Your drive-by generalization of Luhman is shameful. Luhman was known widely among sociologists and practitioners of other disciplines for his academic output numbering approximately 30 books, plus learned articles.

For those of us who have become familiar with Luhmann through the popularization of his notetaking system, most probably know about his high volume of academic articles and books.

Contrary to your assumption that Luhmann had the cadres of academic staff a lot of profs have, such was not the case.

It is ludicrous comparing the length of one of Luhmann's relatively short outlines with one of yours, and certainly no one would accuse you of brevity. Luhmann's Zettlelkasten system, and the way he utilized his "slip notes" (analagous to what we call index cards) reduced his dependency on and/or need for lengthy outlines.

Luhmann worked very well without the benefits of software we have today. A perusal of his publications and a familiarity of how he used his note system demonstrates this fact. A key part of Zettlelkasten is Luhmann's cross referencing system which predates today's programs with linking, backlinking, and tagging.

Luhmann's approach to academic notetaking was a significant paradign shift. Much, if not all, early note taking software created for computers an electronic version reflecting prevailing ideas about notetaking and outlines. That, of course, is changing, and now in the 21st century, we have software which allows those who wish to, to emulate Luhmann's Zettlelkasten which, in case it remains less than obvious, predated by decades the emergence of personal computers in the latter part of the 20th century.

22111 wrote:

Post 2 of 2 in a row:

(Luhmann being another blatant example for a person who's known /
"renowned" NOT for their real output, but for accessories... in this
context, dan7000 here 2012: "Second, looking at those pictures, what NYT
calls a “painstaking” and “detailed” outline is
nothing compared to outlines I regularly generate. He has 30 pages for
a whole book. Yikes. I have outlines 3X that long. His system simply
couldn’t accommodate a truly detailed outline. NYT also says that
he has filing cabinets full of notes and references. That gets back to
efficiency: keeping that stuff in evernote or even searchable PDFs makes
it thousands of times faster to find what you need when looking through
your references. But again, the guy has all the time he needs."
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods
- more about outlines infra, and "has all the time he needs", for
Luhmann, would have probably been "personnel", staff...?)

Amontillado: DevonThink would probably be one of two sw people might be
switch to Mac, the other one being, for some, Dramatica Story Expert,
since their Dramatica Pro - the only one available on Windows - is not a
nightmare but an insult... and then, possibly, even FinalDraft might
crash less on a Mac than it does on Windows...

This being said, it's interesting that even most "Mac writers" (and as I
said above, most writers are "Mac writers", since most of them are
lonely, and so they want to be part-of-the-pack) do NOT write in
DevonThink... anyway, I have to use what's available on Windows, but
without scripting the necessary, additional functionality onto my tools,
I would be lost by "factory" Mac software as well...

Btw, doing almost all my work(ings) within just ONE (as said,
"apped-up") tool, Ultra Recall in my case, bears the big advantage of
having identical functionality identically at my hands (or
"fingertips"), at several stages in my workflow ("integrated software");
this is obviously even much better than just assigning the same
shortcuts (shortkeys) to identical / similar functions in different
tools, and thus, I really have problems to imagine a "smooth workflow"
when people use for writing Ulysses e.g., and then other software for
their "data" (repository), especially without using, at the very least,
some macro tool for smoothing (out) the most obvious glitches.

This being said, people are right in saying that UR (in its "factory"
state) "isn't for writing", so I'm sometimes musing what could be done,
for DT (of which people say similar things), with the appropriate
scripting...

"My World War II notes could be organized in a hierarchy based on
geography at the same time the same notes are in a separate hierarchy of
political goals. That’s pretty cool, but it doesn’t tell a
story." - I in part have already commented on this just here, and of
course, you're right, in most cases at least, the data collection
doesn't tell a / the "story" yet, but I love to have the "data" "at
hand", i.e. in-between the "story" items, or in the same "format", i.e.
TWO UR panes, side-by-side, on the same screen, in case with the
corresponding inter-db links between the two data bases.

"[1]The quickest way for my own technical writing to become pedantic and
stuffy is to drill too deep. [2]A chapter in a reference should have a
deliberate scope. For instance, a section on the user interface to a
software system may have no need to discuss developer APIs [3]even
thought the two are fundamentally related."

