Hello, fellow Emacs enthusiasts.
My name is Edmund Jorgensen.
I'm a software engineer by day,
but by night I love to write novels,
and I lean on Emacs heavily
for both of these activities.
Today, I would like to talk to you about how Emacs,
specifically with Org mode,
has helped me manage some of the practical
difficulties of writing long-form prose,
novels in my case,
and I'd like to get at this by talking about how
another, much more famous novelist managed
some of those same difficulties in a way
that makes me suspect he might well use Emacs
and Org mode himself
if he were still alive and writing today.
This talk will probably be
of the most interest to listeners
who either already write long-form prose in Emacs
or are considering doing so,
but I think that anyone
with an interest in literature or Emacs
will find something to take away.
So let's get to it.
Here's a picture of a man lying on a bed,
writing something on an index card.
If we didn't know any better,
we might think that he was just jotting down
a recipe for beef stew or something like that.
But in fact, this is not just any old man.
This is Vladimir Nabokov, one of the most
celebrated novelists of the 20th century,
and he's not jotting down
a recipe for beef stew in this picture.
He's actually hard at work here,
composing a classic of English literature
on an index card.
That's how he wrote all his novels, in fact,
on index cards.
I don't mean that he just took notes on these cards
or wrote outlines on them.
He did both of those things as well,
but he also wrote the actual prose of his novels,
word by word, sentence by sentence, on index cards.
Let's see what that looked like at scale.
This box you see here,
full of groups of bundled cards,
is what a novel in progress looked like for Nabokov.
If you squint, you can see that these cards
were from the composition of Lolita,
probably his most famous novel.
So why did he write novels on index cards?
It's not necessarily an obvious choice.
Yes, sadly, Emacs wasn't available to him at the time,
but most writers in his day,
if they weren't using typewriters,
which were available,
were using notebooks or loose-leaf sheets
or something like that.
Not these tiny little index cards.
But Nabokov loved index cards.
He swore by them because they represented
an elegant solution
to three of the most pressing practical problems
that every novelist faces.
Writing a good novel
is artistically difficult, of course.
You have to write something interesting
with a good story,
something that people want to read.
But writing any novel at all,
whether it's good or bad,
is brutally, practically difficult.
You're hacking something like 100,000 words
into unified shape over a long period of time,
months or years.
There are organizational challenges
inherent in that process,
and each writer needs practical techniques
to manage those challenges.
The most basic challenge, of course, is that,
unless you're trying to bring back
the Homeric Bard tradition
of reciting books from memory in firelit halls,
you need to actually set down
those 100,000 words on some medium.
In Nabokov's case, index cards worked fine for this.
A little cramped, maybe, but workable.
Secondly, as you're writing,
you're bound to think of little but important things
about the story that you want to record.
I'm not talking here about big thematic notes
or research that can go in a separate document,
but smaller, more contextual notes
that belong right along the prose that they refer to.
These might be reminders, like,
"Remember to clean up this sentence,"
or questions for yourself
to consider during rewrites, like,
"Why does Shirley feel this way here?"
Nabokov recorded these notes
in the margins of his cards or on the backs.
Paper, in general, is great for this kind of
intertextual note-taking.
That's not particular to index cards.
But what Nabokov really loved about index cards
was how they solved the novelist's
third and most difficult practical problem,
which is imposing some kind of structure
on this mountain of words.
To have any hope of wrangling a novel into being,
you need some way to break it down
into parts, chapters, scenes, snatches of dialogue.
You need some kind of higher-level outline
that you can read, navigate, and rearrange
as you consider and reconsider your story.
You need structure.
Index cards gave Nabokov a really powerful way
to impose this structure
because they created small, independent
chunks of prose
that he could bundle together into groups,
like we saw in the box.
This let him navigate his novel in progress quickly.
He could just flip through those bundles,
bundle by bundle, instead of card by card.
He could also impose on
and modify the structure of his novel
just by shuffling those bundles around.
