Bart Westgeest

There are many programs for writing and editing texts and most are good for anybody and anything. Because basically they all do one thing – they let you create texts.

As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create texts as quickly and easy as possible. Quick because when you are finally getting some good ideas or when the words are coming to your mind faster than you can type,  you need a tool that reacts immediately. Your mind is occupied with trying to grab the ideas and impulses so you also want something that is fool-proof and not distracting.

After many thoughts and attempts I settled for the one obvious tool that does the job best: a plain text-editor.

Text it

A text editor is a small program that basically produces .txt files, which is just about the most bare and smallest kind of text-file you can produce. No different letter types or sizes, nice layout or  italics or bold, but just text, ready to be used everywhere you want. Because of the simple .txt format you can take it anywhere you like in the world of text-based software. Open it in your favourite word-processor and create the most beautiful layout you can think of or send it by email to your best friend who can read it instantly in the mail or open it in what ever software and operating system he or she might happen to use. Copy and past that long post into your blogging tool or create an archive of lightweight basic text files, future-proof.

Text files are very convenient to back-up as their small size guarantees the shortest possible uploading time to a backup service, be it on the web or on your memory key. It will take you very likely more than a lifetime to write 2GB of .txt files, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space anywhere.

But one of the main advantages is the quick response time of text editors. They open instantly and make my old computer react like a brand new top model. Keep a shortcut at hand and whenever an idea pops up write it down immediately and save it, either in a file of its own or keep a file open to gather related ideas.

Save it

Save your files naming them with the current date like yymmdd (for example: 100211) and you automatically create a diary or journal that is stored in the right order and with the exact date you had that brilliant idea.

When you consequently start a new file each day you can keep track of different versions by copying the lightweight .txt file of the day before in your new file and edit and save it.

Control it

In order to keep control over your growing archive of .txt files you can use a search-tool that you tweak to index your archive of .txt files only. In this way you will be able to search very fast and won’t get distracted by .mp3 files or house-cleaning schedules. To ease up the searching process I add tags to pieces of text that I think I might want to use or reread later. A tag like #(tag), as for example: #quote or #idea, doesn’t really work in the search-tools I used as they apparently don’t “read” the #-symbol. So I opted for tag-quote or tag-idea that is certainly indexed by all search tools.

Screenshot of the results of a search in my .txt files (using Tracker).

I put the tag on a new line and I add a few words that somehow describe the piece of text I am referring too as these words show up in my search results directly behind the tag.

Screenshot of a text editor with tabs (gedit)

Choose a text editor that supports tabs so you can open search results or other multiple files you are working on in the same window and quickly switch between them. These could for example be chapters of a book, a plot or character descriptions, quotes or articles. I keep always two tabs open; a todo list or notes file and a file with the tags I use so I can be consistent.

Screenshot of the my complete screen.

Most text editors have the F11 shortcut that will turn it into a full-screen productivity machine and with a default easy-for-the-eye background colour there will be no stopping you.

Well, I can’t see a reason anyway.

Conrad Busken Huet

This quote reminds me that writing in the first place is something you just want to do – and as such it shouldn’t be aimed directly at an audience. Liberty is available if you dare to let go of your always weary “Lizard Brain”, as Seth Godin calls  it – the part that is always weary about the consequences. The Dutch journalist and literature critic Busken Huet (1826 -1886) apparently did well in writing freely what he thought, but by publishing it he created many conflicts:

Zijn doel, als van ieder werkelijk schrijver – van de lyrische dichter tot de man van wetenschap toe – was zijn gedachten in een zo klaar, zo suggestief, zo adequaat mogelijke vorm uit te drukken waarbij het gelezen willen worden een secundaire vraag van zelfbesef en financiële noodzaak is.(…) Deze denkmoed, onafhankelijk, candide en wereldvreemd is de motor van alle veroveringen in het rijk van de geest en was ook de motor van Huets kritisch vermogen. Maar wie die gave bezit en wie er zo mee woekert als Huet gedaan heeft, moet afstand doen van het verlangen in ongestoorde vrede met zijn medemensen te leven.

