Back to basics – the creative cornerstone

I have a couple of iOS devices, and various text apps that sync with my Mac – the mainstays being iA Writer and WriteRoom – either via the excellent Dropbox or Apple’s iCloud. But when I really need to chew on an idea, I go back to basics: the notebook and pencil.

I’m certain that working with a notebook and pencil is different to working with electronic gadgets – and I don’t mean in the obvious way. For example, if I write something down that I need to remember, I find I don’t forget it and the written reminder is redundant. This doesn’t tend to happen if I make a digital note by pressing my thumbs against a touchscreen or typing at my desk. I think this might be the result of actually forming the words on the page with a pen or pencil.

Then there’s a particularly tactile aspect to using good old fashioned physical items. There’s a lot of talk on the Internet about tactile keyboards. I’ve even got one myself – and very nice it is too. There’s little that’s tactile about a touchscreen, though. It might click or buzz, but this can’t be compared with the sound of pages turning and the scratch of a pencil being dragged across paper. The dead tree notebook also offers the opportunity to doodle, draw, add notes and stars and arrows, circle text and flip back and forth between pages, none of which is really possible in quite the same away on a device such as an iPad, no matter how well designed the application.

I drafted this blog post in my notebook, while on another page trying to sort out the short story I’m working on at the moment. On the page facing that was a shopping list. I can leaf through the pages, glancing at previous notes and scribblings with ease rather than scrolling up and down a single virtual page. Even the very stylish Daedalus app doesn’t have the same feel.

The notebook I like most is the large Moleskine soft cover. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives available, but for durability, features and general feel, nothing beats this book. (As an added bonus, it matches all my other black stuff…) I‘ll also use a cheap A4 notebook from time to time, when I need more space. The best one of these I’ve had to date was a Kraft ring-bound hard cover with dividers, bought for £4.00 from Paperchase at Euston Station in London. (That was some time ago – apparently these are now £5.50.)

I haven’t yet found the perfect writing instrument, though. I like pencil because there’s a resistance on the page and my scrawl seems more legible. Pencil can also be easily rubbed out, although I usually strike-through rather than remove completely, as seeing what I’ve decided to discard is often as important as seeing what I’ve decided to keep. I’ve also tried two colours of pen – red and blue. This works well to distinguish between various aspects of whatever it is I’m working on, and also looks pretty, but this requires me to carry two pens and swap between them, which feels a bit, well, clunky. Although I’d prefer it to be darker on the page, for the time being pencil seems to be the best option.

Looking back through my notebook now, its pages contain the raw materials that subsequently became several short stories and a novel, as well as other things, such as the aforementioned shopping lists and notes I made in the French class I went to last year. And when this notebook is full and it’s time to move on to a new one, I can stick it on a shelf somewhere, pick it up every few years and flick through it to remind me what I was doing way back when. Who knows, perhaps when I’m long gone someone else will pick it up and glance through the pages and wonder what the bloody hell was he thinking?. Or maybe they’ll just have it recycled and turned into something more useful than some guy’s discarded thoughts. Whatever the case, text files, regardless of their day-to-day usefulness, enjoy no such prospect.

Don’t get me wrong, digital files and cloud syncing are here to stay, and when a piece is ready, when it has some meat, I transfer it to the cloud – as with this blog. But whatever technological developments occur, the physical notebook will always be a cornerstone of my creative process.

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Workflow – a blog on effective file management

There are three different aspects to my working life: report editing for my client in London, fiction writing, and blogging. Although the latter two are related, they are distinct in my mind.

For a long time I was unsatisfied with my filing system, which felt somewhat clunky and ineffective. As a result I looked for a solution, something more streamlined and logical.

Diversity

I’ve had a satisfactory workflow in place for some time with regard to the work I do for my London client: emails come in with attachments; I save these files to my Downloads folder; when I’m ready to work on them the files are moved to my Current folder. It’s a simple, linear system.

My own work is different, however. I have a variety of projects in various stages of development at any one time: novels, short stories, radio scripts and blog posts. I also have a lot of material related to my published work, such as manuscripts, PDFs, cover art images, interviews and various other bits and pieces.

Generally this older material is not the problem as I don’t need to access it regularly. As a result this resides only on my iMac’s hard drive and backup disks rather than in Dropbox.

It’s the current work that’s the real issue – pieces I’m actively working on at any given time, at whatever stage. These need to be available on either my iMac or my MacBook Pro, my iPad or phone, and be up to date. I also need to be able to access fiction ideas and blog drafts to consider or tinker with whenever the fancy takes me.

The problem I had was organising these various items in a way that was consistent and came naturally to me. I needed a system that was so intuitive that I didn’t find myself either trying to remember where I’d put a file, or trying to work out where to put it.

Software

I tried several different methods and applications – Things, Evernote, Simplenote, among others – but I seemed to end up with duplicates of files like ideas for short stories: I might make a note of a story idea in Simplenote, then add it to Evernote, then change it in one and forget to remove the other. This is not fault of the applications in question, but really more due to my flawed way of working.

I really thought Evernote would be the answer, with its desktop and iOS apps and online syncing, but the app never really worked for me. Perhaps this is because I operate almost exclusively in text, whether writing or consuming. The app is also rather more complicated than a lightweight text editor.

Old school

I began to think about how I would physically work with documents and projects. It occurred to me that I would not have one large folder into which I put everything: that’s just not the kind of person I am. Instead, I’d have a separate folder for each project.