1) Right when in combination with 2
2) Right, hence the need for linking, cloning...:
3) q.e.d.

Btw, blogging is very different, hence my hint at Ul probably being very
good "bloggers' software" (with the reserve of me not knowing about
their blog-update functionality except for their non-specific (!)
marketing claims).

"Without any doubt, I would plan the progression of overview through
summation in a technical reference as a sequence of ideas, not as a
hierarchy. That’‘s what an outline is for, actually, to plan
a work from start to finish."

When I say "tree", I mean pseudo-trees, enhanced trees, i.e. with
transclusion, AND I'm absolutely on your side when you abhor DEEP
indentation, FLAT trees are the way to go, according to me, and it's
been years ago that I wrote extensively, in this very forum, about LISTS
in such "trees", but manually ORDERED lists, and with grouping by
divider lines / separator lines, AND I said this manual order is the big
(not inherent but practical: almost all of what we call "outliners",
offer such manual sorting) advantage of "trees", over tagging, where the
"results" are then ordered by creation date, by order of some other
tags, whatever, but not in a predefined, strict order, manually "sorted"
by you;

the "tree" allowing you to "look up anything", and then it depends on
the subject of that "group" if you have interest in ordering the
"members" of that group manually, or by date, even alphabetically in
some (sub-) contexts (and all these "items" may then include
sub-hierarchies in case)...

It's right btw that this "order", in today's "outliners", is "fixed" in
the way that there are no "alternative views", but that's just a
technical problem, not a conceptual one, cf. the later versions of
askSam, again... (and even them remained very (!) basic in that
respect...)

"If I plan a story in a way that doesn’t tell the story, I’m
spinning my wheels." - for non-"natives" who'd need to look this up,
like I had to: "it's futile"...:

But of course, this is just a misunderstanding, as implied above: Most
"data", "material" needs some sort - but, as said, not really deep - of
"hierarchy", and fiction output doesn't need but slight "hierarchy"
indeed, or even none? Well, that'd be "stream" then, right?

Since even the chapters in a novel, the scenes in a screenplay, are
"hierarchy", and that's why Ul has "pages" (and not only "books" or
whatever they call'em), and that's why I write in "items", and of
course, they are ordered in some manual, provisional, alleged
"publication" order, not in the order of the "material", and thus, if
there is not a bulk of such "resources data", I like to put that data
into the (alleged, provisional,) flat "output tree": it'll be shuffled,
in case, together with the alleged "output": resources following their
masters, not them becoming data slaves, or if you prefer, the luggage
goes where the traveler goes, not the latter running after the former.

And again, we're d'accord! Ironically, most novels just have (but have
indeed!) chapters (most of the time not even numbered), and only in rare
(and mostly historic) cases, they have / had an additional "tree" level,
"books" they were named (i.e. above the chapters of course; cf. the
Bible; playwrights have (not necessarily) "acts", then (ditto)
"scenes"), and - this is different in television though - movie
screenplays may NOT begin a new page with each scene, so writing scenes
by "items" in whatever "outliner" is just for creational purposes,
whilst the final "output" then then just allows for upper case "new
scene" indicators, even bolding those being more or less viewed a
"profanity"...

Which means that screenplays tend (i.e. are forced, by the "industry")
to HIDE any "hierarchy", and that's probably "magical thinking": the
audience (which will never see the screenplay) should not be reminded of
any element disjoining the flow of illusion... ("Annie Hall" with Allen
addressing the audience directly being one of the more notable, early
exceptions to the prevailing rule; cf. the (auctorial or not) narrators
in novels);

on the other hand, in novels, I not only remember chapters, but also (in
rare cases) title lines for chapters, and sub-chapters, those being
separated by something like

*
***
*****

whenever such symbol groups weren't used for the chapters, and if they
were, perhaps just some blank lines, in case together with ~~~ or
similar - yes, in literary works, there (not necessarily but mostly) is
some FLAT hierarchy, so any hierarchy / tree-building WITHIN a given
"work" (and for hierarchy and grouping without'em, 3-pane, instead of
2-pane, outliners come really handy indeed, and after all, the "3-
instead of 2-pane" paradigm is for distributing (!) one single, then
necessarily deeper, hierarchy into two partial hierarchies...).

