It occurred to me just the other day that I’ve been working at being creative in a small way for more than 20 years now. In that time I’ve created hundreds of characters, thousands of story ideas, more thousands of conversational and situational snippets, and an impossibly large amount of interconnecting material that joins all of this… stuff… together into a fictional place I call The Wisdomverse.
In all that time, I have also been hunting for the perfect creativity companion — by which I mean, the one piece of software that will make working with all of this material easy and intuitive, that will support me as I move around, edit, append, and link characters, places and ideas together into a huge mess a cohesive framework.
Unfortunately, in more than 20 years of downloading and testing application after application, I still have a yearning chasm where ‘perfect creative application’ should be.
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Whenever I think about it, I usually decide that I can’t be the only person in the world who is still looking and still waiting for the software package that will make the process of being creative across a very large collection of interconnected material easy and enjoyable.
When Wikis first appeared on the scene, I thought the day had finally arrived. I was so excited by the idea, in fact, that I built my own reasonably featured Wiki engine from the ground up [1]. It did most of the things advanced Wiki engines of the time did, with a few more tricky bits and pieces added in purely for my benefit, and for a time I was happy.
Until.
Until I realised how difficult it quickly becomes to maintain formatted text when you have to rely on text-embedded markup to provide that formatting. Editing extended content becomes a nightmare, particularly because you only have the limited editing tools available in the standard text area of your favourite Internet Browser.
Of course, there are projects out there that attempt to bring some basic wordprocessing power to web browsers [2], but to say that these match even a small part of the power of your favourite wordprocessor would be to say something silly like, oh I don’t know, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” which is the kind of dangerous nonsense that is made up by people who like to stab other people with pens.
What am I really looking for? I mean, really?
After having played for many, many hours with many, many applications, including a number of ones that have been built purely to support creative writing projects [3], it turns out that what I want is probably quite a simple idea. Or, at least, the joining together of two existing ideas, which might or might not be simple.
I want wordprocessing mixed with Wiki’ing. That’s what I want.
I want to be able to create text, headlines, footnotes, endnotes, tables, insert images, check spelling, and everything else besides.
I also want to be able to create new, related content rapidly, with linking automatically handled. Throw in a panel that shows me all the documents the current document links to, and all the documents that link to the current document and now we’re talking! Add automatic versioning of every save, so that even if I mess up and delete something I shouldn’t have, I can still reclaim it, and you will see me weep with gratitude. Add the ability to tag every document into meaningful tag groups and I will do things that will blow your mind-hole. Seriously.
I don’t even care if this is an online app or a desktop app. Actually, strike that, I probably care just a little bit that it would be better as a desktop app, since what do I do when my internet connection isn’t working; and then throw away that concern because I don’t really care after all.
In fact, if you took an excellent online wordprocessor like Google Docs, and you added these Wiki abilities to it, that’s pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. That’s it. That’s my perfect creativity companion! Or, perhaps the wordprocessing features of an application like PBWiki will mature to encompass some of the more advanced features on which I constantly rely [4]?
The long wait
Of course, this isn’t going to happen today, and probably won’t happen tomorrow. But surely, someday, someone who works at a senior level in the development team of an online or desktop wordprocessor application will have this same idea? It seems like such a natural solution for so many different content-generation project types, let alone purely creative projects.
Still, I’ve been waiting more than 20 years so far; I only hope I won’t be waiting 20 more before I find that perfect [5] thing.
| 1. | It was called WisdomWiki, and it lived for a while over on my old blog, planetthoughtful.org. |
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| 2. | TincyMCE is one such project. |
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| 3. | e.g. Dramatica. |
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| 4. | Footnotes, anyone? |
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| 5. | Or, heck, even almost-perfect… |
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I read it, I hear you, I feel the pain and fustration, I sense the unlimited potential, I gotta feel that what your asking for is not unreasonable – it has huge practical application – heck I’d use it if you provided me with my usual on-call M for Midnight tech support…. dangnabit!
I have the answer – the solution is…. hire someone to do it for you. Like once you’ve written something, they then go through it and insert all the links n’stuff and techybobbly thingos so your happy. Didn’t they do that before… you know.. before computers n’stuff… indexing and the like. Or you could you know… use different coloured highlighter pens… but like not on the monitor.. on printouts and then put them into a ring folder and store them out of the way…. or something. I’ve forgotten what you wanted now… an application that kept time… like a watch, you should get a watch… or better still a fob watch with a long dangly chain and an inscription on the front that reads something like ‘fully indexed, cross checked and good to go’ and you could set it for local time and then have a coupla other fob watchs dangling off the same chain set for other times. Cool.
And you could call yourself a ‘minutman’ and cart about with your fobs a really big arse clipboard with your writings attached to it and a satchel slung over a shoulder full of hihglighter pens and fuji apples. And when you think of like a character from your ‘Wisdom City’ series you could mark it down on your clipboard… and the clipboard has a little solar powered light on it for night indexing.
And when people ask you to recall something you can whisper under your breath in urgent tones “wiki wiki wiki” until they leave you well alone. Man! You the ‘wiki’ – your memory and your ability to recall things is wikiness – your brain is the application your seeking. Done.
Invoice will be emailed over shortly Midnight.