Ulysses Brilliant Writing Software For Mac
Latrina Cobbett
As much as I love OmniOutliner, and have used it for many years, I would recommend you use it for brainstorming your book. Then transfer the outline via OPML to Scrivener. Scrivener is the perfect tool for writing your 400 page non-fiction book. It interchanges brilliantly with OmniOutliner using OPML import/export.
Yeah, I was going to suggest downloading the Scrivener Trial, which lets you use it full featured for a month for free. If you need to write parts of your book on iOS, you can use any Dropbox sync text processor to integrate with Scrivener. I know Elements works; I suspect Ulysses does as well.
Ulysses is a brilliant creative writing app for those who want to write and organize their books. It's a writing tool with an incredibly simple interface that makes creating scenes or parts of your story easy, without compromising the power needed when juggling multiple files on different devices with other writing programs.
Years ago, I stopped reading New Yorker fiction because I lost patience with beautifully written stories in which nothing much happens. For the sake of this article (oh, the sacrifices I make.), I picked up a recent issue to try again.
Many years ago, I read a National Lampoon article in which a group of New-Yorker-type writers kidnapped Frank W. Dixon, creator of the Hardy Boys series, and forced him to write plots for them. While that was, naturally, over the top parody, it might not be such a bad thing for New Yorker writers to explore the joys of the Buffyverse, and the brilliant storyteller behind it.
I suspect a lot of our sense of story is formed by cartoons, just as the food we ate as children remains comfort food all of our lives. I know for a fact that a lot of my sense of humor was shaped by Chuck Jones and Jay Ward.
Famed screenwriter and novelist William Goldman, in an introduction to his novel The Temple of Gold, writes about his love of comic books during the Depression. That fueled his desire to be a writer. Later he read New Yorker stories and was singularly unmoved. He said they were always about an unhappily married American couple in Europe, ending up at a cafe, and in the last paragraph a fly would walk across the table, and the story would end: And then she understood. He did not connect.
I once heard a nineteenth century critic complaining that, instead of enriching their minds with real literature, young people were wasting their time reading Dickens and Scott. The comic books of their day.
It is great to see someone giving Joss his due. There is a reason I have watched the entire series several times. That is because good storytelling holds up. And it is no surprise that Joss did such a wonderful take on the Bard in his recent version of Much Ado About Nothing, using actors from the Buffyverse and other projects.
I suspect there are a lot of reasons New Yorker stories end up the way they do. Fear of conventional storytelling techniques, a culture that mistakes obscurity and affectation for sophistication, perhaps even a deep-seated belief that life is meaningless and good literature should reflect the fact.
For another, it encourages me to leave the literary voices alone for awhile. The harshest critics seem to come from that crowd and reading criticism in the New Yorker has come to make me fear my genre work.
I remember calling friends AS the pilot was still on, telling them they had to tune into this show. One of my friends had never seen it, several years after it went off the air (first-run, that is), and I finally got her to start watching some re-runs. She liked it so much that she started getting several friends together to watch Buffy re-runs once a week (most of whom had never seen it before), and they still do that a number of years later, having seen the whole series several times. (A few published writers in that group too, btw.)
Dave, after a year in the US, I forgot my native tongue, Hindi. I was six (in my defense). The only thing that encouraged me to read Hindi stories were comics. I devoured them. Most of them were from the Ramayana. In all the great classics, stuff happens, even as great ideas are expounded.
I really love STORY. Story needs a character involved in an external plot that will (or not) change the character internally. And I want to know WHY. There has to be something meaningful going on in the story and I have to be able to understand it.
It is virtually *impossible* for anyone to be completely objective about anything. And that goes for writing and critiquing it. But I would love it if, for once, the experts left room for the unknown.
Glad you thought to raise this subject. In spite of being a literary writer, I, too, have been turned off to New Yorker fiction. What is missing in virtually all those pieces are two things: scene and dialogue, which gives the reader no place to actually connect in a present moment. This leaves me with a Why bother, Who cares, response. The narrative is virtual self-reflection.
