At Slate, Katy Waldman evaluates
several such systems: specifically, apps designed for fiction
writers. She examines yWriter5, which lets you organize your project on a
“storyboard,” and Lists for Writers, which aims to fight writer’s block
by providing lists from which writers can get ideas. She also mentions
Hemingway, which “will kill your darlings
until each sentence is bold and clear enough to satisfy Papa — it
highlights adverbs, unnecessarily flashy words (such as ‘utilize’ for
‘use’), and instances of passive voice” (another appropriate title might
be Orwell).
And she talks to some of the many writers who swear by Scrivener, which
she describes as “essentially a writer’s studio where you can store
drafts and research, craft outlines, and organize your thoughts.” But
she maintains a certain skepticism about the whole field:
“The fiction-writing
app is a curious creature, because it can only sell creativity by
downgrading it. It operates outside of the traditional, mystery-swathed
model of inspiration, in which brilliance floods down on us from heaven,
and instead reduces invention to a series of steps. In lassoing and
regimenting the muse, fiction apps evaporate some of writing’s pain, but
also some of its glory.”
She asks: “Are there any writing apps out there that will actually make you more creative?
Not more fiercely productive. Not more efficient. But more imaginative,
fresh, inspired, and afire with what Wordsworth called the ‘auxiliary
light’ of the mind? Does the app exist that will make your novel come
out not simply faster and cleaner, but better?”
Lists for Writers (which sounds a bit like Yossarian) apparently
aims to be a source of ideas. But other tools for writers, like the
Internet-blocking software Freedom, focus on the more modest goal of
eliminating distractions. These actually seem to subscribe to the
“mystery-swathed model of inspiration” Ms. Waldman mentions — the idea
may be that if you can just block out external stimuli, brilliance will
flood down on you from heaven more swiftly and with fewer interruptions.
In a November essay for The New York Times, however, the novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee argues
that the Internet’s influence isn’t baleful for everybody: “The ever
renewing bits of information in my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds
provide endless fodder, like going shell collecting on the beach on a
normal day versus the day after a hurricane when the ocean has burped up
every interesting bit of stuff imaginable.” And she adds: “The payoff
often comes when some trifle — say, an article on Inuit recipes for
fermented salmon heads — that I’ve clicked on for no discernible reason,
can years later become the perfect thing for a character musing on his
long-ago romantic summer job in a cannery in Alaska.”
For her, the Internet
may be one giant List for Writers, offering her a constant stream of
semi-random information from which she can pick that which inspires her.
And indeed, much of the current thinking on creativity extols the
virtues of doing stuff that isn’t actually your work. The neuroscientist
Daniel J. Levitin and others
have advocated taking breaks as a way of stoking creativity, and in an
investigation of daydreaming at Mother Jones, Indre Viskontas quotes from Dr. Levitin’s book, “The Organized Mind”: “The
history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of
the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the
creator was not thinking about what he was working on, not consciously
anyway — the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer
appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight.” She also cites research
suggesting that letting your mind wander can lead to unhappiness and
cell aging, which may give writers pause — then again, nobody said being
creative would keep you happy or young. And as Cody C. Delistraty has noted
at The Atlantic, studies have also linked messy desks, moderate alcohol
consumption and a certain degree of background noise to greater
creativity.
Given all this, maybe
some writers would benefit from tools that, rather than sheltering them
from the outside world, exposed them to it in strategic ways. Maybe they
need an app that, per the example of Charles Dickens, shuts down the computer at a particular time every day and forces them to go take a walk.
Then again, maybe our habits don’t matter so much. That’s the argument Casey N. Cep makes in her Pacific Standard essay critiquing our obsession with artists’ daily routines. She writes: “The
incessant interrogation of artists about their daily lives might only
be voyeurism, in which case such idiosyncrasies are fine, but I think
most of us read about their lives in order to shape our own. I read and
read and read these routines thinking that if only I could find the
right one to borrow then I would be more productive, more successful,
more writerly.”
However, she argues:
“It
is not only the routine of any of these artists that made them
successful. Not many of them even follow the routines they offer. Their
creative lives are all more complicated, more disordered than the bullet
points or time stamps they detail in one-off interviews. And even if
they devotedly followed their own procedures, then it would be still odd
to reduce the mysterious beauty of their work to these obvious patterns
of waking and sleeping and typing.”
Sometimes, I do try to
clean up my virtual work space. I sign out of email, close all
the tabs, and forge ahead with single-minded focus (or, at least,
distracted only by the physical world). But I’m not at all sure which
are my “more productive, more successful, more writerly” days — those
when I make an attempt at neatness, or those when I give in and open up
15 articles about dinosaurs. If Ms. Cep is right, they’re probably about
the same.
sursa: thenewyorktimes.com