Quick Summary: Short remark about two of my favorite programs for writing projects.
Steve Jobs once said: “Computers are bicycles for the mind.”.
Circus Ponies Notebook and Scrivener exemplify this sentence for me.
I could not have written my diploma thesis without Circus Ponies Notebook and I wouldn’t have been able to finish my PhD thesis without both Circus Ponies Notebook and Scrivener.
Both programs are presented in detail in the blog entries: Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing, and Circus Ponies Notebook: The Best Tool for Structuring Creative Writing Projects (esp. Research Projects). I have also written an article about using Circus Ponies Notebook for academic writing.
Here I just want to point out to those three blog entries and make a case for using them together for (longer) creative writing projects.
Imagine a wild, colorful girl, who is interested in anything and everything, and holds an impossible width and depth of information that she can order in any way she needs. That’s Circus Ponies Notebook. And now imagine a cool, clear thinker, who is very focused on what he does best. That’s Scrivener. Now combine them and you have a very powerful combination for creative writing.
Circus Ponies Notebook can be used to collect notes for a project and structure them in a way that make sense, that you can follow when you write down the text based on that information. This allows you to focus on individual details, small subsections, while never staying from the path of the article itself. This tremendously reduces the cognitive load you have to handle as you do not need to keep in mind all the information you do not actually need at the moment.
Scrivener on the other hand can be used to write the text in, as it has some of the best features for writing I have ever seen, including a “Backup To” function that automatically uses current date and time for the file name, a good outline for navigation, version control, and much, much more. Forget Word when it comes to writing larger texts. Word was made for letters and such-a-like, not for longer, more complicated texts. Scrivener’s main strength is that it lets you focus on writing (and re-writing) and also reduces tremendous amounts of cognitive load.
Taken (and used) together both lets you focus on writing, which is hard enough in itself.
Mentioned articles:
Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing
Circus Ponies Notebook for Academic Writing (e.g., Thesis Writing)
Especially through your blog I was convinced of using the software that you are using. Notebook and Scivener (but for academic stuff I still prefer LyX).
But, as you, I also use DEVONthink. What I don’t understand – how is your relation between DEVONthink and Notebook in your workflow?? Do you collect articles and stuff in DEVONthink and you just take some bits from there and copy them to Circus Ponies NB? In another post you say your dissertation outline was 1305 pages – how did this then relate to DEVONthink? (One disadvantage of putting everything to NB is probably that you cannot use the ‘see related text’ function in DEVONthink.) Also, is NB with such a huge file (1305 p.) still running smoothly?
Thank you again for your work on this blog! – I’ll also check out your new book!
Best, Max
Hello Max,
I did write my dissertation before stumbling upon DEVONthink, so there is (was) no relation between DT and CPN for my dissertation outline. The outline was actually a bit sluggish, as it had a lot of cells (it was all on one page, the page number related to the amount of pages it would have been when printed as seen in the preview mode of print). For writing the dissertation I broke it down into subparts (Introduction, Study 1, etc.), sorted it in another CPN file, and wrote it down.
Regarding my current workflow, it’s on page 327 (book page number, not Acrobats) in OC2. I use DEVONthink to store material (files for work projects, an image database, one for sounds, one for vids, one for private project, one for sources (all articles), one for private sources, but use CPN to make notes about the topics that I deal with (e.g., topic notebooks like information on writing articles, advisory, etc., and article notebooks where I put in information for articles I want/need to write). I have recently switched to reading articles on an iPad (in GoodReader, as Sente turned out to be too sluggish) and will probably store the highlighted sections in separate CPN files. I’ll write a posting about it once I have found a stable solution.
All the best
Daniel