Research and Creativity

From Steven Johnson's boingboing.net post, "How to Write a Book":

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text ... with no organization other than a citation of where it came from...

And so in the last stage before I actually start writing ... I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered ... and as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful ... 

I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

Yes, yes, yes. My own creative process -- whether writing books or piecing together multimedia presentations -- involves three steps:

1) snag everything even remotely interesting

2) go through the big pile, sorting stuff that feels related into smaller piles

3) wait for a pattern to emerge.

Comments

[hannah]

So are you tempted to try Devonthink? Is blogging a legitimate method for "logging" and organizing content that will eventually be part of a book?

[Mark]

Hi, Hannah!

I've owned Devonthink for two years. I used it to create a huge database of every book I ever wrote, and I used it to organize the tons of research I did for a Celtic Folklore Tarot project for Lo Scarabeo. When I knew what I was looking for, Devonthink made it very easy for me to find it.

Devonthink frustrates me, though, in two very important ways:

1) I never felt like I got any of the magical, life-changing benefits people keep attributing to its Artificial Intelligence feature. As a result, I always felt a bit like a Devonthink pretender -- using the software, but never really tapping into its total potential.

2) Version 1.0 was a supremely texty, ugly environment. It didn't feel Mac-like. It didn't soothe my eyes. It didn't strike me as a welcoming, nurturing, inviting place to spend lots of time. (I hear 2.0 is better.)

So: I quit using it.

These days, I'm using Together as an archive; I toss finished pieces in, tag 'em with keywords, and love being able to find 'em again so quickly and easily.

When creating, I tend to use Scrivener to stockpile raw material, organize information, and draft finished work. I've been toying with Curio -- which has the appeal of being more visual and less structured -- but, as yet, I don't really have my arms around it as a tool for getting work done.

About blogging as a method for logging and organizing content: for me, personally, a blog's linear nature makes it difficult to mix things up, re-sort the piles, and see everything in a dozen different ways at once.

That very quality worked *for* me when I drafted a NaNoWriMo novel back in 2001, because, by writing it on my blog, I couldn't "turn back" and edit things to death. Attempts at revising that same book have been frustrating, though, because I can't easily shuffle all the little pieces around on a virtual table, just to see what happens.

Now, Hannah: you're one of the creators I really admire, because you're constantly cranking things out -- you're makin' stuff. How do you organize your raw material? And, since you've got a sweet blog or two -- do you see these as a way to organize the raw material for future projects?

[hannah]

Wow, good questions. I don’t really have a strategy for organizing raw material. I write lots of lists and triumphantly strike through items throughout the day, email myself notes and stash them in folders, put post-its on my steering wheel and chart every hour on Google Calendars. I have physical files for some projects- collections of graphics, paper scraps, color combinations, articles- and digital files for others. I’ve got lots of files. Files are where my ideas go to die!

The simple projects that I do tackle- writing a poem, a short academic paper or a blog post, designing a logo or printing a greeting card- those literally stay on my desktop til completion. I’m about to tackle a long-form writing project, my MFA thesis, so I’m keen to learn how the pros manage and synthesize their ideas.

Do I see blogs as a way to organize the raw material for future projects? Maybe. At least they’re a good start. Flickr is better than any photo album I’ve ever created. My blogs are the closest thing I have to a tagged, dated, cited, organized archive of my obsessions. The fact that they’re portable, public and interactive makes them an even more interesting “database.” They’re living documents, accumulating random comments from strangers long after I have moved on to the next thought. It’s becoming commonplace for certain kinds of narrative blogs to evolve into books, but I can see the limitations of blogs as archive. I need a way to shuffle themes, cut and paste and be surprised by the patterns that appear.

Thanks for the practical and inspiring advice, as usual. Can't wait to pick your brain more about writing methods...