickets in France, of which just a fraction (about 12 p.c., normally that's about 50 p.c., for art house films up to 100 of course) in the Paris region, i.e. people who "know better" hate such fare but it's "good enough" (according to the producers) that way for the masses in the "provinces".

From such fare, you could then infer that "good enough" was good enough, while it isn't.

And that's all about it, the aforementioned vs. "Cat"; respecting the audience by working harder, which way you ever do it.

Styles are de rigueur for presentation. Composing within styles is, to me, a small price to pay for the flexibility. A lot of what Scrivener does with its compile feature can be done with styles.

Aeon Timeline has come a long way since version one. So far, my use of version three has been for tracking some real-life events. I haven't yet had the need for mind maps or narrative outlines within Aeon.

I haven't played much with export, since I no longer use Scrivener or Ulysses. Both are great tools. My not using them is probably a personality disorder.

Import into Aeon is great. It's simple to import into Aeon from spreadsheets, OmniOutliner, and Devonthink, and with a little help from Python, from Curio. There are a few mouse-clicks required in Aeon to accept the import, but it's not bad.

For Devonthink, I added fields for start, end, participant, observer, location, and arc. In Curio, I adopted a convention of tags with two at signs like "@@start=7/20/1965 8:43" in the notes field of items destined for the timeline.

Amontillado, what you say about DT clearly indicates that (even) DT (about which so many people say it would not be) is fit for writing, similar to UR where also many people pretend it wasn't (fit for writing that is) - your doing so I would never qualify as what you suggested, but as a rational choice to "hold your stuff together".

Above, in my little "Fountain" intro, I forget the so-called (parentheticals), like here, or then
(like here)
both within dialog (the return in case being preserved then, but with the proper formatting (indentation) in case, or after

SPEAKER (faintly smiles)
Dialog here.

whilst in "action" (passages in parentheses) will not be reformatted, obviously;

I didn't comment on your writers' groups, but I acknowledge that third-party input may greatly help; if the story is "complicated" enough, there will probably be no drift, but I wouldn't discuss comedy / gags over there...

And the higher-up above applies to "serious" stuff (including thrillers and even comedy if you want), but then, if there is no "subtext", a comedy should at least be very funny (whilst the above-mentioned negative example isn't at all), and a thriller or slasher movie suspense-packed, etc.

And there's the universal law of "diminishing returns", and the Pareto principle, 80 p.c. of effort being considered "reasonable" in view of their returns for you, or for your task, any additional effort being considered "too costly" in most circumstances ("ineffective"); for your personal satisfaction, measured in "speed of work progress" vs. effort, that may be true, but the additional effort "makes the difference" in serious writing, that's obvious.

And the question remains if perhaps my musings above, re IM (information management) for "writers", may ultimately concern the management of "third-party data", considering you may NOT being the author of your "work", but just a "translator" of, a scribe for what you get "from somewhere" - with composers, nobody doubts this, whilst many pretend - delusionally then? - for writers that them be the "masters" of what them write (I speak of "observers" speaking about writers, not about writers who probably almost all know better than that?) - perhaps the less inspired they are, the more they are "masters" of their stuff, since the more "arbitrarily" they write? Does the "public" relish such writing? Probably not so much...

I have rather got the impression that for every "original" story, there is sort of an "ideal" story which then slowly emerges (and where finally "it all fits together"), and which might quite differ from the "original" (i.e. not only the original "idea", but also the original "plan" / "design") in the end, so a "writer" might not be from a translator in what they do as far away as they might imagine, in the end, and then, our terms of "planning", or "construction", and similar, appear especially inadequate.

In the end, nobody really knows, e.g. for the mythological foundations: Yes, "Casablanca" is to be considered an "ideal story", but then, how do we explain the even much bigger success, with the audiences worldwide, of "Titanic", considering that the hero did NOT sacrifice himself for a greater cause, but was just much more unfortunate than the heroine? And yes, young rich men are mean, young rich girls are not, especially when in love. But...

Did it occur to fellow "outliners" that the poor hero's death arranges the situation for the "rich" (i.e. formerly rich, "high (social) class") heroine, discharges her from marrying him, living with him, supporting him financially possibly, by working as a working-class girl, with all that'd implied for her situation with her family, her "social standing" and all?

