My first post on this board - hope this is OK.
Within the last month or so I’ve discovered The One True Way to outline using Devonthink.
At least it’s The One True Way for anyone suffering my peculiar delusions. Your mileage may vary and the method works fine in Obsidian or even iA Writer.
I start with “fact” notes. One or two sentences about people, places, and things. For instance, there’s a cabin in the woods. That’s enough for the fact note for now.
There should be no narrative information in the fact notes.
Somewhere along the line I’ll start jotting down narrative notes. Scene cards, basically. These go in a group/folder for my outline. These narrative notes need to be in the order those thoughts will appear in the MS.
For instance, I decide my book will start on a dark and stormy night. The scene will be in the cabin in the woods. I write a narrative note about what’s happening and I transclude my fact note about the cabin. Every fact involved with chapter 1 will be transcluded into my chapter 1 narrative note, one note per fact.
The chapter 1 narrative note ends up being a dossier covering the chapter.
Later, in chapter 12, I realize the cabin needs to be sitting on an unstable Confederate nitre cache. No worries. Since the cabin is important to chapter 12 it’s transcluded into the chapter 12 narrative note. Adding that tidbit about the nitre in chapter 12, courtesy the magic of transclusion, also becomes part of my chapter 1 notes. When I rewrite chapter 1 the nitre in chapter 12 won’t be forgotten.
One way writers block strikes is when I start feeling desperate to dump all the important stuff right now. When I feel that way, I return to my transcluded outline in Devonthink. I dump everything I need, one fact per fact note, one scene per narrative note with relevant facts transcluded.
That satisfies my hyper-OCD need to tell all without gumming up the works in my MS.
I’ve been doing this for a couple of months and it’s working well for me. Hierarchical outlines don’t work well for me. A “flat” sequence of scene cards in the order of presentation in the final work is much better. For me, anyway.
Obviously, there is no One True Way to write. Please forgive my exuberance.
Nice place y’all have here. I found it with a search for writers using Mellel, which is discussed in another thread in your Cool Workflows area. Thanks in advance for the hospitality!
I need ideas!
(done) ~ (worked on). I have Keyboard Maestro macros to cycle those prefixes.