At its best, my computer is not a distraction, but a place to work—a digital workshop. A text workshop, not so different from a carpenter’s workshop with its wood, chisels, drafting tables, power tools, planers, band saws, and jigsaws. In my digital workshop, many things are at hand.
Partly, I mean the storage—the hard drives and flash drives where I keep field notes, first drafts, projects in progress, publications, finished notes, video, film, maps, and photographs. Some of it comes from the computers, laptops, and iDevices I have used over the years: the tablets and readers. Much of it is the detritus accumulated over two decades as a student and then as an academic, stored in various folders. Mostly, I mean the tools. The tools of the word processors, screenwriting apps, mind-mapping apps, search tools, bibliographic managers, and search engines.
One of my favorite pieces of software is Eastgate System’s Tinderbox, which is, in many ways, a digital equivalent of an analogue notebook and a carpenter’s workshop and much more besides.
It’s a digital tool, and a place to work with text and to do things that were impossible before the digital age. To write, link, make maps, collect, edit, cut up, revise, reorder, outline, search, and much more. Mark Bernstein, the lead developer at Eastgate Systems, has offered regular updates for decades.
Tinderbox is a Swiss Army knife for notes, providing a single interface that suits the way I work.
It also has a powerful set of programming and automation tools that allow me to work with notes.
I think of it, the same way John McPhee thinks of his tools.
John McPhee, one of the most prolific writers of long-form creative non-fiction, has an article in The New Yorker about his writing process, which became part of his book Draft No. 4. McPhee tells the story of lying on a picnic table with all his notes, research, interviews, and everything else in manila envelopes, but he’s distraught because he didn’t know the structure. He says this is no way to write.
I agree with him, and indeed, structure is the hard part.
McPhee used to use analogue tools to find structure. But by the 1980s, he adopted a computer—specifically a dedicated word processor. Kedit, short for the Mansfield, Massachusetts-based company KEDIT, was a full-screen text editor. McPhee describes how he moved chunks of text around using custom-built text macros to code, split up, and bring back together text. It’s something I’ve duplicated for my own work.
For me, Tinderbox is my computer. A lot of writing is rewriting and revising, linking and connecting, making connections, and undertaking an archaeology of your own ideas and notes. Tinderbox is, for me, a powerful tool for that.
It’s the heart of my digital workshop.
Still, at times the computer is a place of distraction. There are times when I sit down with nothing but a pen and write longhand for an hour to see what comes out.