Thus, might the message, the "myth revived" by this monster success be that "love between a boy and a girl of socially different backgrounds will not build a bridge over the abyss that separates them socially, but, while being perfect dream stuff enough for the ageing memories of the surviving, ageing girl for a whole, very long lifetime, and for a very short interlude in the girl's life, it can't be consumed beyond a ONS though, it cannot be "realized" (among other "things", consecration by common children)...

and more so, and in order to avoid complications by the boy, he'd better die so she can mourn him but will not be further bothered."?

Thus, not "love brings together" but "mate in your own social class exclusively, but not without love indeed - outside of your class though, even flirtations are dangerous for your afterlife".

Since first, the movie shows us that the rule, "mate with your own kind", is considered wrong (Rose & Cal) when there is no love, and it then gives a short illusion only of love, notwithstanding "class" difference (including sort of a ONS to make better belief: in those times, a sign of their love being overly serious indeed!)... and then, the below rank "lover" (he's a poor, striving artist, so the risk of him to fail is predominant) conveniently (and together with the ship, i.e. the platform which allowed them to "meet" in the first time) sinks into the abyss that now separates them forever... since she "makes it" away from that common grave, tomb of the inappropriate deflorator AND of the faulty facilitators (vessel plus car...);

whilst Cal (sic!), the symbol of meanness and greed, also survives but is punished by the fact Rose is "finished with" him... (i.e. the defunct hero as an "eye-opener" = is functionalized, deified in the other sense of the term, i.e. rendered a "thing", also as a crotchet to hang fond memories on) and he hasn't got any reason, years later, to survive then his fortune's loss: he lives FOR money, but Rose lives for the MEMORY of love.

We all agree, I suppose, that this monster success would not have been possible with hero and heroine becoming a couple, but isn't that saddening?

Btw, the facts now, 110 years later, are as presented by this movie, after about two, two and a half decenniums (I meant decenniums, too, not decennials, somewhere "above") of docs marrying (i.e. founding families with) nurses, ditto managers, etc with their secretaries, etc., people have been mating again within their "class", and not even speaking of office women mating with plumbers... (Very ironically, that Tim Hardin wrote his "If I were a carpenter" in in or before 1966, when the other way round at least there existed real chances..., so this was a protest song in the end... of perfect "irrelevance" for today's audiences indeed...)

An'thus, whilst "Casablanca" is a wonderful masterpiece, "Titanic" might be considered the most lavish, and highest-grossing girls' porn of all time: a masterpiece in its own right (production values, construction (sic!), results), but one to tear one's hair, considering we - I say hopefully "we"! - strive at affirming the noblest myths in our audience's mind, not the foulest ones, and that without making our producers go bankrupt in the process.

I promise I'm not going to try to multiply movie interpretations here,

but I thought it important to demonstrate it's not only our own relative lack of inspiration, we have to cope with, and with trying to put that inspiration into some "optimized" order, but also with the fact that the audience, whilst craving for being "satisfied" and reassured in their self-definitions of the day and beyond, does not necessarily crave for nobility, other than on their future calling card if possible, of course.

(And ironically, Towne got his "Chinatown" Oscar probably for Polanski's ending change: the "girl" being quite disturbed, after all, not even mentioning the "girl"'s daughter... and then, living together: the big love? Better, the audience's got somebody to mourn - here again: the inappropriate mate - when the lights go on, than to meditate, "they'll surely make a-lots-of-trouble!"...)

Seems that some (more or less) contributors to this forum are unhappy with my recent drift to literary writing, and they've got very unhappy indeed when I said, ultra, if you don't meet your expectations in yourself in that field, just be a good family person (i.e. man, for about 98 p.c. of the readers here, cf. infra), and you'll be tenderly remembered by offspring generations: no need to try to fight luring death with means beyond your means. - So be it.

