Scrivener and Iterated Learning

Nick Lennert, a poet who performed at Augie’s open mic last Tuesday, read from a thick notebook with his own handwriting in it. But often enough, in London basements and Nottingham jazz clubs, you’ll see poets stroking iPhones or propping laptops under their chins like fiddles. 

Speakers in the Alley, https://www.facebook.com/augiesopenmic

Chances are if you got into poetry in the late ‘90s like Nick and I did you’re likely to have done it in the ‘old-fashioned’ way by putting pen to paper. Question is though, did that habit continue? And do people who get into poetry now-a-days start on Word Processors? Writing by hand didn’t pan out for me due to one thing. Scrivener. 

Way back when, in late 2009 I was obsessed with Don Paterson. I remember reading his ‘Dark Art’ and ‘Lyric Principle’ on the tram in Kraków and for me his word was law. So when he recommended a piece of editing software as ‘the best in the galaxy’ I went ahead and bought it. And even though I’ve stopped regularly reading Paterson (for reasons I won’t go into here) I still use Scrivener. 

Now, having read The First Word I’ve started to think that Scrivener gives you something writing by hand can’t. The nerdgasms from casting the web of metadata aside, the ability to instantly reorganise and search everything you’ve put into a project aside, to split screens, to sort and sift, it’s the ‘snapshot’ feature that gets the most use. 

'Iterations' or Snapshots are listed at the top right.

Snapshot basically makes an instant copy of the document as is and saves it. So it’s ‘save as’ but instant and at the touch of a button. This essentially means that, at least for me, a single emergent text will go through anything from 300 to 1,000 iterations (though the number of versions is infinite). I’m not arguing that word processing is better than writing by hand but it certainly changes things. Because, I believe, with this kind of power, to forget and recall at will, you get what Simon Kirby—the Edinburgh Professor of Evolutionary Linguistics—calls iterated learning. 

I believe the slow transformation of simple imitation, the essential model of production and induction that we each know from the early formation of our idiolect, our own language, our ‘voice’ is what Scrivener helps the poet to imitate and so go with the grain of language. If language is, as Kirby in his inaugural lecture ventures to describe it as, “an organism whose environment is our brains” then Scrivener is suited in-so-far as it’s as capacious as language, constructed—as it is—from another language, albeit computational.  

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If you’re curious about evolutionary linguistics and iterated learning best to take a look at the ‘ReplicatedTypo’ blog and maybe have a gander at this dissertation. Also, obviously, if you tolerated my gushing enthusiasm sufficiently to take away an interest in Scrivener, visit their site and consider purchasing.