so at work I'm doing web development and i've found that i can really only think about things by using a legal pad, drawing things out, and then moving to the computer.
and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.
i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)
note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.
but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.
so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.
so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:
to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.
i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.
So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.
in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).
all right. enough willful self-indulgence.
current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.
