(337) Writing tools

On this week’s show, Matt and Lisa meet Tris Oaten to discuss whether writing tools actually matter—and the answer might surprise you. While musicians have interfaces like Ableton and sequencers that fundamentally reshape their creative output, Tris argues that writers’ real tools are invisible: patterns of thought, environmental context, and the mental associations we build with certain albums or spaces. It’s a fascinating reframe that challenges how we think about creative tools entirely.

The conversation tackles why we’re still trapped by document formats designed in the 1980s, with passionate disagreements about whether Microsoft Word is an accessibility triumph or “awful garbage” that tricks you into formatting instead of writing. They explore alternatives like Typst and markdown, debate whether templates liberate or constrain creativity, and question why there aren’t more playful, experimental writing tools when musicians have entire ecosystems designed to spark new ideas.

But the real insight comes when they dig into the relationship between consumption and creation. Tris claims that writer’s block is actually reader’s block—your creative output depends entirely on rich inputs. They discuss techniques for breaking out of established thought patterns, from Bowie’s cut-up method to the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, and challenge the romanticization of suffering in creative work. Why do we assume writing should be painful when it could be joyful? It’s a conversation that moves between deeply practical advice and genuinely thought-provoking questions about the nature of creativity itself.

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Transcript automatically created by Descript:

Lisa: Welcomed episode 337 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Matt Ballantine, and Tris Oaten.

Well, we’re back here again, Matt and I, and we’re welcoming Tris onto this week’s episode. And Matt, how has your week-ish been? What’s been going on for you?

Matt: My week-ish. So well a couple of weekends ago now. ’cause time flies like that. I had the delight of taking my mother to Venice for a long weekend, celebrate her 80th birthday, just her and me and it was amazing.

It’s the third time I’ve been to Venice and I don’t think it’s a place you can tire of, or maybe I’m just getting old, I don’t know. But it’s just, I mean, it’s, it’s utterly surreal. It’s completely beautiful. It’s touristy as hell in many ways, but there’s bits of it. And we were staying in a bit with just a little bit off the tourist trail, which is quite nice.

We went out to Lido, see the beach, which is totally different. We went out to Murano to look at very overpriced glass stuff that was nice. And then just pood around walking. Pops into a few museums, went to the Peggy Guggenheim Institute, which is a amazing modern art gallery , so that was great. And then I’ve been back, I’m taking taking a role at work with one of our bigger clients, which is, quite exciting. I’m also gearing up though for going on jury service in a week and a bit. And so trying to be able to fit what I can in before that.

And it’s, it’s a strange thing, jury service. It’s the second time I’ll have done it. And it does mean that you basically had to put your life on hold for unspecified period of possibly up to two weeks, but maybe more or maybe significantly less. Who knows? So I’ll be pood along to a crown court near you soon to be able to do my civic duty.

So that’ll be that. And apart from that, I’m, I think I’m losing my voice and I know that my mother is actually she’s fine, but has come down with COVID again. So I do wonder with my voice starting to fade out, whether I’m also gonna have COVID to delay on top of everything else, which would be great.

Amusing fun. That,

Lisa: that sounds like if that is the case, will that mean you won’t be able to do the jury service, I suppose.

Matt: I think you might need to be actually technically dead to not be able to take part in jury service, but we’ll, we’ll see. They’re quite strange. Right.

Lisa: Okay.

Matt: Which, you know. Fair enough.

But yeah, there we go. How about you, Lisa? What have you been up to?

Lisa: So the last week or two has been quite manic. My end. The famous book that we’ve talked about on a few episodes has finally gone out into the wild. Friend of the podcast and according to his post on LinkedIn, friend of me, Chris King, hi Chris, found a copy in actual Waterstones in Leeds, which is very exciting ’cause I’ve not yet been into a physical bookshop to find it.

And I wasn’t expecting it to be actually physically available for some reason. So That’s lovely. But yes, the last couple of weeks has been quite a lot of, I feel like I’ve become a bit of a content factory with it all. Because. As somebody else said, like once it’s, once it’s published, that’s just the beginning of all of the rest of the stuff that comes with.

So that’s been keeping me busy except it’s not been that that’s keeping me the busiest. What I’ve actually been doing recently is swapping SharePoint for PowerPoint. So the last few weeks I’ve been working with an Irish client who are doing some innovation training for a bunch of businesses in Ireland, and they’ve got several different suppliers and several different speakers.

And I’ve been trying to pull everything together into like a more cohesive templates and trying to make things a bit more keep things consistent for people. So I’ve swapped SharePoint for PowerPoint, which is a lovely change. But I did have a conversation again this afternoon about SharePoint, so I can’t.

I can’t escape it.

Matt: I think it’s worth pointing out at this point, my long held view that doing PowerPoint isn’t real work. But you know,

Lisa: what is real work? Is it something that you do, that you get paid for?

Matt: PowerPoint is the one of those things that you can just, I mean, so much time can be plowed into it. I guess putting the sort of work that you are into it is helps people to avoid that so they can actually focus on the actual bits that matter rather than working out whether 18 point or 22 point font is the right thing and whether it should be Crif or San Crif because you’ve gone through all of that for them.

