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The easiest illustration is on a personal level (what Platt calls an “individual trap”) where a short-term gain comes with long-term loss. Uses the term “social trap” to describe situations like a fish trap, where individuals, organizations, and societies get started in a direction that later proves unpleasant or lethal but difficult to back out of actions or inactions prompted by self-interest create long-range effects that are to almost no one’s interest. The idea of a social trap is simple enough. In 1973, John Platt published an article called “Social Traps” in American Psychologist. But if you’ve got $15 to spare, Scapple is a better investment than many alternatives. Should you buy it instead of groceries? No, probably not. It hasn’t been as revolutionary as Scrivener, but I have been able to put it to use beyond frivolous experimentation.
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Scapple supports this, letting me toss tidbits anywhere on the screen and, once I begin to see connections, shape those tidbits into something that becomes more and more cohesive. Different people, obviously, prepare for novels differently, but my initial work is sloppy-to an outsider, it might look like I write a bunch of unrelated things on index cards, shuffle them up, and pick five of them to give me a randomly generated premise.
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The flexibility of Scapple works in a similar way, allowing easy expanding and moving and reclassifying. This is a place where taking notes on a computer can simplify the process, because if I discover as the lecture goes on that something would do better indented farther, or moved back out, or expanded on, or cut and pasted somewhere else, it’s an easy fix. Is this mention of a study with conflicting results going to be a passing mention that should be another subpoint, or are we going to explore it in detail in its own right? And if it becomes its own point, should the first study’s authors’ rebuttal be noted in the margin back up there, or should it be included with this second study? One of the more difficult things about taking lecture notes can be connecting and ordering them in a way that will make most sense later. I wouldn’t say I’ve fallen in love with it yet, but it was certainly a useful process to map out my novel as the concept developed (I sometimes think of this prep work as a sort of skeletal first draft) and Scapple provided a flexible way to do that. What can I say about Scapple? I haven’t used it much beyond what’s above, so I can’t speak to/gush about it to the same extent I can Scrivener. The primary difference, of course, is that my marker notes couldn’t be rearranged, connected and disconnected and changed to a different color. I fell out of the habit, but working with Scapple reminds me a bit of that. I had a big pad of newsprint paper (something like this) and a pack of these multi-colored markers, and I’d sit on my dorm room floor, writing down different questions and answers about the project in different colors and orientations. Here’s the end result, zoomed out to show the whole thing:Īnd here’s a smaller section that’s actually legible:Ībout five years ago, I went through a phase of freeform brainstorming a little like this. I tested it out in the early stages of prep work for the novel I’m working on (the ghostless ghost story I mentioned a few months ago). There’s no built-in hierarchy at all, in fact-in Scapple, every note is equal, so you can connect them however you like. Scapple doesn’t force you to make connections, and it doesn’t expect you to start out with one central idea off of which everything else is branched. Literature and Latte describes it as a “freeform text editor” and explains, The basic premise: Scapple lets you put down ideas, make connections between them, shift them around, and more. Not so long ago, I decided to try out another program of theirs, Scapple. Last time, I talked/gushed about Literature and Latte’s application Scrivener.