How to shift your writer’s block using free writing software

Trawling through my RSS reader late last night, I came across a note about NaNoWriMo, the annual National Novel Writing Month, which starts today and runs until the end of the month and aims to push reluctant writers into the deepest of ends, into writing an entire novel.

It’s a simple, but effective idea. Your NaNoWriMo mission is to knock out 50,000 words in 30 days. So set your daily and weekly word counts. Work out when to write. And you write. Anything. The trick to reaching such a high target in such a short time is not to worry about your precious words, plot, characterisations, whatever you’ve been taught in writing school. What’s important is to keep tapping on the keyboard. A month later, you’ve accumulated a huge mound of, ah, material. Maybe it’s not all bad. Yes, here and there: the basis for something better next time.

First, sharpen your pencil

Better creativity through software

Chicken and egg, form and function, structure and agency: when I’m writing, I’m pretty certain that in order to be creative, to make something new, I need an argument, a structure, first. Without a sound argument, staring at the screen, blinking in time with MS Word’s cursor, I’m struck by a vast, chin-stroking, procrastinatory, angsty agony. Blinks. Strokes chin. How to start?

Go figure, hippie permissives: for me, mapping out my arguments in geekish detail isn’t so much about control freakery, it’s more about providing the foundation for the spontaneity needed for playing around, for creative thinking.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an argument mapper called Rationale to do this. At first click, Rationale doesn’t give the impression of having much to do with creativity. It produces analytical argument maps. It’s about being critical, rational, inductive, deductive, logical, oh my.

Working with Rationale

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Rationale works by helping to break down an argument into its component parts. Its aim is to encourage critical thinking. As the argument’s unstated assumptions come more clearly into view, the argument becomes easier to evaluate. It’s a cinch then to hammer the weak spots and, oh yes, concentrate on awing the world with your awesome creativity etc.

So, how come it took Bill Gates five years to revamp his flagship bunch of code? Was it laziness? Procrastination? Perfectionism? Did Bill just mislay his copy of Getting Things Done?

One straight-forward answer is that in trying to compete against Apple and internet-based companies, in trying to anticipate whatever the future may throw at the PC, Microsoft ran into problems with Vista’s code. The software geeks made it too complex. Senior executives stepped in and refocused Vista. And shipping got delayed.
- Microsoft milks the cow one last time, Independent
- After delays, Microsoft in party mood for launch, SF Chronicle

Gates, not surprisingly, gives a positive spin to this. Five years is a worthwhile investment; it lays the deep foundation for incremental improvements down the line:

Well, we haven’t been idle. During that time, we had many Media Center releases, many Tablet releases, lots of things like desktop search. We had a security-oriented release called XP SP2. But, we also had to invest in the layering of the operating system, so that we could be more agile in the future, and have things at the higher layers, like the browser, release on an every-two-years, or even in some cases every-year-type basis, whereas the deep things like the scheduler, the file system, you don’t want to change those more than every three years or so, because they affect compatibility. So you want stability in those pieces. So we invested a lot in layering and security.
- Bill Gates, Q & A, Business Week Online