Lisa: Exactly. That’s exactly why I’m there. I’m helping ease their cognitive burden by. Bringing it all into one template. So I might be losing my sanity, but hopefully everyone else is keeping theirs.

Matt: And how from a obviously your, you are specialist subject now around accessibility of content. How does PowerPoint fare these days, and especially how does some of those automated parts of PowerPoint enable you to be able to do things automatically?

So

Lisa: some of it is very good and some of it, the automated stuff that it spits out in the first place is very bad. The, the built in accessibility checkers in PowerPoint are great. All of the suggested color palettes when they create this, I, I love a smart art graphic ’cause if, if you use it, if you create a smart art graphic, it’s built off a list of bullets.

So it’s already starting with a list of structured content. So it’s not a li it’s not 17 text boxes on a page that have got lots of lines between them that you’d have to try and describe. But the color contrast is often not right. It often suggests white text on a yellow background, which is hard to read for everyone.

So yes, some things are really good. Once you’ve created, once you’ve done the work, making all the page layouts and templates, do what you need to, it actually makes it a lot easier to make a, a consistent experience and something that’s usable. But it takes some fiddling and also. Once you’ve made a template, when you actually start using it in earnest, you start finding it.

Actually, that’s not a great color scheme. Or, oh, I, I didn’t make the text. Not autofit the placeholders. And you can get really nerdy about it, but it’s all right. And using the built-in checkers makes it better. But anyway, that’s enough about my content creation. Speaking of content factories, Tris, welcome to the show.

What have you been up to?

Tris: I’ve actually had an extremely busy time. I returned on Saturday from Paris. Mm-hmm. I was tending the Euro rust. Conference, which is a programming two day programming conference on the rust programming language.

And I was a speaker on day two. I discovered one week before I, I knew I was gonna be a speaker for a couple of months beforehand, but I discovered one week before that I was on the main stage and I made the mistake of looking at a photo of how big the main stage is and how big the audience, the auditorium is.

And so I was a little daunted. I, I’ve spoken at conferences before, but none quite this large. So it was quite, it was quite an exciting time and I, of course was writing the talk right up until the very moment I ascended the stairs to the stage.

Lisa: Amazing. I don’t think that’s judging by the lateness that I’ve had some of the slides through for the, the training sessions that I’ve been sorting out recently.

That is, you are not alone doing that.

Tris: No, it is, it is an old writer’s adage, I believe. I believe this quote is by Bill Condo, C-O-N-D-O-N who I think was a reporter. I, I, I, I’m afraid. I don’t know exactly what, what he wrote about. No piece of writing is ever finished. It is only due.

Lisa: Oh, I love that.

Tris: And I think about that every day of my life because nothing that I nothing. I’m never satisfied with anything that I’ve written, but it is due and I must finish working on it because the next thing needs to be worked on.

Matt: I can hear though, the voice of Marcus, John, Henry Brown saying, yes, but it is due at least six weeks before you do your presentation because then you have to practice.

Tris: Now, that is absolutely the secret. Lisa, I’m sure perhaps you have spoken on this very pod podcast about the importance of practice like that, I think is how I, I have had the modest success that I have on my YouTube channel is that I practice and no one else in my field, which started out with programming practices.

They just start screen sharing and breathe into their microphone. And I don’t blame them particularly, you know, they, they, it’s, it’s not even that They don’t know any better. It is not their skillset. Yeah. It sounds exactly up your street. This is something you would teach. Sure. Well,

Lisa: it’s something that both Matt and I learned about.

So a few weeks ago I went to Bavaria to the Marcus, John Henry Brown Speaky Summit, which was a few days staying in a lodge. Well, st a a, a small conference in a lodge. We weren’t all staying in the lodge on a Bavarian hillside talking about being better speakers. And I went to it for a few reasons.

The latest reason was that Matt went last year and said it was the best thing he ever did. Marcus has also been on the podcast previously, and I found him terrifying because of how good he was at using the microphone and how he used his voice. His, his awareness of how he speaks and his presence, I just found it a bit intimidating.

So, and I’ve also seen him at other events and conferences and yeah, one of the biggest takeaways of it is no one just turns up and wings it on the day, even if you are tweaking it beforehand, even if you are changing it or enhancing it because something’s come up practice and it, it’s showing respect for your audience and it means that you are panicking less because you know what you’re talking about.

Tris: Absolutely. Would I, I have some thoughts about my own video process that might be relevant here. If with your permission I’ll talk about that. So I You, you’re absolutely right. The, the, the audience, the respect for the audience. That practicing gives you are giving up your time so that it can be multiplied however many times the audience is.

If you have a hundred people in the audience, every hour you spend is 100 hours, you have saved everyone else in that that room. Absolutely. And of course on YouTube, the numbers are inflated insanely, you know, tens of thousands. If I’m particularly lucky with the video and I do not I run, I I run a very accessible, I try to run a very accessible YouTube channel.

I don’t have sound effects. I don’t have animations, I don’t have motion I don’t have screaming and memes and things like that, what I have. But unfortunately, all those things are good for engagement. Keep people interested and keep them, keep them watching the video, which of course is why everyone uses them.