You can use MS Word instead, or some other "text processor" as they were
once called (e.g. "Atlantis", I mentioned that one before): They all
come with some sort of "outlining help", in order to facilitate your
"navigation" beyond the scene / chapter / whatever (flat, but then, not
totally flattened-out) hierarchy level, BUT in their "content" (body /
all text) field / pane then, they do NOT separate those, but show your
current "element" together with its "environment", and that's why I
insist on more-than-1-pane "outliners": only they will "single out" the
"element" you're currently working on, but that "freeing your mind"
(upon that matter cf. infra).

(Of course, you should not work, for weeks (!), upon a 700-plus-page
document, in MS Word (!) on an iPad (sic! incredible I may say!),
without at least daily backups, see
https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/40882/how-best-to-recover-from-catastrophic-text-loss
- he could recover, from some export, some 625 pages, lost another 100,
then gots lots of advice recover tool use, and then, at the very end,
told his helpers all that occurred onto an iPad - so I did NOT make this
horror tale up! (Ain't there no Mac tools to recover data from a
connected iPad then?))

I also wrote, in this forum, about continuous numbering in legal text
books, i.e. chapters numbered 1...120 or whatever, instead of even doing
a "slight", flat hierarchy indeed... but for "technical" works (of all
areas), this is obviously not the very best way to do, and thus, I have
seen such legal textbooks, with about 120 chapters, courageously counted
thru some "parts-and-books" hierarchy, overlaid over that, now obviously
having become ridiculous, flat-thru numbering...

Whatever, this forum proves that by "tree", "hierarchy" I understand
"just what's really needed, what really makes sense", even having
explained here how by introducing "separator lines" (just do an item
____________________
with 20 underscores, and then copy it into wherever you need it, into
your text / "content", or then, into your tree, in order to "hold
together which belongs together", instead of artificially creating
another hierarchy level there, which would not only be unneeded, but
most of the time then would even create ambivalence: "did I put item x
into subgroup a or b?": it's like placing the kids of some unworthy
parents into different foster families, and further problems will
arise...


"I think some people who hate outlining (like myself) would be better
off if they planned what to write." - you also said, here, in 2019,
"Outlining has a bad name. Part of that comes from the pain of looking
at a hierarchical topology you’re sick of and morphing it into a
sequential exposition." (
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8650/0/more-on-robert-caros-research-writing-methods
)...

So now for some history, since after better evaluating the term
"hierarchy", it's time to define "outline":

I had always done outlining, but on paper, and then necessarily tearing
those sheets into slips, glueing them afterwards on new sheets, and so
on: terrible!

Thus, I tried to become an "early adopter" of ThinkTank (Windows
version), and, according to https://jessems.com/outliner-list , that had
Expand / collapse items
Drag and drop items to re-order*
Hoisting

(*=not by mouse, mind you, there was no mouse then; it might have been
added later on though)

I don't remember the hoisting, but I remember that I very quickly
discarded it, since there was no way to "develop" a little bit, except
of course by adding another 1-line child item for the "commentary" or
whatever your further ideas, and given the screens of the time, with
each line up to 80 chars, this was unusable by my standards.

Now I think I have already developed this idea in this forum, but I'm
not sure, whatever: By writing an outline just as a naked outline, you
even DROP ideas / elements, instead of collecting and preserving them,
for development, since most (i.e. quantitatively at least) ideas /
elements within an outline will be developed WITHIN the outline
elements, i.e. "further down", HIDDEN BY the (naked) outline, i.e. by
"what's in the tree", and an outliner like ThinkTank WAS "tree-only", so
it made me LOSE ideas, instead of preserving them, oh my!

Today, that's different, i.e. even the (rare) one-pane outliners all
have "room" for "content", but as said, that was not (yet) the case in
those times, and those outlines you learn in school, are, we all know
that, unfortunately of the ThinkTank type, why? Because, as your
schoolmasters (correctly!) said, if you did all the development within
the outline (which on paper is possible, cf. supra = just what I've said
before), you wouldn't have time left for your body-text!