And thanks for the last paragraph about crossing over. That is my goal with the literary genre: stories with arc, plot, moral argument woven with the delicacies of inner information and insight. In his quiet way Richard Ford has been doing this.
As a Union general, Grant expelled Jews from his war zone; as president of the United States of America, he set a new national tone that helped usher in a brief "golden age" in the history of the American Jewish community. This year-the 150th anniversary of the Civil War-is an appropriate time to reconsider Grant's reputation and set the record straight.
In 1982, as a young faculty member at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, I was invited to address the institution's Board of Overseers. This was an important rite of passage for a new faculty member, and I was determined to prove myself. Since my lecture date more or less coincided with the 120th anniversary of Grant's infamous 1862 order, I decided to talk about that event.
At that point a few chairs in the room shifted uneasily and my mentor, the pioneering American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, buried his face in his hands. That, I knew, spelled trouble. Clearly, I had just said something terribly wrong. Not knowing what the problem was, and fearing for the security of my job, I hobbled to the end of my lecture and invited questions.
An old man in the front row promptly raised his hand and rose to his feet. "My name is Mack," he began. Then, looking me straight in the eye, he announced, "That was my great-grandfather you were talking about."
Since that memorable day, I have looked for opportunities to expand upon the history of Ulysses S. Grant and the Jews. Most Jews of the 21st century do not know that Grant expelled Jews from his war zone in 1862 and that during his presidency (1869-1877), he transformed himself in Jewish eyes from a villain into a hero. This year-the Civil War sesquicentennial and the 150th anniversary of General Orders No. 11-is an appropriate time to reconsider Grant's reputation and set the record straight.
On December 17, 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant issued and signed General Orders No. 11 to evict Jews from the vast war zone under his command-known as the "Department of the Tennessee," but actually stretching from northern Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. His edict was subsequently described as "the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history." It read as follows:
The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
Practically, probably fewer than 100 Jews were seriously affected by General Orders No. 11. A fortuitous communications breakdown, as well as Abraham Lincoln's prompt decision to revoke the order-Lincoln declared that he did not "like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners"-greatly limited its impact.
Still, General Orders No. 11 had lingering effects. It brought to the surface deep-seated fears that, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jews might replace Blacks as the nation's most despised minority. Some Jewish leaders explicitly feared that freedom for slaves would spell trouble for Jews.
Within a year, Grant's victory at Vicksburg had elevated him into a national hero. When, in 1868, he ran for president on the Republican ticket, the memory of General Orders No. 11 sparked passionate debates between those Jews who extolled him as a hero and those who reviled him as a latter-day Haman, a traditional enemy of the Jewish people. For the first time in American history, a Jewish issue was playing a prominent role in a presidential campaign-the issue of multiple loyalties. The election prefigured a central conundrum of Jewish politics that remains relevant today: In selecting a presidential candidate, were Jews to cast aside all special interests and consider only the national interest? Or should General Orders No. 11 be the sole factor in determining how Jews ought to vote? Jewish Republicans faced an excruciating question: Should they vote for a Democrat-representing a party they considered bad for the country for seeking to roll back Reconstruction and deny freed slaves the right to vote-just to avoid voting for a man who had been bad to the Jews?
Two of America's most distinguished Reform rabbis debated this very question. Liebman Adler, rabbi of Chicago's K.A.M. synagogue, argued against voting on the basis of Jewish interests, and in favor of what he considered broad American interests. Proud as he was of being a Jew, he wrote, "It is different when I take a ballot in order to exercise my rights as a citizen. Then I am not a Jew, but I feel and act as a citizen of the republic." On Election Day, he insisted, "I do not ask what pleases the Israelites. I consult the welfare of the country."
For Rabbi Adler, the principles of the Republican Party, particularly the promise that "all men of all races should be equal," trumped other considerations. Must Jews like himself set aside their principles and change their vote, he asked, "since Grant has insulted us?" Answering his own question, he declared forthrightly that "if Grant is the best man for the Americans, he is the best man for us Israelites, despite General Orders No. 11."
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