I’m one of those people to whom ideas come less than fully-formed — not so much as “ah ha!” moments as “why the hell am I thinking about that?” moments. It takes some work for me to wrangle a collection of images, ideas, themes, characters, jokes and bits of dialogue into something resembling a story. So I tend to adhere to Twyla Tharp’s concept of Boxes – creating a single repository for all the crap that’s on my mind when I’m searching for a story. I began with literal boxes – comic book longboxes, in fact, because I’m a nerd – but soon found them impractical (I travel too much, and coffee shops frown on people who walk in with a big-ass box full of paper and dump it on their floor. Plus, y’know, all that paper makes me feel guilty.)
So I started looking for software that could be one of those boxes – an application that would allow me to collect all of that stuff, dump it out on a virtual bed and look at it this way and that — all the while adding notes and sketches, nudging it all around until it began resembling a coherent thing.
I looked at Tinderbox first, mostly because the ever helpful AmberV had written about it so passionately in this forum. I also liked the idea that Tinderbox has a Way. I’m a sucker for Ways.
It took me an hour to understand that the Tinderbox Way is, in fact, Way more complex than I need it to be — and that AmberV is Way smarter than I am. Alas.
So I looked at Curio, which I soon found to be — like Scrivener — that rare breed of software that had exactly the features I was looking for, and several features that I would have been looking for, had I been more imaginative.
I liked that I could add notes, drawings, film clips, whatever to a space, and slide them around at will. I liked that, if a space got too messy or off-point, I could create another space within the same project and start clean (but still attached). I especially liked that I could take a PDF of a draft in progress, spread it out across several spaces in an organized way, and futz with it in chunks. And I loved that I could do it all in any way I wanted, utterly free-form… until I no longer wanted to be free form.
I relate the whole process to David Gray’s excellent ideas about napkin-sketching: when you’re drawing a picture, start with the big stuff first, then add the little stuff until you have a picture of, say, an elephant. Curio is my way of drawing an elephant that I’m not even sure is an elephant when I start – it allows me to start really, really big; it allows me to add the small stuff; and because it keeps track of everything for me, it makes it really easy for me to begin imposing some structure when it comes time.
Make sense? I’m not sure I gave you an actual workflow there, but I hope this inspired you to see how you might use Curio in your own way.
Some side notes:
Talk of index cards in this forum helped me see that Curio really was a modern, massively powerful version of the late, lamented ThreeByFive. Which led me to an attempt to turn text notes in Curio into index cards. Couldn’t do it, so I pestered Curio’s developer – the curiously one-named George, the Cher of Mac software – to add ThreeByFive functionality to Curio. Hugh and others chimed in, and it seems like George might actually do it! Woot, I say! If you’re a Curio user and want to add to the thread linked above, please do so. The L&L forum has a lot of people with very good ideas, and I’m sure your input would be invaluable (and it can’t hurt to bump the idea back to the top).
Curio is indeed a little pricey – it’s not at the Tinderbox level, but it’s up there. Be aware that there are some hidden, slippery-slope type costs as well. It won’t run on an old Mac – it needs Intel, and it needs RAM. It also led me to purchase a Bamboo pad, because I wanted to be able to sketch with some degree of control. So be forewarned.
Two recent developments have made Curio massively useable for me (again, beware that slippery slope!): The LiveScribe Pulse Pen + Evernote integration in Curio = an ability to put actual handwritten notebook pages into my Curio box. I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this has been.
@DanielParadise: I heard that Macbreak Weekly thing on Curio too. I’m glad that Leo made Curio a pick, and was very happy to hear him mention Scrivener. I totally disagree with his thought, though, that Curio might somehow replace Scrivener. Neither program quite works the way Leo (bless him) thinks they do. They are, instead, perfect complements.