I was also drawn to the concept of text files, their simplicity and longevity, being compatible with just about every Word processor out there. Think of a text file as a sheet of paper: if I have different ideas, notes, things to think about, I don’t want all of these on a single sheet – I want separate sheets for each so that I can edit, expand and develop in a more effective way, as and when I want to.

Yet while I like my files to be organised, I don’t like to have too many folders: putting items in folders is like putting them away, and if a project or document is “active”, whether I’m actually working on it or it’s simply being considered, I want it to be available at a glance. This makes it convenient, and also acts as a reminder that it’s something I need to think about.

Less is more

After some trial and error I think I’ve found a streamlined solution that works for me:

• General notes, snippets of information and ideas, recipes, miscellaneous stuff like that, I create quickly and easily using nvALT, which syncs the notes as text files to a folder within my WriteRoom folder on Dropbox. I can access these items via nvALT on my Macs, with the application’s fast search function, and via WriteRoom on my iPad and phone. For organisation, if the text in question is an idea for a blog post I’ll name it something like Blog – workflow; if it’s an idea for a story it’ll begin with Development; a note of the process to reset the SMC on my computer, for example, is prepended with Mac. This way, related items are grouped together in a logical and clearly visible way.

• Posts such as this I draft in iA Writer on my Mac or iPad. I then finalise markdown and hyperlinks in Byword for export to HTML, which I then paste into WordPress.

• Fiction ideas are mulled over in WriteRoom, developed in iA Writer, then moved to Scrivener when they become the current work in progress. Until the iOS version of Scrivener is available I can also sync my projects between devices using the “sync with external folder” feature. As well as in Scrivener itself, these files can then be edited or reviewed in WriteRoom or Writer on my iOS devices.

WriteRoom could easily be used on its own for the above processes, but I’m a fan of Writer’s interface and its iCloud syncing. Creation of and searching for text notes in nvALT is quick and easy, and there is a clear chain of development for fiction texts.

This is all far simpler and consistent than my previous attempts at file organisation, increases differentiation, and is much more intuitive for me.

Bingo.

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UPDATE – 27/06/12: I’m now using Brett Terpstra‘s Marked to preview files in Markdown. Marked has a great many output options, including the ability to export to PDF – a feature I’ve already found useful in, for example, creating a cheat sheet for my Keyboard Maestro shortcuts.

Scrivener, Dropbox and backups

If like me you keep your Scrivener projects in Dropbox because you alternate between machines – in my case an iMac running Lion and a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard – when you switch from one machine to the other, make sure Dropbox has synced before opening your current Scrivener project, otherwise you’ll need to dig out a backup.

Scrivener’s automatic backup feature means that your recent files are always available to restore should you be a bit of a pillock and forget to do this – as I did last night. Twice.

Say, what?

Here’s the scenario: you’re working on your desktop machine on a Scrivener project that you keep in your Dropbox folder. You close this at 5:00pm, at which point Scrivener saves the project to Dropbox and automatically makes a local backup on the desktop computer. All good.

At 7:00pm you decide want to work on the same project on your laptop. You open your Dropbox folder on the machine, but being particularly enthusiastic (or forgetful) you open the file in the local Dropbox folder before Dropbox has synced with the web-based folder. This can happen, because Dropbox often doesn’t sync immediately – sometimes it’s very quick, but on other occasions it can take a few minutes, depending on connection speed or other factors.

As a result the file you now have open on the laptop will be the one Scrivener saved the last time you worked on the project on that machine; it could be a day old, it could be a week old, who knows? But even if it’s only a few hours, the chances are that you’ve made more changes than you really want to have to make again because of your… enthusiasm. For the purposes of this post let’s say you last saved the file on the laptop the previous day at 3:00pm.

What this means is that Scrivener will now automatically make a backup of the file you currently have open on the laptop – the one from 3:00pm yesterday – to Dropbox when it does sync, thereby overwriting the more recent file you saved at 5:00pm today on the desktop machine. Even if you close the file or quit Scrivener now it will automatically overwrite the work saved at 5:00pm today with the version from 3:00pm yesterday. Not so good.

Hey Presto!

It is in just such circumstances that Scrivener comes to the rescue. What you need to do is retrieve the back-up of the project that Scrivener saved locally on the desktop machine when you closed it at 5:00pm. On a Mac (don’t ask me about Windows…) you’ll find this in the following location:

Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups

If you sort the file list by Date Modified your most recent file will be at the top. Open this file, double-check to make sure it’s the correct one, then save it to Dropbox. This will overwrite the version from 3:00pm yesterday that Scrivener saved from the laptop when you closed it at 7:00pm. Boom, as the late Steve Jobs would say, your work is restored, and you should be thankful to Scrivener for holding the safety net for you.

There are a couple of potential problems you should be aware of. The first is the possibility that you don’t realise you’ve opened an older version of the file before making changes aplenty. In this case you’re just going to have to repeat some work, because you’ll have conflicting files with different changes. The other problem will be if you save the file on your desktop, then go out on the road with your laptop, because you won’t have access to the backup that Scrivener saved locally on the desktop computer. I was lucky: I was at home.

Ideally, wait until the local Dropbox folder on the machine you’re working on has synced with the online folder; a good idea is to set Growl to issue a notification when this has occurred.

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