While some co-contributor here, in his wordpress blog welcometosherwood, continues to inform you about almost everything appearing as (mostly online?) "outliners" and the like, even those more-or-less me-too- fleeting stars for which there doesn't seem to be so much room indeed, mid-and-long-term in the - quite crowded - market, another co-contributor here, in his wordpress blog drandus, seems to have ceased to inform the public re his "toolbox", the last post, one more re "Chromebook" - what else? - having being posted over there more than 4 years ago.

But then, in his more-than-6-years-old post, "Solving writing problems by physically pushing through and letting yourself go", he wrote, "I feel this is a process of “letting go” of some things and liberating my mind to be open to some other things.", and that's spot-on re what I've tried to express above:

You cherish something (i.e. some "scene" (o.k., I'll stop! Scrivener is it, for the "writing" guys, end of discussion...), some idea(l??), some e.g. commercial concept), and you'll have to let go... but before mourning and sorrow's got a chance to overwhelm you, paralyzing your further, alternative inspiration (for your marketing strategy or whatever, mind you), be aware that you don't throw away your "ideal", your real "thru-line" (oops! I seemed to do it again... but then no, I'm speaking of a real thru-line here, applicable to any field), you remain loyal to your spirit...

you just open your mind to pursue your objective differently now... ideally even better than before, but at the very least, more stringently, with obviously better chances to attain it - more "suitable" (analyze the term: "suitable" > "suite"...) -; in other words, the journey's NOT the reward: You might get smitten by some phenomena on your way, and when you cling to them, your way will mislead you: is it worth it? obviously not.

What I named "writing" above, you easily can rename it "planning", be it your marketing strategy, your career, your life, whatever: Don't cling to details, even if you might be besotted with them, and it's not by accident that many a fairy tale - ain't they considered to keep alive collective wisdom? - warns you about clinging to ideas that should better be done away with, in order to save the spirit.

Thus, at the end of the day, you have to discern, about real mourning (re deaths in your immediate family), and that very harmful, false "mourning" (for people stepping out of your life, for ideas, for "elements") just holds you back within unnecessary inertia (and what drandus calls "writer's block" in his post)...

and (i.e. the "at the end of the day" continued), "outlining" is not only about finding the elements that "logically" will follow, but also, and ideally - but you have to pay attention to do so, and that's the secret in that -, about identifying those elements which would harm the ideal suite... which's a mean to the guiding idea... and you can even outline and hopefully perfect that one.

Outlining's about the spirit then, and elements are means.

Even in your possible campaign to sell some crap, but perhaps, while thinking about it, you get even some idea for product quality? O.k., the latter just applies to individuals, or to pop-n-mom ventures; for corporations, our now-traditional division of labor and "competence" is opposed to that resort. On the other hand, the "creative writing" individual has no such excuse. And yes, erratic - physical - outlining might become largely dispensable when your (e.g. commercial) intuition already will have discarded any dead-ends or moribund-ends, subconsciously, when you start writing out (your business plan or whatever). ;)

Obviously, outlining is also aimed at minimizing the possible effects of the so-called sunk cost fallacy: If you can foresee, you can avoid, at no cost, or at least at much lesser cost.

So, we have "investment" here, in time, work, personpower, money... and especially, in all these means, in non-attribution of those to other, more worthwhile targets.

This "clinging to something" is therefore double: you will probably have got "inner (unconscious) reasons" to cling, and then the "investment(s)" you will have already put in that "thing", and if you only consider one of these co-factors, you'll risk (again?) to decide badly, for the suite now.

In other words, your "investment(s)" in themselves had been motivated by unconscious reasons (which had either been more or less unfortunate from start on, or had been "justified" then: this is quite a grey zone, obviously), and then, you might even risk to persuade yourself, "the investment (i.e. cost, e.g. "I would have to throw away too many pages" or whatever) has been too high, I can't abandon the idea / the element now", whilst in fact, you far more cling to your initial (but obviously still unconscious) motivation that drew you into making that "investment" in the first place.

Thus, outlining is about foreseeing, or better, about trying to foresee, since any "development" will then, often quite extensively, change the foreseeable; thus, in corporations' "strategic" departments, most work, ex post, has been "for the bin", but then and hopefully, will also have provided non-negligible savings in future / further investments.