Yes, they were correct in saying this, but it was utterly misleading
though: They misconceived outlining as a preliminary step in some
waterfall model, and in class, they forced you to do it that - i.e.
their - way...

whilst in reality, outlining - if really you want to give it a name - is
just what you, from beginning to end, just jumping around ad libitum, a
100 times, 10,000 times... while writing, be it writing wherever in the
"tree" or wherever in whatever "content"... writing, cutting,
inserting... in other words, you create a jungle, then swing around in
it with the help of the already-created lianas, or the ones you will
have to create to "cut" your way... and at some point, it's not really a
jungle anymore, but will have become a landscape into which you will
have laid a given, determined pathway for the "reader" (i.e. your
audience).

Thus, what you will have written up to any given moment, does not lead
your further way into some fixed direction, but you may discard
elements, creating new ones instead, so calling this "outlining" is
really misleading, since if you do writings / changes within the "tree"
or the "content" is just a question of level, of "directions" or
"details" in case.

The above also implies that "outliners vs. pantsers" is a false
dichotomy if you understand both concepts in their traditional - and
wrong - meaning which is:

outlining = first create a frame(work), polish it (do a ThinkTank, i.e.
naked outline), then fill it up with text (write your novel or whatever)

pantsing = have some idea(s) in your head, then sit down and write, more
or less from the beginning to the end of your intended final output
("work")

Thus, the respective allegations between these concepts being, the
outliner knows where they are going, they "write by numbers", it's just
that themselves created those "numbers" beforehand, instead of buying
them from some book (or from Dramatica, hoho!); the pantser has just got
some idea(s), but hasn't any, or any very precise, idea where they will
be going: at any given time, what they will have written, will "guide"
them (i.e. the pantsers) for what they will have to (!) write further
down the line...

As you can see, the only difference within those technical stratagems is
how much developed the "project" ideas of the two writers where when
they start "writing": it's more "I clearly see the pic of ..." for the
"outliner", whilst it's more or less "yoghurt", which then "forms itself
into ..." for the pantser: both will then try to remain faithful to what
they will have written up to then, since nobody wants to throw away up
to 90 p.c. of what they will have written, and ironically, it's the
"outliner" who will have the much better chances to remain flexible,
they will just create less (which then would become) waste in-between,
hopefully...

Which brings us to another aspect: The "pantser" obviously need to have
already written lots of details, in order to fuel their further
inspiration, whilst the "outliner" (in the above definition: waterfall!)
MUST have lots of inspiration, even without yet knowing about the
details - and since that's simply not the case, even for most "writers",
they then fill fervent- and ardently out all those forms in (freaked
out) "writers' planning" tools, their monthly subscription price being
the real help since "it'll help me. you get what you pay for. amen."
(You see here that even those alleged "outliners" go into some "detail",
for some "core elements", like "characters"... whilst they don't trust
their core concept, they adhere to its waterfall model though...)

Well, I'd say that's real bad timing, both paradigms are, and thus, we
should FREE ourselves from such ridiculous concepts, since both HARM
your "inspiration" (or whatever you call it), by imposing that (just
differently embodied) "first things first" challenge ("first the rack"
vs. "chronological writing", which is nothing else then the totally
unnecessary claim that for writing chapter 2, chapter 1 should already
have been written)...

and yes, "first things first": first, you should learn something about
writing (by whatever means, and allow for irony, so Stephen King's
writers' manual: "Don't by writers' manuals!", I cite from memory...),
but then, swing freely between outline ("tree") and "work" ("body
text"), ALL the time!

You will have to finally discard much LESS of your work than most
writers identifying as "outliners" AND "pantsers" in the traditional,
devoid-of-sense, sense of the terms.

(Ok, I don't know how Danielle Steel works, I just know that she has
written about 200 novels, which "made" about 800 millions, and that she
has shifted from 4 to 6 novels p.a., that she works 20 hours a day, 7/7
("my husband and my boys are out of the house, I need almost no sleep,
I've got nothing else to do, I don't like hobbies" and so on, I cite
from memory), but I suppose her - predominantly female? - readership
might love her "numbers"? (Well, her boys certainly will love hers when
the day will come... oh, no, that's nasty! writer's envy is a special,
ugly thing!)