So I only have one thing, and that is a tight script. That is well. Practiced. I suppose that is two things. Perhaps. I’ve got these two things, and so that’s all I can do to keep people engaged, but it, I think, makes a very satisfactory piece of content, piece of art, piece of and a video. And the practice is the most important thing.

On the conference day for, I, I skipped like three hours in the morning of the conference because I was pacing my hotel room, speaking my script over and over and over again, and making fixes. Yeah,

Lisa: and I think there’s also something, what you were saying about your channel being accessible. It’s also understanding your script is written to your audience.

We talk a lot about plain language. And plain language is the, the language your audience understands the first time they hear it. So it might not be the, the language that everybody understands the first time they hear it, but if you know who it is you’re speaking to they will understand it and you explain the terms that are needed and you give the time and the space and.

I think, I mean, I’m not quite your audience, I’m not a programmer. I was able to pick up some, know, some knowledge from your channel and also realize that I’m definitely never gonna be a developer, but I did find it very approachable and something that I appreciate the lack of Bellis and whistles.

So thank you for that.

Tris: Well, not at all, not at all. And only half of my, of my videos are, are programmed. The other half is like my random hyper fixations that I’m desperately trying to monetize.

Lisa: That feels like a perfect time to get into the, the main part of this. So, shall we get on with it?

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Matt: So Lisa said to me that she thought Trish and I should be able to be brought together to be able to do something, talk about stuff. ’cause we had lots of things in common on the podcast. And that’s, that’s all well and good, but you need to kind of some sort of theme. ’cause otherwise it’s just random old blokes talking on the internet.

Let’s be honest. There’s quite enough of that. And look where it’s got us. So to give a bit of context for this conversation and many places that we could go completely coincidentally, I got involved in a conversation on Blue Sky earlier today. The track called Paul Risin, who I, I think I only really know from social media, but have conversations with every so often he posted something about how he saw within the world of music.

That there were tools to be able to help people create music and sequence music and explore music and experiment with music. And so tools like Ableton and tools like oh, I gave a long list of various things and I’m looking around me in my desk at, at, at home here, and I’m surrounded by the things.

I’ve got an professional MPC studio thing. I’ve got a keyboard over there. I’ve got a ridiculously luxurious thing called a hap ax that enables me to be able to interact in music in completely new ways. I’ve got a digital saxophone as well as a couple of normal saxophones, all sorts of things there.

And what’s really interesting is although the, the, the instruments that I play through these devices are pretty much the same things all the time, or some of them digital, some of ’em analog. The, the thing that I use to access them, the, the interface that I use has a massive impact on what comes out in the end.

So if I use something that is like a saxophone to be able to interact with the, the digital instruments, it gives me a very different sorts of field of reference to play with. And if I use a traditional music keyboard or if I use drum pads, or if I use the hap acts, which is a sequencer that’s got like loads and loads of buttons, it’s a bit of a, a grid and you can, it’s very visual and it’s, I, I love it.

It’s an amazing thing. And what I wondered from that and in conversation with Paul was whether well does the thing that you are writing on make a difference in that kind of way? Does it make a difference if you write in a notepad to, if you write on a an old fashioned typewriter to, if you write in se four than if you write using Microsoft Word, if you write using another piece of software that maybe wasn’t intended for writing?

I’m not sure that answered the question that Paul was asking, to be honest. But it’s an interesting starting point about what do we have to be able to help us go beyond just the, I guess just the, the recording of the words. What are the tools in this amazing digital age that we have, all these sorts of things available to us that might.

Enable us to be able to extend our creativity with words without it just being ask chat GP for some stuff, which would seem to be the tech industry’s answer to that question at the moment. Anyway, long rambling intro. What do you reckon?

Tris: It’s a fascinating framework to think about writing the, the interface.

You know, playing something on a piano is very different to playing it on a, on a trumpet say. I, I think everybody would agree with that. And of course we’re all using exactly the same instrument, the keyboard, and even different kinds of keyboards. Up to typewriters, I don’t think makes a difference. I would go as far as saying maybe even using a pen doesn’t make much of a difference.

I acknowledge that I don’t. Tend to hand write things. This, this is a long habit since I was 11 or 12 when my teacher said, tr we’ve given handwriting a really good shot, haven’t we? Please use a computer. And then my dyslexia was managed a little better. I think our. As writers, our interfaces are patterns of thought, not physical patterns, not not physical interfaces.

Our interfaces are mental, our interfaces are temporal and context based. Am I writing in Starbucks? Am I writing early morning before the kids have woken up? Am I writing in a very loud environment or when I’m tired or in a group situation? I think all of these would much more drastically change what I am writing than just the instrument that is under my fingers or in my hand.

I am reminded of a quote by Paul Graham because I wrote it because I, I did it in my talk last week, but it sounds super, super. Super, super relevant. Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y Combinator, but a, a very greatly respected computer scientist in his own right before then. He said the programming languages are not, are not just technologies, but patterns of thought.

And I suppose one could also extend that to natural languages. They’re not just ways of communicating, but they’re patterns of thought. So I think that these mental interfaces could be where we might find the writer’s interface compared to where the, where the musician’s interface is. The instrument. I would, I have more thoughts, but I will pass it back to you two.

