The Commonplace Cloud

Nimbus II by Berndnaut Smilde

I love writing “by hand” (talk about a recursive phrase). I use my journals all the time, but I also use a grab bag of free services on the web to keep many of my “commonplace” notes.

Kelsey McKinney talks about how social sites like Pinterest are the descendants of commonplacing. Be sure to check out the article, which has pictures of commonplace books from one of my favorite places: the Harry Ransom Center! 

Saj Mathew over at The Millions talks about Tumblr as a Commonplace Book with a more in-depth look at the pros and cons of living in “an archival age.” As usual, I would argue with the hand-wringing tone of some of his concerns:  

“[W]e live in an archival age, in which memory has reached a point of near-irrelevance. With the right keyword, we can instantly recall any message, photo, or article instantly. That memory is never endangered by the specter of forgetting endangers memory more than ever.”

I think we go about our days remembering plenty, personal interactions and childhood experiences, for example. I would bet we keep a mental record of many more people, some we’ve only met on said social media. I don’t keep phone numbers in my long-term memory like I used to, but I have a collection of emails, web addresses and passwords. Our memory will change and adapt according to how we use it, but I hardly think it will wither away. It’s a surprisingly old argument, one that Socrates made against writing, as in writing by hand. David Malki over at Wondermark, points out that we wouldn’t even know about this opinion of his if someone (not Socrates of course) hadn’t written it down. 

But I digress! Social media sites can be a great way to commonplace. Actually, the ease of clipping, saving and sharing ideas, quotes and images has encouraged many people to commonplace without even knowing that it is a thing. Still, consciously using social sites to collect material for later use is a little different than using these media to curate your personal image for public consumption. Fortunately, as William S. Burroughs says:

“Everything is permitted.”

You can use these tools however you want. Here are some of the ways I commonplace on the cloud. 

I’m a highly visual person, so I use Pinterest to aggregate images for writing specific stories and for prompts. When I find an inspiring image on the web, I’ll pin it for later use. I follow other users who are busily collecting images that I find fascinating. It is also an excellent resource when searching for images on a particular topic. The open environment of sharing makes this a powerful tool of discovery both through searching and serendipity. I also use it for recipes. 

Evernote, while not exactly a social site, has the most diverse uses, and is really the core of my cloud commonplacing. It has powerful organizational tools like tagging, keyword searching and notebooks for sorting disparate information. I use it to collect quotes, notes, and research for this blog and for the fiction I write. I keep market research and copies of all my writing contracts here too. I have a list of books to read along with their local library call numbers. I’ll be adding a comprehensive index to all my journals here soon. Evernote works across all my devices so I can access or enter information at home, work, on my phone, or even my old iPod. 

I use Goodreads to keep track of the books I’ve read. I post very brief reviews/summaries, more to jog my own memory about the content of what I’ve read. That said I’m happy to socialize and meet people through these social tools.*

There are dozens of other places out there, Imagr, Instagram, Google+, Reddit, and new sites being built every day. Explore what they have to offer, but don't forget to consider the ways that you can best use them to your own purposes.

* Certainly, I have nothing against being social! I use Twitter sporadically for random thoughts and links, and Facebook mostly with people I’ve met in real life or know through writing. Of course the ease of socializing 24/7, is terribly dangerous to artistic productivity.

The Moment and the Memory of It

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Remember me? *

There is a lot written about living in the moment, why it’s good for you and how to do it. It’s all about paying attention, which is especially important advice for writers because paying attention is critical to building and honing the kind of deep insight we need to create meaningful characters and stories.

One uniquely modern dilemma is learning how to balance being in the moment with the urge to record it. There are so many nifty ways to record every moment of our lives, and so many cool devices that we carry around in our pockets to collect all these memories. There’s a kind of emotional logic to the idea that capturing these memories and uploading them to external memory containers like our computer’s hard drive, the cloud, or various social networks will be more stable then just trusting them to our own fickle wetware.

Our modern understanding of the brain in general, and memory in particular, is a vast and fascinating field. Currently, memory is understood to be largely a reconstruction of events built from experiences that are often melded with other information we’ve encountered. Check out "How Our Brains Make Memories" over at the Smithsonian.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laurate who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, talks here about how experience, memory and happiness are connected and how they are not.

Toni Morrison supports this idea of reconstructed memory in her excellent essay “Memory, Creation, and Writing” (PDF), when she talks about deliberately using her memories’ fungible nature when writing.

“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”

~ Toni Morrison

“Memory, Creation, and Writing” Thought Vol. 59, No. 235 (December 1984)

 I haven’t seen any studies about how our devices affect our memories yet, but I believe that when I’m involved with recording an event, it interferes with experiencing it. It turns whatever’s happening into a different experience, and therefore a different kind of memory. When we become too busy recording our existence for upload, we have less internalized material available to us when we need to create. This is important, because it’s our internalized experiences that are the raw material for good writing.

How hard is it to reconstruct some event if you didn’t fully experience it? How can you draw from it emotionally if you were reigning in your full emotional experience so that you could hold your device steady? When you take a picture or video of an event you have a different kind of record, a completely legitimate one – I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m writing this post from some moral high ground. I love my electronic devices and enjoy hanging around Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I too am guilty of “curating” my life.

But, as a writer, what I draw on when I create is my bank of experiential memories. On the times when I was entirely there in the moment. We don’t need to throw our devices into the bonfire, or cancel all our social accounts, just remember to balance your time with them. Remember that while our human memories may not be good at collecting the kind of photographic, factual data that a camera can, they are the best at collecting a different kind of truth. You are the most complex and mysterious recording device. The truth you tell from your remembered experiences is the truth of you, and it’s what readers want. 

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

* I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. If I were to make one this year, it would be to have a couple blog posts in the can for busy family times like the holidays. For the past two weeks, I kept trying to get in front of a screen to write a post, but with Christmas gifts like Pandemic and Star Trek Catan as well as a family trip, it obviously didn’t happen. Fun was had by all and the break, I think, was a good thing. Now, back to work.