bron: Jan Romein en Annie Romein-Verschoor, Erflaters van onze beschaving.
Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, Amsterdam 1977 page 728

My humble translation attempt:

“His aim, as that of any real writer – from the lyrical poet to the man of science – was to express his thoughts as clearly, as suggestive, as precise as possible, whereas the wish to be read is a secondary question of self-awareness and financial necessity. (…) This courage of thinking, independent, candid and otherwordly is the engine of all conquests in the spiritual world and was also the engine of Huet’s critical capabilities. But he who posses this gift and who makes it profitable as Huet has done, has to abandon the desire to live in undisturbed peace with his fellow human beings.”

Some people argue that there are too many easy distractions in our time. That we are seduced by an bombardment of entertainment on television, the internet and even in books and newspapers. Because of our acceptance of this mostly shallow entertainment we get less interested in more complicated issues, we don’t take the time to indulge into matters that take more than a minute to get into terms with.
The internet is to blaim, and commercialisation of just about everything around us.

I think that there is a great deal of truth in the argument, and yet I am unsure.

People have always looked for easy entertainment, from listening to the gossiping neighbour to reading cheap love- or supermanstories. The majority of people have always been oblivious to the more profound thoughts of their time.
The biggest change over the last decennia has been the growing accessibility of both the producing and receiving means of public information for a much larger age group. This means that we moved from a intellectual culture that was made by and aimed at persons of at least 25 years of age, to a culture where the participants are between 1 and 101 years old. It was for example not possible some 10 to 20 years ago to read thousands of articles, blogposts, comments and opinions by 12 to 20 year old people from all over the world.

Today’s technology makes every kind of information easily available to everybody and we can all ventilate our opinion in many ways. We are free to choose whatever tv-channel we want and we can read exactly what we want the truth to be in the many articles on the internet, not just what we are supposed to read or listen to.
The level of genuine interest in the more evolved and intelligent culture might still be the same, but it got company with the explosive growth of other interest groups.
Bookshops truly start selling to the masses, libraries change ideology, newspapers get even more shallow. Yes, but one could also say: The truth is coming out. We are what we are. Some of us read great literature, most of us read detective stories.
Should we worry about this or should we be happy that our real interest is visible now?
We have the choice to be critical, the freedom to make up our own mind, and make decisions about what we want to read, see or listen to.

Because that is what we need to do in our times of information overflow. We have to restrict ourselves to the things that really matter to us. A huge task indeed, as it is very easy to get seduced by unnecessary information, but what truly matters is available too, in large quantities. You just have to want to find it.

(Picture by Flickr user chuckyeager)

I made a change in my WordPress setup two days ago that I couldn’t undo and as a result this blog didn’t show up properly. I think I made WordPress make a change in the .htaccess file.
It was possible to reinstall the blog by visiting (…../blog/)wp-admin/install.php in my browser but since it wanted to create a new database it demanded for the old databases to be deleted first.
Luckily I have a plugin installed called Wordpress Database Backup that sends me a backup of the database every week. So I could delete the database, reinstall WordPress and reinstall the database again and everything was back to normal

I was happy with the Statement-theme by BlogOhBlog that I used, but decided at this unfortunate occasion to switch to this Igloo-theme from BizzArtic nevertheless as it seems to have many more options and I have good experiences with BizzArtic. I have not tweaked all things properly yet, but I hope to fix that soon.

The feedburner feed is a mess for example, as I can not access the old feedburner.com feed. Feedburner has been taken over by Google so now the feedburner address feedburner.com links to feedburner.google.com, where my feed unfortunately doesn’t show up in the list of feeds I own. So for now I ran the feedburner feed through feedburner, producing an interesting http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedburner/iILz link.

I think, honestly, that of all the things I wrote in the past, like diaries, short stories and poems, I only feel satisfied with about a handful of writings.
At the moment that would be perhaps 3 poems and 3 short stories. The older works are not necessarily that bad, but I don’t want them any more.
I don’t know what to think of this unsatisfied look upon everything else I did, it is just the way it is I suppose. I have become older so I prefer other things and I am more critical.
It just makes me wonder if this process of rejecting works from the past is something that will continue the rest of my life. Maybe.

