Virtually Priceless Thoughts

Just a quick note on Scrivener – it’s a wonderful little Mac writing app. It’s written by a little independent company (as stated on their website “not a software company…Literature & Latte is one guy with lofty writerly ambitions, who has written a piece of software designed to aid in the process of writing). The author of the program, Keith, needed a tool to help him write and so he designed Scrivener. It’s a program that I use at the start of several of my writing projects and really like the approach Keith has taken to writing.

Right now for me, it’s starting “the big one” – my dissertation. I want to get started on the background sections in parallel to the research, so I have a large portion done when the results are coming in. I have moments of being daunted. There are these images of this grand document, hundreds of pages in length, gold edged paper, culmination of years of work, etc. etc.

It’s not unusual to feel that about one’s dissertation, I’m told. It hampers the ability to start.

Anyway, I ended up “playing” in Scrivener. Using the index card metaphor — you know titling index cards for sections, a few notes on the index cards about what sections would say, etc – nothing fancy, just pushing some pixels around to let the ideas percolate. Certainly not writing anything. That would be too daunting. Just outlining, some notes, play.

So this morning, with about 50 virtual index cards, I realized I hadn’t written over one thousand words already.

Now with the psychological hurdle of starting out of the way I get to just keep writing, which is far easier.

Thanks Keith.