Cory Doctorow has six suggestions for writing amid the distractions of our time. I especially like this one:
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. . . . Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.Read it all:
Writing in the Age of Distraction (Locus Online, via Boing Boing)
comments: 14
"Oh, f***."
- Cory Doctorow, upon searching through his document for "TK" just after finishing his article Writing in the Age of Distraction.
He'd been using Control-S or Command-S to search, right? I know there's a joke here, Benjo, but I'm (at the moment!) dense and missing it.
(Thanks for using "***" — my mom reads my blog!)
A joke, maybe, but not necessarily a good one :-)
Doctorow notes that "'TK' appears in very few English words." What "TK" does appear in, though, is articles about using "TK" in one's writing.
In other words, after making the point about how uncumbersome it is to sort the incidental "tk"s from the unresearched facts, it ends up encumbering him quite a bit. Hence the asteristks.
Ah, now I get it (duh). Thank you for not berating me. : )
You're quite welcome.
On a more serious note: Daily Routines has compiled some writers' and artists' accounts of their working environments and routines. A fun way to kill a few hours.
(Most of the people on that site predated the internet; it's interesting to note how central the issue of staying away from the web browser is to the routines/struggles of those who've done most or all of their writing during the age of the internet.)
That site seems to be on everyone's mind. I like it a lot.
Yes, staying away from the browser is the issue. It's strange to think that I once led a life in which I did not "check my stuff" several times a day.
Hmm, ZX might never appear anywhere and are right beside each other on the keyboard. Whatever works, I know.
In a couple of months, I'm going to be sitting down to edit and put together a book so this tip is quite useful to me! Thanks.
This piece — What the TK? — explains it: TK = "tokum," i.e., more information to come. Deliberate misspelling, like dek and lede, not to mislead typesetters.
Now that makes more sense - "tokum".
And before we wrote on computers with string search functions, it makes even more sense. Still, I may use the "ZX" for my own purposes. Thanx!
Word verification is "headel" - looks like it should be on the list of made-up words somehow.
It seems to be a bird: the black-headel. That's about all I found out from Google.
Julia, your "ZX" reminds me that back in the day (using AppleWorks on an Apple //c), I added "@@@" to endnote numbers so that I could find them easily while writing and revising.
Editors put in stuff like this all the time and then forget to take it out.
As for browsing, I write on paper and type on an Alpha Neosmart. It's a lightweight text editor with no distractions, and you can connect it via a cable or an IR pod to your computer (Mac or PC). It runs 700 hours on 3 batteries (after more than a year, my batteries are 86 percent capacity). It's low-tech in appearance, clunky and not pretty, but handy as heck, and people ask me about it all the time when they see. Beats schlepping a laptop around when all you're doing is writing.
Extomin. Sounds like a new drug.
Diane, have you read Paul Ford's "Followup/Distraction" on the Neo?
That was interesting. I bought mine more for the portability, but I get why a connected computer takes you from kittens to peak oil.
Bacomaux. Tres francaise. (Sorry, too dark here to fiddle with accents and cedillas.)
Dear me, no wonder I'm not impressed by Doctorow's fiction: twenty minutes per day? Egad...
Post a Comment