Lisa: That’s made me, I love that about the patterns of thought. There’s been a few linked experiences recently that I think has changed the rhythm of mine a little bit. So it started off, I think the first thing was when Cy Cornwell, also a friend of the podcast on the WB 40 Album Club a couple of weeks ago, brought Kay Tempest new album.

And Kay is an incredible spoken word artist. And the rap, the, the, the rhythms, the way he speaks, the way he duets with a, a younger version of himself, it, it blew me away a bit. And I’ve been listening to that album basically nonstop since. And then I went with Paul Armstrong from who’s also a friend of the show, T of TBD fame.

And we went to a spoken word, immersive experience, which had the, the spoken word performer and poet Miss Yankee, who spoke at the TBD conference last year, and I think she’s performed a few times on the agenda. And she was performing with some other fantastic performers on a stage. And it’s that kind of spoken word, cadence again.

And it, I found that with, with Kay’s voice in my head and Miss Yankee’s voice in my head. The other day I posted a video, which almost had a bit of a spoken word cadence to it. I, I hate seeing myself on video and it’s something that I’ve been trying to get better at and more comfortable at doing, but I did find myself thinking about sentences in a different rhythm or pattern.

So I love what you’re saying there. And I think also for me, when I write, I tend to listen to the same albums over and over on repeat. So years ago it was Neil Sissy Riga’s Mouth Moods

Tris: love Neil SISs Riga. Yeah. My goodness.

Lisa: I, I. But now I can’t listen to any of the tracks on that song without thinking that I should be writing, like I should be getting deep into writing.

I find that it really became like the backdrop to my, to my work for a few years. So I kind of move on every, I don’t know, six months or so, maybe. It depends on the thing. What, when you’re thinking about the surroundings, I have to control the surroundings to be a, even if it’s just headphones on with no noise, a lot of the time I put headphones on, it’s almost like the equivalent of sticking my finger in my fingers, in my ears, and if I’ve got my headphones on, I can get stuff done.

Tris: Right. Yeah. That you’ve, you’ve pavlov yourself into into, into writing. When, when when listening to that, I wonder if Pavlov thought of his dogs when he heard a bell.

Do you ever wonder about that? Yeah,

Matt: so I, this idea about us being in patterns of thought, a couple of things that I’ve been working on recently. The, my book project, which is hopefully coming to an end soon. But it will

Lisa: never finish. It’ll just get to the next

Matt: phase. I know. Yeah, I know, I know.

With a due date on it. Oh no, there’s a due date, 30th of November. So that’s all good. No. So the, the, the, the two stories that spring to mind about this idea of patterns of thought are two things about intentional ways of using randomness to help people be able to break out of their established patterns of thought.

One is the cut up technique, which is something that people like David Bowie, William Burrows used and literally taking some text, chopping it into small bits, throwing it up into the air, and then creating lyrics, or in Burrow’s case, entire novels from whatever is left on the, on the floor. And then also a thing that was kind of invented by the the surrealist in the twenties called Exquisite Corpse which is, you might remember it as a childhood game, which is where you take a piece of paper, fold it.

And so you end up with panels that you can only see the top panel and then people either draw a picture and then they’re left with just the, the lines to attach the next bit and the next bit and the next bit or that you use it doing using text is the other way that you can do this. And so what you end up with is a number of people contributing and collaborating to create a shared piece of art where they don’t know what the others have created.

And again, you get this, it’s again similar to the kind of cut up thing. And the thing I find really interesting about that, and maybe feeds more also into the, into the, the thing about writing is that I think a lot of the time people feel that those kind of techniques are cheating. ’cause they seem in some ways too easy.

And often the results of it can be a little bit weird, which is a separate problem. But that actually we have so much associated in. The, the world of creating with it being about a, an act of sufferance, about it being something that should be painful and tortuous. You know, van Gogh held up, held up as the, the archetype of the tortured artist.

And unless you chopped your own ears off, then you’re not trying hard enough. And maybe, maybe one of the reasons why there aren’t tools like Ableton for the, the world of writing is because nobody feels that that’s what you should do with writing, because it should be hard.

Tris: There is assumption, some truth in that.

I think very like the, it’s possible that it should be hard, not necessarily for dogmatic reasons, but perhaps because the struggle is. The work, wrestling with the ideas that are on the page in front of you. I’ve, I’ve I’ve read a marvelous book called writing to Learn by William Insa. And in, in there he presents a very, very, very good thesis of focusing your thoughts through the medium of words on the page in a structure, in a cogent argument, and then the act of drafting that sharpens up the concepts and, and so forth.

I mean, you’re, you’re both writing books, you know, just what I’m, just, what I’m talking about. Like, it’s, it’s very easy to write a long book. It’s extremely difficult to write a short book. One of the, one of the clear examples of this is that I’m sure you, in, in, you will have exper, you’ll have found some of, what am I saying?

I’m sure you will have come across some of the PKM books such as GTD, getting Things Done by David Allen, an enormous Goliath of a book. It is perhaps four times longer than it needs to be. Not that it is not a good book, but the first two chapters are really where, where the, where the good stuff lies. And Atomic Habits is another one.