As for Tinderbox, can't say, but have doubts... Bernstein's expensive
StorySpace (always Mac-only, 149$) might be one of the less useless map
tools, whilst I can't imagine MindJet and similar (alleged) "mind map"
tools being useful for anything but in presentation situations (i.e.
after "work").

"Curio (...) particularly since those references can appear as duplicate
instances in multiple places." - yes, transclusion is a sine qua non; I
personally don't understand how anybody can accept (less alone then
evangelize) a writing or other organizational tool (paid by subscription
or up-front) coming without.


"A chapter in a reference should have a deliberate scope." - I had
intended to comment on that in its context above, but then postponed my
comment, except for saying I fully agree. In fact, you speak about the
problem of "information atomization and regrouping" here, and that's the
conceptual and technical unresolved problem.

So we all have to find intermediate solutions, for our individual means,
and for external resources, I do it this way: I download the full text
of the resource, together with its url of course, but without all the
crap - the broader the audience for the resource, the more crap to
discard (even before copying, I have this semi-automated, so it's very
quick; I also download graphics, into the text, if I think they are
relevant for my means); then, I bolden the text parts I think are
important for me, very important parts I then also underline (which in
theory leaves the "underline" format for something else, but I have
never used it yet); I bolden important entries within the tree; I "blue"
tree entries which I want to refer to, e.g. I "blued" some tree entries
to "prepare" this forum post; afterwards, I'll put them back into their
"original" format (i.e. regular or bold).

Then, when I have got some element from the ("original", "downloaded"
i.e. and e.g. text-copied-from-web) "compound" item I want in some
other, or in "its own", "context", I cite from there, i.e. I
(half-automatically) create a "child" item, with just that passage, and
with the original item title, the original url and the original web page
title, and with an indication that it's a citation = an excerpt; also,
my scriptlet puts a "this/these paragraphs copied for
TitleOfTheNewPage", me manually putting an indicator which paragraphs
are concerned if more than one; I then put the new child item into
whatever context it belongs, and in rare cases, even cloned in several
contexts. (The above is not perfected since I leave out the internal,
unique itemID of the original item, and in there, I leave out the
itemIDs of the "citation" items (alternatively, I could create "links",
which I do neither); on the other hand, UR's search being quite good,
it's obvious that with my remarks, here and there, i.e. in the
"original" and in the "target(s)", I could easily "look up" (i.e. find)
both the "original" from the "target(s)", and vice versa, and even other
"targets" from any one of them; in practice, that need never arises
though, since all the core info is "on both sides".

I postponed these comments because you also wrote, in your next
paragraph, "There are other needs for the writer, though, such as
consistent private notes related to more than one place in your work.
You can make those notes lower levels in an outline, but if the same
note applies to more than one topic in your work your notes are a little
less easy to keep consistent and relevant." - Here again, you address a
core problem: "Where to put items which, more or less for their
individual contexts then, would not have to be "cloned" just once or
twice, but multiple times?"

It's obvious to me that such notes should placed not, as I understand
from your writing, deeper down, but in some "Generalities" parent items'
sub-trees, higher-up, and then, when you work upon "things potentially
concerned", you just read, and re-read, those higher-up "instructions"
(i.e. guidelines to bear in mind, etc.), once a week for example; I
don't know any better way since, since repeating "something more or less
present" dozens of times (which technically would be easy) and "wherever
it might apply" will go on your own nerves: "yes, yes, I know... shove
it!"... but then, if you don't remind yourself of those things here and
there (e.g. once a week, for important considerations), you might lose
sight of them after all... Thus, in practice, and to honor our current
context, there might be a higher-up "Allg" for "Writing", but further
down another "Allg", for "Writing Thrillers"... "Allg" standing in for
"Allgemein", the beauty of that German term being that, contrary to
"Generalities", it starts with an "A", so that even in (more-or-less)
alphabetically-ordered (otherwise all-English) lists, it appears on
top...

