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[[!meta title="Why Nabokov would use Org-Mode if he were writing today"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2023 Edmund Jorgensen"]]
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# Why Nabokov would use Org-Mode if he were writing today
Edmund Jorgensen (he/him) - <https://tomheon.com>, <mailto:ewj@inkwellandoften.com>
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I've written several novels in Emacs. One of them grew into a monster with a
baker's dozen twisty, interconnected subplots.
When I started to revise that novel, I had to use an outline to keep all the
subplots straight, but I found it nearly impossible to keep that external
outline consistent with the prose.
Finally I landed on a workflow using org-mode to keep the outline and the
prose together, which significantly reduced the burden of keeping the two
consistent as I moved and modified sections. I also found a way to use tags
and sparse views over them to enable quick read-throughs of subsets of the
book for continuity checks (which I plan to demo).
Later--long after finishing the book--I realized this process was essentially
the Emacs update to the writing process that Nabokov used: he wrote on index
cards that served as both prose and outline, so that he could move them around
(which he did incessantly).
There's something deeply beautiful about org-mode's refusal to treat structure
and prose as different things in a piece of writing--something I think Nabokov
would have appreciated, and something I definitely appreciate, because it
saved my novel.
About the speaker:
I'm Edmund Jorgensen, a software engineer by day and a writer by night, using
Emacs for both. When one of my novels threatened to collapse under the weight
of its own subplots, org-mode's powerful blending of structure and prose
rescued it. I'd like to show you how that worked, and how much of org-mode's
power for writing comes from its similarity to Nabokov's famous
index-card-based writing process.
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