From notes to finished piece

Here's one thing I've discovered while testing the OPML Editor over the past three or four months: writing in an outliner makes writing easier. That's why I think it's a great tool for students, and why I keep bugging my sister-in-law to try it out in her freshmen comp classes.

An outliner is the perfect note-taking tool. Thoughts just seem to flip right in there without much mediation between brain and words on the screen. It's kind of hard to process what that means unless you try it, so you should try it. It's free.

Then, once the notes are up there on the screen, they have these pleading eyes. They beg you to elaborate on them. Honestly, I can't tell you now many times I have started blunt little posts on my OPML blog, like "Saw the Pew survey on podcasting. I'm not buying it." Before I know it, I get this irresistible desire to make real sentences out of those little grunts because I know how easy it's going to be to flesh them out and publish them instantly.

Publishing feels not only quicker, but somehow closer because there's no uploading, just upstreaming, which doesn't transfer the whole file each time you make a change. And there's no separate process when you publish -- when you save your file on your computer it's saved online at the same time. Your words are out there on the internet, but all the while you're feeling it's all happening very locally (because it is).

The outline becomes the finished piece in an effortless way. It's not like the dreaded index cards from which you wrote your term paper, where the processes were completely separate. It's all part of the same process. It's more like the sketching that a painter does on a canvas, later to be painted over, than it is like a film director's storyboards, which need to be executed in an entirely different medium.