And yes, the concepts of atomization, variation and transclusion are
intimately linked... well, interwoven... amalgamated in the end...

As for variants - you mentioned them in your second citation of mine
here -, I currently (i.e. have always done, up to finding "something
better", but that would imply me coding it then, so...) and always
preserve the above procedure, i.e. do not fiddle with the citations, but
then "comment" them where appropriate, i.e. ADD text beneath the
original, copied text chunks, and clearly distinguished from those, so
as to not mix up the (in case, contextual) "addition" with the
"citation"...

At the end of the day, my "system" is not so much different from
"academic citing", where you would, in case, cite the same (your own or
third party's) source again and again, just with different text chunks,
in different contexts.


Finally, citations from Kühn's (cf. ) defunct blog: (
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2018/08/popper-on-writing-and-objective.html
), "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" (1919) and Quentin
Quencher's "Popper on Writing and Objective Knowledge" (
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/meine_offlinegedanken_ein_experiment ;
you could use google translate or something similar):

"Sir Karl Popper made a sharp distinction between subjective and
objective knowledge. Subjective knowledge is, he thought, deficient. It
is expressive of our concrete mental dispositions and expectations; it
consists of concrete world 2 thought processes. Objective knowledge is
far superior. But how do we get from subjective to objective knowledge?

Popper believed that objective knowledge comes about by writing ideas
down:

"Putting your ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an
important difference. For in this way they become criticisable. Before
this, they were part of ourselves. We may have had doubts. But we could
not criticize them in the way in which we criticize a linguistically
formulated proposition or, better still, a written report.""

and

"Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der Mitreisenden
im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft (...)
Hier preschte ich nun mit einem Erklärungsansatz heran, der
natürlich nicht neu ist, aber auch nur meist als Ausrede gebraucht
wird, wenn das Verhalten von Menschen, manchmal gar das eigene,
irgendwie unlogisch erscheint: „Die Gefühle bestimmen das
Denken, nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der
Rechtfertigung.“ (...)
Es könnte ja sein, dass meine Gedanken völliger Humbug sind
und andere, längst bewiesene naturwissenschaftlich beschriebene
Vorgänge das Denken steuern. (...)
Ist die permanente Selbstüberprüfung förderlich?
Aber ich bin offline, also spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter." (...)
Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es unsere
Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen können?
(...)
Kann sich Individualismus überhaupt entwickeln in einer
Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer permanenten Möglichkeit der
Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen Gedanken?"

Now, we are here at the core of creation, and you could translate
Kühn's "Objective knowledge is far superior. But how do we get from
subjective to objective knowledge?", in our context, into "how to get
from the yoghurt to the finished work?", to adapt even that passage to
what we're after, and which is,

How to get the yoghurt, the mesh, plasma, shaped, tangible?

Here -
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9759/0/musings-on-tools-for-thought
-, I had said, fountain pens ain't fast enough in order to scribble
down, the first element, the "yoghurt", and before, I had said, in
another thread here, that I use a little, portable dictation device to
do that, one with real keys (but you could use your "smartphone" instead
if you are sufficiently familiar with it), and then, afterwards, I use
dictation (Dragon), from those audio "notes" - it's here that I "think
again" about what I had "noted"; here's "time", here now, I could use a
fountain pen indeed if it was 1980: it's the first "screen editing
time", for (first screen) weighting, selecting, discarding,
reformulating (so I listen to my notes in reverse order, in order to not
to do unnecessary work onto previous audio passages I had already
discarded, "judged inferior" in later audio notes)...

And yes, often in my audio notes, I "derailed": I developed something
which appears "impossible" (or "illogical" or whatever), in view of
other parts of my "writing"... and I would NOT have noted these passages
in other (i.e. screen) circumstances: I would have "known" "this is not
possible", etc.