In other words again, "mourning" is justified, and necessary, in clearly defined spheres, and a fallacy in itself otherwise, since it gives the illusion that clinging to perpetuating sunk cost behavior, i.e. augmenting already sunk cost by "spending" more (time, money, emotional investment...), that "not cutting" instead was justified, when in fact it's not.

Of course, you can discard such considerations, but then, outlining as an instrument of serial decision making (and of which "creative writing" isn't but one example among many) will not provide you with its fullest power.

It's right though that for this paradigm of doing a max of (i.e. also core details') "development" while outlining (i.e. iterative planning where and as much as possible), a (good) 1-pane outliner would be fine, too; that's just a question of your individual mental organization.

3rd post of 3 in a row, the previous one being an addendum to the one before, and this one being another addendum.

Yesterday, my parcel with, among other DVDs, "Stop! Or My Mum Will Shoot" arrived - I was delighted from the first 30, 40 minutes or so, very original subject, and very, very funny... in the second half though, gags were rare and much less funny, whilst there was some good action sequence, but in a comedy, it's the laughter you're after, hehe! - Since that's a recurring problem at least 2/3 of all comedies show, it's worth mentioning, for reminding self-declared "authors" here... (And no, trying to replace gags by "cuteness", as in this "Mum" example, is bad, bad, bad... (state) television customs...)

Back to work then.

I currently don't know (but that might be my lack of knowledge only) any (1-, 2- or 3-pane) outliner which would permit to expand / collapse the "tree" (or, in 1-pane, the headings' hierarchy) down to a fixed level (e.g. "expand first 2/3/4 levels only, while collapsing anything below that") - in some use cases, such a functionality would be helpful though (and sometimes, its missing is surprising, given the fact that the tool even maintains the "indentation level" attribute, which is the case with UR for example).

On the other hand, the usefulness of this functionality is not as general as you might expect (i.e. as I had originally expected, at least), since in most (but not all) real work situations, at different parts of the "tree" (or headings' hierarchy), a numerically identically indentation level would not necessarily and conceptionally correspond to the "same" level in other parts of the hierarchy, so if you try to inflict such "importance equivalence" onto your headings in different parts, this could come out as quite artificial.

Another, much more important aspect of "tree building", is the question what you will put into the "tree", and what goes into "content"; it's the same, in 1-pane, for the distribution between "headings" and "content", then, and that should obviously be a "plastic", malleable part of creating your content, to become "fixed" only in the very moments before output (/publication); also, above, I have spoken of "serial decision making", not "hierarchical decision making", and when you consider the (even today, in most cases, serial!) output, you'll have to convene that any "tree building" (be it in 1, 2 or 3 panes) is just a framework along which to create the ultimate output, i.e. an organizational, preparational tool, and whilst there are non-linear, mammoth outputs, like wikipedia, it's highly interesting to observe that, whilst academic libraries for instance, buy most book publications in their electronic version nowadays, practically all those are then as serial, as linear as the corresponding printed book: that - much-touted, 20, 25 years ago - "hyperspace" paradigm obviously has failed to win over the public (or the "publishers"), for self-contained, "finite" works: on-screen or on paper, reader read books as they always did, not necessarily in numeric page order, but in numerically ordered pages, hehe.

Thus, we have found that the "tree" is an organizational tool, for the "writer" (author(s)), and then, it's its final form, also for the reader, but the question of "what is where" within that "tree" is more or less plastic, and several authors "treat" (i.e. then present) the same subject not necessarily in the same way, and whilst, e.g., in the past, there have been quite some stupid computer books (by third parties, not speaking of the original "manuals" here) which treated software strictly in menu-submenu order (!), better authors then juggled those bits, before publication, to bring them into some, more or less individual, "functional", "work-situational" order...