And various other things. These were all very large books and there’s good stuff in there, but the most impressive book I read recently was a very, very, very small book. On note taking called a System for Writing by Bob Doto. It is available DM free because I bullied him into making it DRM free.

Originally, he just had it on Kindle. Bob, if you’re listening, thanks so much. And it is so short. It is obvious that the author understands exactly what is important to write about and nothing about what is irrelevant. And this struggle is obvious that he has had, because what is given to us, just like practicing a talk, is only the essence, just what the reader needs to know.

Lisa: Tri, you said PKM. What does that mean?

Tris: Ah, that is personal knowledge management. One of the nightmare deep dives that I don’t recommend any of your listeners research and look up, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Do not learn about PKM or kerning or any of these other things. I’m of course kidding. Personal knowledge management, task management, note taking.

All of these were under the umbrella of PKM and it is a subject of my interest because as a writer I have an increasingly large body of work that I somehow need to externalize onto the page and keep referenced and hyperlinked and available for me to look back on. Because I can’t keep it all in my brain

Lisa: on the tools front.

Something that I’ve not used before, but I do know some other writers have used it. There’s a thing called Scrivener, which is like a, a proprietary thing that appears to be a combination of tools from mapping stuff out with the kind of notes and mood, not mood, mood boards, but storyboarding. And it makes it easier to look at chapters and to be able to flit around in the structure if you are writing quite a lot of things or if you’re writing one big thing.

But it’s not something I’ve used myself when I’m writing. I tend to, I’ve got a, a messy combination of a random notes app on my phone that just takes a couple of ideas. Or I, I tend to use Word, I’m really boring, but I do use Word because I like using headings. I like them being able to navigate between the headings.

I like structuring my content. Clearly it’s accessible to the reader, but it helps me when I’m writing because my head, my headings become what comes next. I’ve tried Google Docs and it’s, it’s okay for a blog post or a throwaway thing, but I do like full on word. If you wanna get right into things,

Tris: awful garbage tools for people who don’t know better, and I don’t mean that as an insult.

The, you mentioned earlier, if I may call back to your discussion about presentation and accessibility and theming, there is a sharp difference between writing the content. In a presentation or in a, in a document and fiddling around with how that content looks. I spoke with a lawyer friend of mine recently.

I’m hoping to try and get her to start a podcast because she’s my friend, and therefore, when you solve that equation, it means I’m talking to them about starting a podcast, and she says that 80% of her negotiation with the other client’s, lawyers are about presentation of the contract, not the words in the contract, and she hates it.

And I greatly sympathize, and I think that happens to us all the time. And Lisa, you must stop using Microsoft Word immediately because if you were to have an out of body experience and watch yourself, right, you would be horrified at the amount of time that you think you are writing, but you are in fact fiddling with formatting and, and who would blame you.

You look at the interface of Microsoft Word, what is covering the interface? It’s covered with presentation options.

Lisa: If you’ve got your template set up right in the first place, you just need to write and you can format it afterwards. I, that, that is the spirit. I love the fact that you can apply things consistently throughout.

You can change things with one click. If you use it properly and you understand how it all works, you can get your footnotes and your ed notes and you can, you can put it all in and tie it up together into a nice, neat package. It does take, but mm-hmm. If you are not using all the features in it then I can see you can end up fiddling in the margins and you can end up fiddling with the formatting.

But I do think that’s a different, different phase.

Tris: Yes, you, you’re, of course, you’re right and I’m, I’m, I should have known better than to think that you would’ve fall fallen into the trap that mere mortals, such as I would, if I were using Microsoft Word, I wouldn’t.

Lisa: You could take word or PowerPoint away from my cold dead fingers.

Tris: Hmm, interesting. We are going to talk about markdown momentarily. Oh, go. I hate markdown.

Lisa: I hate markdown. I hate wikis. It’s normal formatting that’s been made difficult for people that think like developers.

Matt: Interesting. The thing, there’s a, but the thing with this is really I find fascinating. We’re in 2025.

I first used a word processor probably in about 1982, and although the user interface around them has. Change dramatically. The outputs of those things has pretty much not changed in 45 years. And there’s an issue there, which is that if you create content in PowerPoint, if you create content in Microsoft Word, unless you are absolutely fastidious with the use of the formatting tools in Word and not at all with PowerPoint, the minute you try to look on it on a device that doesn’t have a screen shape like a PC screen, it all goes technically to tits because it doesn’t suit with the way in which a mobile phone screen operates, or the a, maybe a tablet screen operates with it being in portrait format.

And the A Word document is aimed at being in. Portrait format and yet doesn’t scale necessarily to be able to deal with the mobile phone. And then it’s stuck into a PDF. So it can be a locked document in your, you know, legal contract thing. And then there’s no use to man or beast because it’s just, and that we haven’t actually moved on from what are essentially analogies to printed documents.

We’ve got Word document, which is basically a typewritten a four or letter format thing. And we’ve got a PowerPoint deck, which is essentially a 35 millimeter slide that is projected on the wall. And everything else has never been able to get some sort of traction to be able to become useful. So we don’t, you know, I, I, I get your reservations about Wikis and markdown, Lisa, but that’s the route that we should be heading down because we’re stuck with these formats that also constrain how we think.

