I’m enjoying using Word at the moment. It feels like a return to a very familiar tool, even though there are other programs I’ve probably used more. More than anything, it takes me back to my first laptop, a Dell with a rattly keyboard and external CD-ROM drive. I remember purchasing a CD from Computer Exchange that had Word 2000 and Outlook on it and it may have been the first time I paid for software. It’s crazy to me that this happened over twenty years ago.
Anyway, I’m using Word not only for fiction, but also instead of a notes programme. Having flicked between Bear, Apple Notes and Obsidian and not being wholly convinced by any of them, I remembered the massive feeling of relief I felt the first time I uninstalled Evernote. I’m not really convinced by the usefulness of digital notetaking. I think it’s something you do instead of actually working on something – a stopgap measure that makes you feel as if you’re working, while not actually getting closer to the goal. You sit at the keyboard hammering away at half-thoughts, but that’s not the same as actually writing.
To be clear, I don’t feel the same way about writing by hand. That, to me, is a different process, using another part of the brain and a separate physical action that allows for different types of thought. I know it’s rough, but that’s OK, because I’m just working things out on the page. There’s no confusion that writing by hand in a notebook is a final product. I’m not sure the same can be said for typing in a digital notetaking app. It feels the same as working on a manuscript, so the brain feels satisfied in a way it shouldn’t.
This is a long way of getting around to what I’m trying to say:
Write it down. Type it up.
That’s the new philosophy. It’s that simple. Write down things as they occur to you and if it’s worth something, type that idea up into a draft. No more documents filled with question marks and sentences that begin ‘Maybe’. All that stuff goes in the notebook. Other stuff goes into a Word document with a descriptive filename that I think is going to go into a folder on Dropbox.
Why Dropbox?
I’ve been using iCloud to sync files between my Apple devices and for the most part it works fine. The problem is that it syncs everything – documents, spreadsheets, photos, scans, music, downloaded PDFs, Affinity files… it can feel overwhelming.
The idea of a folder just dedicated to the Word documents I produce feels right. It’s perhaps a validation of Apple’s thinking, introduced in Mac OS Lion, that documents should belong to the apps that create them. I never got on board with that, mainly because a good proportion of what I do is collecting different media types into projects. I don’t think I’m alone in that, but the current focus on writing means that blocking out some other noise is maybe a good idea.
It is handy to be able to access some files on the go, though. Dropbox works pretty well for this. I have a free account with some additional space due to referrals or something. Enough for many, many Word files, which – if they don’t have images in them – tend to top out at a few hundred KB at the most. (One of the things I didn’t like about Apple Pages was the fact that even a one-page short story seemed to require a file of about a megabyte. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot when your device has gigabytes of storage, but it contributed to a sense of uncertainty about the application as a whole. That and the use of a sidebar for formatting, which just felt wrong to me.
Thinking about Dropbox came about largely because of my experimentation with blot.im, which is ongoing. I thought I would have to install the Dropbox service on my Macs in order to post, only to find that the service now supports iCloud. There’s now a folder on my Desktop where I can post to blot, but exploring my Dropbox account made me realise that it’s largely a clear space where I can impose a structure, as opposed to all the chaos I’ve already created.
The other thing about Dropbox is that it conforms to my sense of what’s proper in cloud storage. Files should primarily live on my computer and go up to the cloud, not the other way around. iCloud sort of does this, but on devices that have less storage, I use selective syncing and this makes me feel uneasy. As for Google Docs, the idea that any of my work is in the hands of Google – a company I haven’t properly trusted since the discontinuation of Reader – isn’t something I can live with. They’re an internet-first company and while their word processor product is great for collaboration, I can’t live with the idea of my work living on their servers, in a file format that doesn’t really exist in any sense and can’t be opened by anything else. (That last point is another mark against Pages, as well.)
Folder structure
I haven’t implemented the folder structure yet, but I think it’s something like this.
· Ideas
· Roughs
· Revisions
· Ready
· Out
This should be fairly self-explanatory, but just in case I come back to this and wonder what I was thinking, here we go:
Ideas is for fragments. These can be documents with a few paragraphs in or perhaps even just empty documents with a file name. This is about as close as I would get to a digital file system, but they’re things that were worthy of being typed up.
Roughs is drafts of things, not necessarily completed. This is where it’s about pounding words out and getting to a thing that can be shaped and refined.
Revisions is where this happens. This folder should only be things that are in a readable state.
Ready should have the least in it. This is the directory containing things that are completed, but aren’t currently under consideration anywhere. Ideally, this would be an ‘outbox-zero’ situation, but things aren’t always that simple.
Out is the stuff currently being considered somewhere. There’s obviously going to be motion between this and ‘Ready’, but hopefully note too much, right?
There probably needs to be an Archive folder for when things get accepted / published / abandoned or whatever. I would prefer that these folders were alphabetical, but perhaps I’ll just prepend them with numbers.
Alternatively, tags
It doesn’t have to be folders. If I end up not using Dropbox for this stuff, it might be worth instituting these as labels in Finder and using a Smart Folder to collate them all from across my hard drive. It’s a possibility that allows for other types of files in all sorts of disparate places, which is perhaps more realistic for where I am at the moment, but undermines the sort of controlled experience I’m trying to create.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually used Smart Folders. They might not be what I think they are. I think I’m going to investigate that. I’m running up against my Pomodoro timer and want to do something else for the next chunk, so I think I’ll finish here.