Learning How To Use IdeaMason

Posted by dan7000
May 22, 2008 at 09:20 PM

Hi Gary,

Good luck with IM. I gave it a serious try last year, attempting, as are you, to write a lengthy nonfiction piece. I posted about it awhile back at http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/347/5.
I came away disappointed at its inability to store or search external documents and the fact that I couldn’t easily see the content of a bunch of related “material” or “library” or “quote” items all at once - among a lot of other disappointments.

“Material”, if I remember correctly, is supposed to be an actual piece of writing that will appear in your book or article. IM expects that you will write all these unconnected bits of “material” and then organize them, thus automagically generating your entire written product out of individual snippets of writing. Of course that never works, because in real life, a snippet of writing has to read well with the snippet that follows it. In my experience, it’s impossible to move an item of “material” to another place in my outline without completely rewriting it. Which makes the “material” concept kind of useless.

I could go on. But maybe it’s just that I didn’t really ever figure out how to use it correctly, despite using it intensively for 2 months. I much prefer using some other note manager like ADM or even OneNote to keep track of and outline snippets of information (and whole files) that I will use in my nonfiction work. Unlike IM, those programs allow me to store any amount of information very quickly (without requiring lots of categorization and pre-organizing like IM does), and they allow me to retrieve the underlying source document easily to see the information in context.

If you find that IM is useful for you in your nonfiction project, I’d be interested to hear about it. I really do need a better tool for that stuff and I was excited about IM at first: maybe your experience will help me learn how it can be helpful.