You know, it is well known about how PowerPoint is able to be able to constrain thinking. There’s the, the the famous Tuft pamphlet about how it caused one of the space shuttles to crash because people were thinking in terms of bullet points rather than thinking about in terms of the messages they were trying to get across for I

Tris: love Tuft work.

If you were to go and please excuse the self-promotion to oatman.com, Oatman with zero you will see that I am using Tufts. Typography on my blog. I do not update the blog anymore, but I’m extremely proud of how I’ve wrangled Tuft’s design language into in, into that I have a halfway house between Markdown and Microsoft products.

If you are interested, Lisa,

Lisa: maybe

Tris: it the, when I was at university, we had to write all of our our coursework and, and so forth using latex, which is spel latex, which is like postscript an awful punishment for those who those who want to. Make their their documents. And as a student, it was a complete catastrophe.

I had to learn EMAX in order to use it. A double punishment for the the, the young programmer. There is a modern version that it takes inspiration from. Donald Knuth late Tech, but brings it up to date. This is called Types. Have you heard of types?

Lisa: I don’t think so.

Tris: It is extremely, it is, it has only just really come out and it is the learn the lessons of latex, which is don’t make a true and complete programming language that happens to be able to make PDFs.

That’s a bad idea, but it is a, a type setting a very lightweight type setting, heavier than markdown. Lighter than latex, and it’s extremely modern. And you make your, you make your template using, using some extremely, like, simpler than HTML using using a simple, some simple rules, you know, what font you want and so forth.

And then you crack on with just writing with some, some lightweight stuff. The, the reason I’m so keen, and I’m, I’m offering this option to you and your listeners to check it out, is that I’m certain there is such a huge gain in productivity that can be got in making templates. You’ve told us this, Lisa, this is a very important part of part of the process.

I, I, I take that to an unusual extreme, which is if I am touching the mouse, I am slowing myself down. Now I, you please excuse me. That is of course a very programmer thing to say, but I’m now a writer, not a programmer. I, I spend all my days writing, not, not programming. And I think this, this idea that absolutely comes from the programming world of like the, the Uber hacker clicking away and never using a mouse.

I think that is the extremely applicable to the writing world is that the mouse is sort of where you are. You are never typing on a mouse. If we’re talking about tools and interfaces that are designed for certain things, the mouse doesn’t get anything done. From my point of view as a writer now, I, I in a, in a presentation, there are boxes to be drawn and layouts to be made, but not much really.

Lisa: You don’t need to draw a box if you’ve got placeholders in there. ’cause you set up your templates with appropriate placeholders.

Tris: Exactly. So actually you should have done a small amount of, of setup there and like, you know, clicking around and, and doing, doing so forth, the rest of the day should be judged by how much typing and thinking and research and so forth is, is happening.

So the more, the more you just spend doing that and the less fiddling around you do, the more productive as far as I am concerned. That is how I look at my as how as how I look at my days. And so a product like Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, imagine such a product that was designed for templating right from the start and had two, these two distinct sort of phases.

You had the, this template building process, I’m talking about types now, and then using the template and instead of blurring those with an interface that has all kinds of boxes and stuff to click on, you had these two, these two. Two separate phases. It’s like the analogy, I’m sure you know, you, you and your, your listeners will know this, like bringing the marble into the studio is a separate step than carving it.

You know, that, that old analogy writers often talk about free writing or exploratory writing, getting as many, hammering as many words as possible. Stephen King often talks about this and then editing it later. Hemingway very famously said write drunk, edit sober. And I think for the same reasons.

Matt: So I, I get all of that in terms of being able to create consistency.

But what about the other extreme? Because. I do think we run risk of, of actually any generation runs risk that they think that pervading technology is how humans work and therefore impose the worldview of the current pervading technology onto people. And then it constrained us. And we saw, you know, the, the, in the 1920s, I was looking at some stuff recently, some very early infographics from a German artist name of him.

I can’t remember books over there somewhere. But in the 1920s there was a, a picture of the human body. And in the human body it was all represented as mechanical machines within the body because that was the pervading technology at the time. It was steam engines in the early ev e evolution of electric motors.

And, and that’s how they were using metaphor to be able to explain how people’s bodies and brains were. Now, of course, it’s complete nonsense. That’s nothing like the way in which a, a human body works in the same way that using metaphors of. Processing units and random access memory and all the rest is complete nonsense and actually has nothing to do with the way in which human brains work.

And so taking something to, to your point, Lisa, about the, you know, the, the, the struggles with things like markup that they, they’re trying to impose structure and order onto things can be helpful. Sometimes structure an order can be a creative creative tool in its own right. But what about completely unbounded, unstructured stuff?

What about the ability to be able to, like my desk in front of me here at the moment have mess? So much of what goes into to computers tends to have to have order and structure because that’s the way the computer wants it. Or sorry, that’s the way the computer programmer wants it. Rather than being able to have the ability to just create mess.

And maybe that’s what we need sometimes for creative process.

Lisa: My process for mess. Well, my, my creative tool set also includes not what TRI says, but pens are important. I’ve got tombo pens, which one end is a brush pen, and one end is like a really nice flowing felt tip that doesn’t bleed through pages like Sharpies do.

