#Devonthink pro end note scrivener serial
#Devonthink pro end note scrivener pro
#Devonthink pro end note scrivener series

So I don’t think the program will help me as much as it could. The program helps one create a mosaic, but I’m not trying to create a mosaic in my work, at least right now: I’m trying to create a linear plot.

#Devonthink pro end note scrivener series

In the essay after Litz’s, Anthony Cronin’s “The Advent of Bloom” begins with the structure of Ulysses: “ if Ulysses can be said to have a plot, its plot is formless and does not give form to the book – it is not shaped to produce a series of dramatic sensations for purposes aesthetic or otherwise it has no conclusion in event, only a termination in time ” If a plot “does not give form to the book,” then something must for some writers, Scrivener might organize it and help find a way to present formlessness.

#Devonthink pro end note scrivener serial

This is a difficult trick to pull off, but it means that the serial nature of the writing I do is probably less likely to be helped by the structure of Scrivener than the writing some others might do. I still want “patterns and relationships” to reach conclusions, but I don’t want those conclusions “fore-ordained:” I want them to arise organically, and for them to be inevitable yet surprising. If I can rearrange the chapters relatively easily, then I feel like I’ve done something wrong. The narrative threads and the desires of each character should force the novel in a particular direction. I used to write more like this and now I write less like this: it is often my goal to ensure that each chapter follows inexorably from the preceding chapter. The mechanical nature of this process emphasizes the mechanical nature of those ordering principles which give Ulysses its superficial unity Like the mosaic worker, he was continuously sorting and re-grouping his raw materials, assigned each fragment to its proper place in the general design. It was the function of the note-sheets to assure that patterns and relationships already visualized by Joyce reached their fore-ordained positions in the text. Joyce used notecards, and Litz liked the mosaic-worker analogy so much that he uses it again a few pages later: The “scattered portions on paper” come next so they can be rearranged, “collected” and “sorted.” There’s nothing wrong with using pieces of paper, of course-it worked for Joyce!-but I wonder what the great novelist would think of working digitally. The “design” and the ability to “visualize its characters and the course of the action” corresponds roughly to Scrivener’s idea pane. Finally, the fragments were placed in their proper positions through a process of rough drafts and revisions. Then, like the mosaic worker, Joyce collected and sorted material to fit the design. First it was necessary to determine the design of the novel, to visualize its characters and the course of the action, and this entailed putting scattered portions on paper in order to clarify them. did not write Ulysses straight through, following the final order the episodes. For example, I’ve been reading Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses for a seminar paper and came across this description of Joyce’s process in A. More on that later, as I’d like to follow-up on the idea that computers can “help and hinder the way we work.” Scrivener enables one to rearrange large chunks of materials easily, which is how a lot of writers work in the off-line world. Scrivener 2.0, however, is intriguing these videos demonstrate its power. Obviously I could use DTP with Scrivener, but the use of DTP makes the marginal value of Scrivener somewhat lower. The “artificial intelligence” engine is surprisingly useful at making connections that I didn’t realize I had.

#Devonthink pro end note scrivener pro

Word, in turn, gets used for any documents I have to share with others (since they already have Word).įallows describes how Scrivener offers “a ‘project’ organization system that makes it easy to amass many notes, files, quotes, research documents, etc related to the essay or article or book you’re writing.” I primarily use Devonthink Pro (DTP) for this kind of purpose, and it connects whatever ideas I have to other quotes, ideas, and the like. The pace of development of Mellel – that is, the number of new releases – have dropped significantly over the last three years.” That’s another way of saying, “We’re not really working on it.” It’s discouraging when a forum post from the developer says, “Yes, we have been slacking off. The other problem with Mellel isn’t related to the program itself, but to the release cycle.

This, for me, is not merely bad: I can’t use Mellel beyond first drafts. James Fallows’ post about the writing program Scrivener “suggests broader truths about the ways computers help and hinder the way we think.” He’s right, although I’ve used Scrivener and didn’t love it enough to switch: for anything beyond blog posts I mostly use a combination of Microsoft Word and Mellel, a word processor that is very fast and stable but can’t track changes.