Above, I had described in some detail what would be a - quite optimized, according to me - way of "distributing" your stuff between your "tree" (i.e. the "headings" of any indentation level, also in 1-pane) and the "content", in literary writing, and I personally even go so far as e.g. putting some dialog bit into the "tree", for further use, and which might, later on, disappear from the tree, being "used up" in some scene, or even then, not even used in there, but having germinated a corresponding scene, with better dialog; in both cases, I preserve the "idea" though, by either "bolding" that dialog bit (so that in case the scene will be discarded later on, the idea isn't discarded as well), or by putting the - not used anymore - bit beneath a separator line within the "content" there which tells the export scriptlet to exclude anything beneath it from said export -

It's obvious that that's the way to "handle" your ideas of all sorts, with any material, in any matter: Any idea to be developed in any form "belongs" into the headings, as a "reminder", and any (provisionally?) discarded idea should remain "traceable", and thus, for me it appears obvious that you should not try to "format", to "classify" your headings (be them in 1-, 2- or 3-panes) by their respective - and really, mostly aleatory - indentation level, but by some real formatting (color, italics), all the more so since you will be interested in holding the depth of your "work hierarchy" (as well as then your final "presentational hierarchy") as "flat" as possible, so that your ideas in same "area" remain as visible as it gets, even when working in other areas, or when getting some "overview" of the area question, but just expanding some of its depth...

Since that - almost ubiquitous - command "Expand all" is simply not realistic (while just technically easy, for the developer): You may try to visually sift thru 1,200 or 1,800 "items" = headings, but it's clear as day that it's much more comfortable, and extremely time-saving, if you (mentally) "recover" your ideas by some "quick look", so don't bury them too deep in the hierarchy (and not even mentioning burying them within remote "context"), and have them thus formatted in a way that visually they don't interfere with your "main construction" (i.e. "chapters" and such), and consequently, I judge tree-form writing tools which, sometimes for reasons of visual "neatness" (maintain a "pretty user interface"), or then since they have introduced technical formatting instead, devoid of sense for the user (cf. Devonthink), prevent (fact for DT is, it would, if it can't be hidden by the user, seriously interfere with any - probably not even available to begin with - user formatting) the user from (their own) "tree" formatting as conceptual failures, and if some user really preferred to have their "personal metadata" (ideas and the like) in some other tool, ok, but such a (quite convoluted, since it would imply the maintenance of two "parallel", synchronous hierarchies in the end...) "work-flow" should then be their own, deliberate (and bad) decision, not come out of "necessity" (caused by the choice of inadequate software).

By the above, I do not want to express you should "illustrate" "ideas", let alone "preachings"; if you can't "develop" them instead, they don't "hold", and more often than not, ideas are passed from within the "headings" to beneath some content's "discard line", but then, they often had been replaced by something better... to which they had LED, in some way or another.

As for the "level of detailing" in general: It's obvious that in academic (opposed to literary) writing, you will have much less problems with decisions about that, since (at least extensive,) final discards later on will be rare (and then be a sign of quite bad planning; in most such situations (sudden discovery of totally new repercussions...) you might discard instead from current project indeed but but then use for a subsequent one; in literary writing though, and considering your "voyage" might take you into paths not necessarily foreseen in planning stage, you might be interested in not too much "writing out" early (in order to not too much being "bound" by your "sunk (time and energy) costs" (cf. supra; and while jotting down the core ideas indeed): Here again, it helps to work "a max" in the "tree" (i.e. within your "headings"), while "thinking about" before doing any writing within "content"; that this way of doing things will also ameliorate your "construction", probably goes without saying.

Not losing items in a long hierarchy is one of the reasons why I like to use a mindmap instead of a collapsible outline. The mindmap has two dimensions (left-right and up-down), and you can see all the headings at any level at a glance (looking up-down), while the different levels are visible or collapsed (left-right). An outline only has one dimension (up-down).

Yes, that's an interesting point. That's why we all mourn the passing of Tree Outliner (although Dashword is trying hard to replace it on macOS and Windows).

Cyganet wrote:

Not losing items in a long hierarchy is one of the reasons why I like to
use a mindmap instead of a collapsible outline. The mindmap has two
dimensions (left-right and up-down), and you can see all the headings at
any level at a glance (looking up-down), while the different levels are
visible or collapsed (left-right). An outline only has one dimension
(up-down).

It's also worth noting that a growing number of outliners (okay, okay, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, Effie, Taskade, various versions of TiddlyWiki...) offer multiple views including idea maps AND outlines. Not to mention the various mind mapping apps that more or less do the same.