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Posted by Amontillado
Jun 9, 2022 at 10:27 PM
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 I’m an unpublished wannabe.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.
Posted by 22111
Jun 12, 2022 at 11:33 AM
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… ;-)
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jun 12, 2022 at 12:10 PM
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… ;-)
>
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jun 12, 2022 at 12:13 PM
In my previous post the word should be identical. Sorry for the typo.
Posted by 22111
Jun 12, 2022 at 05:49 PM
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…