So that's why Nabokov loved index cards
for writing novels.
Now I'd love to talk about
why I love Org mode so much for writing novels
and how it helps me tackle those same challenges.
The first practical challenge,
recording your words on some medium,
is pretty simple.
Org mode is a part of Emacs,
a text editor, so you can just type in your text.
We're not going to spend any more time on that.
For the second practical challenge,
recording small intertextual notes,
Org mode offers comments, like this one here.
The comment, "maybe I need to say which store?",
with the leading pound sign there.
I think that comments are generally
underappreciated outside of coding.
When writing fiction, for example,
I love that Org mode lets me keep these comments
close to the prose they refer to.
I can see right here that I'm talking about
saying which store in this first line,
"One day, Bob went to the store."
I get to keep these things close to
the prose they refer to
without ever having to worry that
they'll accidentally be exported to a reader.
That's great.
So let's talk about how Org Mode handles the third
and most brutal challenge of all, which is structure.
Here we've taken the same text
and we've imposed some structure on it.
Like index cards,
this is where Org mode really shines.
Org mode extends outline mode,
which is built around the concept of header lines,
with different levels denoted by
different numbers of leading asterisks (`*`).
Personally, I tend to use top line headers
as chapters and second line headers as scenes.
You can see that here, where chapter one says
"Bob and Shirley meet."
Here's a scene, "Bob goes to the store."
And here below is chapter two, yet unwritten,
where Bob goes to work.
Pretty exciting. Since Org mode supports folding,
I can read quickly through a summary of my novel
at either the chapter or the scene level
just by flipping through different levels of
visibility, just like Nabokov could flip through
different bundles of cards.
So here's the chapter level.
I can see at a chapter level,
"Bob and Shirley meet", "Bob goes to work."
And then I can get one level more specific
and see the various scenes in the chapter
at the second header level.
And I can, if I want,
I can go all the way back to the prose level.
And just like Nabokov shuffling
his index cards around,
I can move scenes around as logical units.
Let's say, for example,
that we wanted to move Bob's thoughts about life,
which are down here, up further.
Well, I can grab "Bob thinks about life,"
and I can move it up or down as a logical unit.
But Org mode offers some even more powerful tricks
for structuring and navigating your novel,
beyond what even index cards can do.
For example, you can use tags
on your scene headings. You can see these here.
They're the prominent colon separated words
on the header lines.
In this case, I'm using `bob` and `shirley`.
These tags can represent characters
who appear in the scene,
which is what I'm doing here,
or locations in which the scenes occur,
or plot lines that the scenes further,
really anything that you want.
And you can then use Org mode's sparse view features
to query a set of tags and trim your novel down to
a subset of related scenes.
For example, let's say we want to filter down to
only the scenes in which Shirley appears.
This could allow us to read quickly through
just a subset of the prose,
the prose that referred to Shirley in some way.
Maybe we want to do that
to check continuity for her character,
or make sure that her character develops
along a compelling arc,
or even just to get a sense
of how much airtime she gets in the novel.
Thanks for listening to this whirlwind exploration
of some of the practical challenges of writing
novels and other long-form prose,
and how Org mode can help tackle them.
I'd like to leave you with a couple takeaways
and next steps for those who are interested.
First, if you're writing a novel
or other long-form prose,
or even considering doing so,
take a look at Org mode,
especially if you're already familiar with Emacs.
It won't solve the artistic problem
of writing an interesting book for you,
not even with a ChatGPT plugin,
but it's a fantastic tool for managing
some of the practical challenges
that come with hacking 100,000 words into shape
over the months or years that that process takes.
Second, if you're interested in learning more
about some of the advanced features of Org mode
and how they can help in this process,
I wrote a long blog post about my difficulties
writing a novel with 13 interconnected subplots,
and how Emacs and Org mode saved it from imploding.
I'll put a link here below. [ewj.io/emacs]
Thanks for listening, and Emacs on!