But thus, these "notes" are there, they exist now, and so I have to
decide upon them: are they to be discarded because they are "not in
sync", or should I "integrate" them, them "bettering" the "work"?
Kühn (see in context above): "For in this way they become
criticisable. Before this, they were part of ourselves." - NOW we have
the "full context" (of what has been "written", devised before), whilst,
when "scribbling", human memory problems left out some beacons,
signals... but then, were those beacons, signals "good enough" in order
to be preserved, or is it rather that we had needed them before, as a
"way" of stewing something more valid, while on errance? (new word for
"erroneous wandering") - At the end of the day, that's what our heroes
do "all the time", so why could we be safely shielded from it? In this
context, think again about "outlining" and "pantsing": both concepts
will hold you back from doing the necessary adjustments... they might
just be too devastating, psychologically, new ideas coming in "too late"
to be taken into consideration, so an iterative approach (i.e. tree,
content, tree, content... "ad infinitum"... well, up to that certain
"finish" beacon (you must find indeed...) seems to me the only valid
one?


You will remember that years ago, some experts said that writing
on-screen (and even by typewriter, years before) altered "your" style,
perhaps even "produced content" - could it be that with handwriting (or
with audio notes) you get quite often into that situation where you
simply don't remember "important details", "street signs", then go awry,
on first sight, and then do rewrites you would never even have thought
of, had you been sitting in front of a screen on which "everything"
anytime is available by looking it instantly up, or even before a pile
of typed pages, but considering visually "going thru" such a pile is
quite easy at least in direct comparison with an often much thicker
(well, that would not have been the case for Nabokov indeed) pile of
handwritten "material" (here meaning "work"), with or without then
scribbles of all sorts, making it more or less unreadable in-between,
i.e. before (paid) final typing?

Quencher speaks about notes written down when he's just "on his own",
i.e. without web (or other) access to any "info", and he says it's the
feeling - the wading in the yoghurt in my - well, Allen's - allegory,
and then, after having found "something", you "reason", in order to
"better shape" them, to make them "presentable" - for a more faithful
translation run the citation ("Die Gefühle bestimmen das Denken,
nicht die Argumente, die dienen am Ende nur der Rechtfertigung.") thru
the translator of your choice.

And he mentions the limiting character of the presence of "all that's
there already", vs. the freeing character of that not being the case,
and, just like Kühn, he doesn't speak of literary creation, but of
the tangible-tangible, of third-party info (or fake info, whatever, of
the "accepted, general knowledge" if I may say so: "Ist die permanente
Selbstüberprüfung förderlich? Aber ich bin offline, also
spinne ich meinen Gedanken weiter."

Then, he asks, how does a situation in which I constantly can check the
congruence of my thoughts with the "above" (i.e. "their knowledge";
supra: "Um mich herum das übliche Bild, rund 80 Prozent der
Mitreisenden im Zug sind in ihre Smartphones vertieft" - "as usual", he
says, 80 p.c. of the travelers bent over their smartphones...), alter
these? ("Was mich zur nächsten Frage bringt: Wie verändert es
unsere Gedanken, wenn wir sie ständig überprüfen
können?")

And finally, his (rhetorical?) question: "Kann sich Individualismus
überhaupt entwickeln in einer Onlinegesellschaft mit ihrer
permanenten Möglichkeit der Selbstüberprüfung der eigenen
Gedanken?" - What chances for so-called "individualism" to develop in
our society in which is now possible for everyone - [and even asked for,
from everyone, I might add] - to balance everything anyone thinks [I
could have said "match"...] with what "they" might think on that matter?
As said, my translations here are very "free" ones, thus my repeated
invitations to use google translate...

Oh, and drinking alcohol while "writing" may in part have the same
effect, i.e. it not only disinhibits, but it also makes you temporarily
forget aspects, and thus may empower you to leave that "highway" of
originally "THEIR" thoughts and feelings, and in our context, to leave
that "highway" built by your own preceding writings in that "project"...

Or you just take notes anywhere, e.g. just a STEP OUT of the shower in
some public bath, and without worrying - which in front of your screen
you'd do, inevitably and preconsciously -:

DOES IT FIT?

Since when the priors look right over your shoulder, you don't
feel-n-think free anymore.

(And the double entendre in "prior" says it all... and yes, thinking of
"Stop! Or My Mum Will Shoot!"'s inevitable now... and whatever they say,
it's a very funny movie indeed!)


Here and everywhere, and Chris's right: "Some Rights Reserved" by his
forum site indeed - it not being a quarry though anybody'd be free to
pillage...