Michael Bywater
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Posts: 9
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Speaking as a Tinderbox oldie -- I've written three non- (or almost non-)fiction books relying heavily on Tbx for the purposes Jeff mentions, and countless other stuff (articles, papers, conference talks etc) -- my first thought is that the key to using Tbx for this purpose is incremental organisation.
Tinderbox shares with my other two favourite apps, DevonTHINK and Scrivener, the ability to watch your structure emerge as you work, which, I'd gamble, is at the root of any "creative" writing. Whatever they teach in school, if you're a writer, outlines just don't work. I think it's common to 90% of us (based on other writers I've talked to) that once we start writing, the words call the tune. This sentence prompts the next sentence; this paragraph, the next; and so it goes until we're done and it's time to rewrite.
The great strength of Tinderbox for me is that I can start with a fairly simple outline. I know things are going to need research notes, vague ideas, structural notions, snippets of stuff that strike me as particularly finely written (and which will therefore never make it into the final draft; murder your darlings) and so on. I also know that I can make sense of this stuff in Tinderbox as it begins to make sense to me. For example
-- Hey, this thing is linked to that thing! -- I need to make sure this bit goes in chapter 3 -- I ought to be collecting everything I know about sworn-brotherhood. -- Maybe I should formalise my notes on source material now. -- I want an easy way to see the stuff that I've already allocated to a chapter. -- I've lost track of what my researcher is doing; I'd better have a system for that. -- I've got too much material on this subject; I want to see instantly which of my notes has the most links to other notes, as good a measure of importance as any. -- I need to lay this bit out visually, in Map view.
. . . and so on.
Tinderbox lets me do this, and I know the ideal is that we "grok" something but, to be honest, I've never "grokked" Tinderbox; just found that, whatever it is i want to do, 95% of the time I can (with a little bit of fiddling sometimes) do it, and, most of the time, do it on the fly. The underlying stuff remains intact.
One of the beauties of this is, as Jeff mentioned, that I don't get to the end of the thing and hand it in and then think "darn, I never included that bit about X". In fact, I'm going to go to my Tinderbox file for the current book, just nearing completion, and set up something to find all the things I said I'd use but haven't. A little Agent will do it; look for "Crucial=yes" and "Used=no", and gather them all together. Less than five minutes' work.
I've a gripe, though. A major gripe. Mark Bernstein knows all about it, because I've been whining to him for a few years now. It's this: semantic links. Tinderbox shows its genealogy, its interactive/hypertext DNA if you like, in its links and specifically in the Nakakoji view. Link-sets are called "Paths" and it was only when I realised this was a hypertext narrative idea (you could have a "ends in disaster" path and a "gets the girl in the end" path and so on) that it made any sense.
Unfortunately it doesn't make sense to narrative writers, certainly not at my end of the game. What I want is to take a given item and see what's linked to it, and how. I want to see all the stuff that supports it; all the stuff that refutes it; all the "see also" stuff; all the things that reference it. Instead, I can only look at it by links across the board. So I can see everything that refutes other stuff, everything that cites other stuff and so on, with no idea really of the underlying semantics at all.
Minor gripe. But one that must be made.
I've said more than I intended to. I was going to say "Fascinating topic, let me have a think about it and I'll post some hopefully useful stuff in the next few days" but as usual -- as always, with a deadline looming -- I've banged on too long. Forgive me. I'll be back with something sensible. As for "suzjet" -- this must be the only software forum where one's not surprised to see Interventional Narratology rearing its pretty little head...
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