I use Dotty paper in my notepads, and I’ve always got a pad to hand, so I might be doodling to try. And if I doodle, it means I’ve, I’ll remember I’m processing stuff when someone’s talking to me. And there’s a process which I think I originally learned in design and technology at school. You know, and, and I do.

I I think it’s a. It’s still a good way of going about things. But you know, when you are kind of like a, you’re in the very first stages of ideation. It might be a spider diagram or a mind map or just a load of words on a page, which either is in my Dotty paper or it’s on a mirror board, or it’s with post-it notes that you then group and shape and you start off with going broad and wide and then start grouping things.

You start high, okay, let’s, let’s explore these ideas. These ones work, these ones don’t. I’m just gonna take these four forward or these two forward, and then you develop it and go a bit deeper. Like I’ve got, I’ve got some persistent notes on my phone, which, ideas that come to me, particularly if we have had a drink or like, so sometimes a couple of times a year we go away with a big bunch of nerds to go and play some games in Darbyshire.

I’ve got a, a note in my phone of game ideas, which over the years has evolved and it’s massive. And I think one or two of them have actually made it off the note into a bigger thing. But I think the mess, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta let the mess out and then you can’t, but you can’t take all of it forward ’cause otherwise you end up losing your mind.

So picking the things that work and putting them, whether it’s, you know, I’ve also got a sty on my phone, which I do actually use. I’ve technically got a sty on my laptop, but I very rarely use that now. I used to use it for note taking when I was out and about, and I’d use one note. Hi, Microsoft. You know, I’m, I’m a big fan still, but actually I found that using a pen and a bit of paper is generally better ’cause I’m not really gonna be using those.

I I’m not a professional sketch noer who’s gonna be digitizing those pictures to, to, to write up about stuff or anything that’s beyond my own needs. But yeah, that’s how I do miss also looking around my desk.

Tris: I think the, the capture part is extremely important. The ability to get all of the, the disparate ideas down in, in whatever way you, you like. I have a a remarkable tablet, which is an a simple E Ink sketchy tablet for exactly what you have said, Lisa, we’ve got the same, same idea there. Like if I’m talking to someone, I’ve got a pen in my hand.

It just happens to be a digital pen. I find it works, it works much nicer with much nicer than a laptop. Like if I, especially if I’m like in a, like an interview situation where I’m sitting across from someone like, it, it, it’s, even if the person trusts that, I’m not like scrolling Reddit. If you see me with a pen in my hand and writing, not only can you kind of see what I’m doing, but I’m certainly not scrolling.

Reddit, the, the capture process is, is so, so important. The, these as creatives, we’ve got two main inputs to our, to our brains. The, I Matt, I think earlier you were talking about like ideation and brainstorming and cutups, like the ways of, ways of making, ways of getting gen, generating new ideas.

Did you mention Writer’s Block? I wrote down Writer’s Block. Was was that one of the topics you touched on?

Apologies. It reminded me of Writer’s Block, and I’ve written down something that I believe very strongly. Writer’s Block is caused by readers block. Like the inputs to my system are the things that I’m consuming. What I’m reading games, I’m playing films, I’m watching people, I’m talking to experiences I’m having in the world.

Like if I were to shut myself off, I would eventually run out of those that, that raw material that is coming in and inputs like that, which in the PKM world, we often call literature. As a catchall liter literature notes is one half. The other half are ideas that I have as I I, because I wrote about it in a video.

I have the quote memorized, you’ll excuse me. Martha Graham, perhaps Marsha, I, I forget exactly which the founder of Modern American Dance said that there is a, a, a quickening that will only exist in you once in the whole world. And if you don’t act on it, it will be lost. The, the, the river will wash past and, and you will never have, have expressed it.

And so it’s not up to us whether or not the thing we’re thinking of is good or not, or the thing we’re writing is good or not. That’s not us to judge that it is our, our job only to make the thing. And then. Other people in history can be the judge of that. And so the capture process, the note taking process is so vital because how many things do we forget a day?

Some of those things I often worry might have been useful, and so I, I had this capture process just like Lisa said, like spider diagrams, note like lots and lots of this. This is all capture. And then processing it into what is good. Then you can consciously throw away stuff that I feel a lot more comfortable about, like distilling it down, distilling the thoughts down into what is good and what is bad, not what I happen to have forgotten and what I happen to have remembered.

That sounds very dangerous. Capture super important.

Lisa: So that was quite the conversation. I’m so pleased I managed to get you two together because I think even as we were going there. I wasn’t quite sure where we were going next, but I feel like there’s been a really lovely thread as we’ve been talking to each other and thinking about how we learn and document and write and process things and create things.

But, oh, what a, what a joy. I always say that these are interesting conversations, mainly because talking to people is interesting in itself, but love this. So what is happening next? What are you up to in the next week or so? Matt, what’s going on for you?

Matt: So alongside the day job. I am going to go to the freeze art fair on Saturday, which ooh, I’m gonna be taking my youngest is doing his GCSE art there, had the chance very fortuitously against some free tickets to it, so that would be interesting.

