Hypercompendia

When I woke up this morning I found myself once again anxious to get back into the program.  Stumbling down the hall towards the kitchen to make my husband’s lunch (yes, we’re that frugal; think of the $5/day saved, not to mention a sandwich the way he likes it and fruit, and turning one stupid light off to save $25 a year doesn’t measure up), uh, where was I…..

…oh yes, I hang a left into the living room and click on the laptop.  I can do this by feel so my eyes don’t necessarily need to be open.  This way, once I’ve kissed my husband out the door I can sit down and start playing immediately.

One thing I particularly like about the Storyspace program is the additional need to manipulate the text boxes apart from just working with typing words strung into a story.  Even the visual, the mapview (or chart or outline; tree, to me, is dopey, at least for this project), becomes a part of the writing process that once you get used to it, tells a story in itself as to the complication and depth of the narrative.  An easier way of putting it:  How exciting is it to wave even a hardcopy bunch of pages around versus colored plot points all laid out and connected.

Think the sight of a half-inch of text pages is fulfilling?  Try this: drop them on the floor from a height of six feet (all right, I’m really reaching here).  Pick them back up at random and read.  Then try to make sense of it.

Back to the main point here, and that is that where I used to play Freecell or some such idiot game as think time or not-think-at-all time, the Storyspace environment fulfills that need to tinker, to be actively doing something creative even when the creativity does not filter into language use and storytelling.   I noticed this same level of excitement–above story–in putting together a poem in Movie Maker.  Coordinating visuals, audio, and story wasn’t just a bunch of creative ideas, but required the manipulation of technical software direction in order to make the whole thing work.  Storyspace does this for me.  It’s like playing a game while you write.

So now I don’t have to go to Freecell or Solitaire to be productive (using that loosely here) while my mind is taken with the thought process of story prior to it becoming a tangible typed text.