How to Capture an Idea
Falero. Departure of the Witches, 1878 (via.)
One of the best things about living in this era is that there are countless options available to capture ideas, digital or otherwise. You may have a moleskine in your pocket, but you still jot an idea down on your iphone, depending on what the idea is, the rhythm of it, and what you plan to do with it.
The decision to type or handwrite usually boils down to how fast do I need something captured and searchable? If I know I’m immediately going to use an idea, I usually write it as an email to myself. I delete the email as soon as the text is integrated in the intended project, whether it is an article or blog post or short story I’m writing.
When I come up with a somewhat poetic turn of phrase, I usually write it out on a paper notebook I always have with me. For years, I carried kraft brown Moleskine Cahiers, but now I’m obsessed with and never without Muji’s recycled paper note sets. (I also have the Chronotebook with me always, but mostly use it for mind mapping, rather than scheduling.)
I title these notebooks something obscure (”Are you a sling shot or a snake charmer?) and date them with silver sharpie. It has to be silver sharpie or I really will not use the notebook. There’s probably a deeper rationalization for why I need silver titles on recycled brown paper covers — like how most of my work is about where the organic meets the inorganic, nature and technology at odds — but in any case that’s one area I’m uncompromisingly neurotic.
Attending a lecture, I would much prefer to take notes on my iPhone, but because that action is so often misconstrued, I usually write things down on whatever pamphlet was handed out before the event.
I could never type a journal. I always write them in ink, partly because my handwriting is so terrible, it may as well be in cyrillic. Handwritten, the secrets in my journal are safe from others, sometimes indecipherable even to myself just a few years later.
When I do type out my ideas, it’s because I need it fast. If I’ve got a story beginning to end in my head I will cancel anything to get straight to my laptop because otherwise key elements will escape from my brain between the time I’m going about my day and the time my fingers are typing it out.
Lately, I’m experimented with voice recognition like the DragonNaturallySpeaking iPhone app, and I’ll explain that in an upcoming post. I get a lot of use out of Simplenote on the go, but because typing on an iPhone presents hiccups, I dont ever bother with articles or conjunctions. Usually these notes result in lists of scattered nouns and verbs, to remind me of the original idea.
Reading about Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti and knowing JG Ballard only used a typewriter, made me think about getting one. Just to mix things up and see what kind of writing might result from the introduction of a new tool to deliver it.
When I have a rough idea I need time to stretch out, I create a file and type a loosely structured outline. I use TextEdit, Google Reader, MarsEdit, or something else, depending on how much time I have to type it, whether it is going on the blog or to an editor, and a bunch of other deciding factors. And Ommwriter is a dream come true for the book of essays I’m writing.
I’ve got this blog, a tumblr, a twitter, a posterous account. The choice I make over what goes where is based on similar kids of decision — whether it’s social, private, a first draft, etc. I also have a long file in Google Wave, I’m using as a project timeline.
When it comes to preserving facts, quotes, reference material, it’s just as much a matter of how this information is being used.
For a while, when I was working on a novel, I would cut out relevant articles and put them in labeled green folders in a wire sided cabinet on casters (again, really particular about colors for some reason.) I’m afraid the last time I filed something was about a year ago, as I read fewer and fewer print publications, and don’t print out articles as often as I did in the past. That’s not to say, I wouldn’t start doing it again if a new project called on it.
I use del.icio.us is spurts, either tagging several things a day or ignoring it for three months at a time, instead saving links in text files with full quotes.
Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap.
It’s also partly why I subscribe to as many blogs as I do. I can search for “Tiger Woods” and the results come from my little globe of blogs and publications I like, rather than, well, what happens when you search for “Tiger Woods” in Google.
I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough?
Robin at Snarkmarket commented:
[William Gibson] said it’s like dipping a finger into the zeitgeist. It this river roaring past, and you’re just taking its temperature. The reason to go for scale—to subscribe to 700 feeds, not just 70—is to increase the chance of weird combinations, of unexpected collisions that reveal something new & interesting. To pile it all into your brain and wait for interesting things to happen, not necessarily on the conscious level! Warren Ellis talks about this too: about throwing it all in the brain-pot and letting mysterious things happen
And it’s not just the odd combinations that result; it’s essential for trend spotting. When all of a sudden everyone is talking about Rodarte, not just the fashion bloggers, but the design bloggers, even the boy bloggers, well, then you know it’s happened: it’s tipped.
Farhad Manjoo once wrote:
RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That’s how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you’ve got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don’t want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It’s like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read.
But…it’s not email. It’s not directed at you. You don’t have to read it all or respond to any of it.
Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian’s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it.
Since I don’t have much time to read blogs during the day, I usually glance at Google Reader and star whatever looks interesting for reading later. At the end of the day, I go through whatever I starred, unstar a bunch of things that at second glance doesn’t seem interesting, and read what is left.
The best thing about Google Reader is it is so multi-use. The sharing and liking fuction isn’t really as well used as it could be, but the potential is there. If I had really thought about the question, I might have listed Zach Seward’s shared items as the best new blog this year, since he seems to read just about everything and leaves insightful notes.
This is really just what works for me. Having the information stored and searchable matters more to me more than seeing the full design of a blog or coming across it in a serendipitous way. Although, I really get what Michael Surtees has pointed out about wanting to read blogs at the original sites. Even if I already subscribe, I definitely go the URLS of my favorite sites a few times a week, whether to click on the archives, check out the comments or just view them in a more aesthetically pleasing format.
And I understand I’m in the minority here, but I really don’t like Twitter as a link aggregator. I wish more people used it for the epigrammatic rather than an arrow to elsewhere. Yeah, I miss what you had for breakfast, ok? Your “must read article on architecture” bit.ly link may be my “already saw it on Metafilter three weeks ago, and six other blogs.” For the most part, bloggers title posts relevant to the post, but there’s not much space on Twitter to explain what the link is about. I might use it more if there were sites where you could search your friends’ feeds. Again, I’d much rather search just my friends for “Tiger Woods” than all of twitter.
The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control.
Google Reader just makes my life a lot easier and if there were only one
thing I’d ask of it, it would be an auto import to Instapaper.
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