The article “Litterære manifester for et nyt årti” in the Danish newspaper Informationen gives 9 manifestos of contemporary Danish writers containing their thoughts about literature in the new decennia that we just entered. As always the thoughts are personal and thereby very different from each other. Some don’t believe in manifestos while others write a nice little article with their thoughts.
One subject that is more often mentioned is the difference between the popular detective stories and the less commercial literary works. Most hope that the latter will survive the stream of very well marketed, and occasionally well written detective stories. This cry for support for the original, more personal literary works make it clear that the writers see a clear difference in value between the two kind of books. The literary works might not make the writer a lot of money (and maybe if they do than only after the writer’s death) but they do contribute to the more interesting and valuable part of literature.

(Thanks to Ian)

This thought was somewhere in between my notes. It is from not too long ago, but I actually can’t remember where I got the inspiration from. It must have been a blogpost somewhere.

Life has to be a selvfølge (something obvious, literally: following its self), one does things because one has to. Because it is needed to survive or because one can’t stop doing it anyway. Any other thing will cost too much energy and will be experienced as something that doesn’t really matter. Accepting this also means accepting ones role in life. One can’t become more than one is, but one should continue looking at, training and exploring ones self. A whole world lies inside. Many things become obvious when one discovers the beauty of living and being.

I’ll try to follow the advice. Distraction comes o so easy, all things seems to be interesting, worthwhile or even important. But deep inside of us our soul (or whatever it is) only asks for certain things. To be truly productive and valuable to yourself means concentrating on this voice.

As I added to the thought (probably sarcastically – but that can’t cover up the well meant intention): Good luck!

This post from 43folders.com contains a video with another interesting line of thoughts by Merlin Mann, who thinks about productivity, creativity and the caveats surrounding them.

Merlin presents his ideas in a popular way, fast and often funny, but he is serious and dedicated in trying to find out the truth about his subjects.

It is another attempt to define, and thereby better deal with, procrastination.

Here are some quotes I wrote down:

Procrastination happens when we don’t know what to do.

(You go look around to find out what you should do next.)

Sometimes you procrastinate because you feel you need to do something else for a while. But if so, then never forget who you are and what you want.

It’s important for creativity to read or do something even if you don’t know why you are doing it.
But sometimes you have to put your head down and work really hard.

Happiness is in the right balance of these two.

In his video Merlin explains that it is important to figure out who you are and to always keep that in mind. Procrastination can be o.k., but it should never lead you away from your own goal.

There are truly many more thoughts in the video including his well meant advice on how to protect yourself from certain forms of procrastination.

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Here’s another post I wrote about Merlin Mann’s ideas.

Hope Gate, Québec ca. 1871, by Louis-Prudent Vallée

There are many languages, many words. All spoken languages are prefect because they have been used for centuries.
But sometimes there is a word in a language that seems to be unknown in other languages.
I looked up the word prudent, as I didn’t know exactly how to define it.

According to thefreedictionary.com it is:

prudent
adj.

1. Wise in handling practical matters; exercising good judgment (sic) or common sense.
2. Careful in regard to one’s own interests; provident.
3. Careful about one’s conduct; circumspect.

There is a possibility at the bottom of the page to translate the word into another language. This can be helpful for those that speak a different native language.
But prudent is translated into Dutch as voorzichtig. That is definitely not right. Voorzichtig means careful, and this not in the sense mentioned in point 1, 2 or 3 above.

There is apparently no good translation of prudent. That’s probably why I didn’t really know it. It makes one wonder why the Dutch didn’t need a word covering this quality.

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P.S. I came to think of the word verstandig as a somewhat better translation. And indeed after a quick search I found that http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php chooses verstandig as the best option.

But http://online.ectaco.co.uk gives many options: voorzichtig, omzichtig, beleidvol, oordeelkundig, verstandig.