Writing in bits and pieces

I am currently trying out the writing software Scrivener, to see if it is a better system for a type of writing which might fit how I think. It has a lot of very seductive aspects, such as several good ways to visualise chapters, a lot of ways to introduce meta-data which can also be used to outline or summarize the work, different tags and connections. But after years of handling text as massive monumental pieces, like a scroll growing mainly in one direction, it is very hard to wrap my head around another writing paradigm.

This is of course why I am doing it.

I have always felt that  my thinking happens in leaps and bounds, that my thinking is like a puzzle where nothing fits at first. I have a piece here and a piece there, but not really the whole picture. Then I start seeing how it needs to be organised, and I keep moving it around - a piece of sky there, a bit of fence here, until I have it more or less filled into a whole picture. Using Scrivener I realised that while this may be the metaphor for my thought process, it is not the metaphor of my writing process.

When I write, I visualise not a puzzle, but a river. Everything flows into the force of the direction I am moving in. Little thoughts and ideas flow into the writing and get caught up and carried along, until it's grown wide and heavy, powerful and overwhelming. Sometimes it falls into the ocean in a dramatic waterfall, splendid and catching rainbows, sometimes it works its way painfully through a muddy delta, but on it struggles until its conclusion.

Those are two very different processes, and while it may be due to the force of habit, it feels like Word is the river, while Scrivener is the puzzle.

At the same time, writing is a puzzle even when it feels like a river. I pause and put in references, I search for books, I write in qoutes. I use systems to organise the reference process - if I managed to figure out how to do that more efficiently in Scrivener, I might be over a big hurdle. All of this makes me feel old, tired and lazy when I can't get the different technology to work for me. Still, my understanding of well designed technology is that it makes me feel smarter, not more stupid. The technology I adore eases my everyday life, it doesn't make it harder. It fits in smoothly, without abrasions, because if I have to fiddle around every time I use it, I can do the processes quicker and easier by hand. On a piece of paper. With some scissors and glue.

So, no conclusion, just frustration. I still have a lot of other systems to mess around with - the perfect one may be out there.