And I am continuing to do the exercise of throwing away that Trish was just talking about there as Nick and I continue to be able to, well, partly throwing away as we work out which bits of the book are the ones we wanna keep and which ones are the bits of that we wanna discard. And also then creating the imagery for the book, which has been really interesting and for me has been the chance to be able to.

With a limited but some self-confidence about what I’m doing, be able to create a visual style for something. And that’s been really interesting. And mostly inspired by walking past some posters outside the Young Vic Theater a couple of months ago, which gave me inspiration for a style and then really thanking goodness that I, for the last 20 years basically, have been taking photographs of all sorts of strange things, which has given me an enormous library of stuff, which has been ideals to be able to illustrate a book about randomness.

So that’s, that’s my week ahead.

Lisa: Oh, on that. I’m sure you already do this, but one of my fa ’cause I also take pictures all the time. One of my favorite things with that is to search in my Google photos because it’s very good at recognizing things. Oh

Matt: yes, no, absolutely. And I, I will search on Google photos and then I will also often use things that it has correlated to be the result of that search.

If you look at some of the pictures of Indeed this podcast some of the illustrative pictures, if you’re wondering why they are there, it’s because I search for something related to the show on my photos and it came back with that. So that’s what you get.

Lisa: Amazing Tris. What are you up to over the next week or so?

Well,

Tris: A great deal. My first fiction show, lost Terminal is just started season 20 20. Yes. Yeah. So weekly show. Yes. Season 20.

Lisa: It’s a weekly show. How often, so how long is the season? How many episodes is that? If you’re at season 2010

Tris: episodes, the correct length for a season, that’s a nice, sensible sensible thing I use I use a seven point plot system, which I then pad out with 12 extra sections to make, 10 episodes of four sections each.

Four acts per it’s all very structured because I’m incredibly autistic about it. And I do it every week and then I take. A month off. And then I, I do another, I’ve since started taking two months off to help with my RSI though actually powerlifting lease, we should talk powerlifting has actually properly fixed my my my, my RSI.

Amazing. And my back, like, I think that could be a life hack for any office worker is power lifting. Like, do your hands hurt, do your back hurts? Gr guess what? I’ve got one thing that will solve both of those things. I’m not a doctor. Do not take my advice. Lost terminal is is, is, is going. I’ve released another episode today.

Every Monday I’m writing the Phosphine catalog, which season three drops on Halloween. This is a 1976 themed. 1976 set podcast set in an art auction house that sells magical artworks. You go to Christie’s with your Statue of the Madonna crying blood. They don’t believe you. You go to the Phosphine catalog, they give you a good price.

That is my fortnightly show and by some Miracle Modem, Prometheus. My second show, which I don’t write, but I do produce is coming back. This back from a long two year hiatus back on Halloween as well. So October is extremely busy for me. I also had the conference at the start of at the start of the month.

I’m sure I’m even forgetting things that I’m supposed to be doing. I’m probably gonna be writing some videos for the channel as well. But it is a nightmare and a blessing to be a professional writer with all of these projects. I also started my own Talking Heads podcast. Podcasts, much like the one we are doing now, which is called deencapsulate deencapsulate.com if you’ll forgive me.

That’s my friend Robin and I who, Lisa, you will. Meet if you’ve not already very soon. Talking about tech similar stuff, Lavis, except that the he’s, he’s on board with Mark down instead of not being on board with Mark down. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same. It’s a, a very busy time and I write music every week for all these shows as well.

Wow. I feel inadequate Lisa, but I don’t have, I don’t have kids, so it’s okay. What else am I gonna do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt: That’s fair enough. Lisa, what about you? What is what’s coming up in your week ahead?

Lisa: Well, Thursday is my birthday. It’s also the color walk day. It’s also pub o’clock day. So this Thursday is a very big social day for me.

Tomorrow night I’m also doing a storytelling. You might yeah, it’s, I’m, I’m going along to a storytelling evening, which is exciting. There’s five speakers doing five minute stories, so I’m looking forward to that. The book promotional schedule continues. I’ve got articles that I’m writing.

We’ve got, I’ve got talks to write. I’m doing a talk in a couple of weeks time about accessibility, ’cause that’s what I talk about a lot now. Yeah, there’s, there’s lots of things. I’ve got a whiteboard or talking about digital tools. The only thing that works for me is a tiny whiteboard that I bought for 3 99 from the post office to actually capture all of the different buckets of things because it, it crosses clients.

The only, the, the only tech problem with it is sometimes my cats jump on it and wipe it off.

Tris: So you haven’t got bugs. You’ve got cats.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. Amazing.

Matt: Well, that’s it for another week. Trs, thank you very much for joining us. Pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. What a delight. Lisa, thank you for organizing that.

Lisa: I’m so glad I managed to bring it all together. This is exactly what I was here for.

Chris. I know Weston, if you listen to this. Yes. I’m trying to bring people together. I’m the puppet master here.

Matt: We’re back in a couple of weeks time. We are going to be meeting with somebody who is organizing the second of an annual conference about sports data. So a complete change of of mood.

But you know, that’s how we roll here on WB 40. So until then, have a great fortnight.

Tris: I see. So I feel personally attacked because you’re getting the no boilerplate guide to write to, to read some boilerplate. Marvellous. Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at WB40podcast.com and on all good podcasting platforms.