Broken English

Some notes on narrative that, in best Blue Peter tradition, I made earlier. 16 years earlier:

Narratives are made up of units of information. In Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ he states:

“…narrative is never made up of anything other than functional units … This is not a matter of art (on the part of the narrator), but of structure…”

Barthes goes on to deconstruct these functional units, outlining two distinct types of narrative component.

The first type are referred to as ‘functions’, which are essentially the narrative elements of the structure, the units that constitute ’story’. Functions are “…units of content…”, they are statements that describe actions, (eg: Oswald shot the President) or provide information which is key to the narrative (Oswald had spent some time in Cuba). Barthes’ ‘Functions’ are similar to Hallorans’ ‘Message Vehicles’, which take meanings in terms of codes and sub-codes. To use an example from Barthes; the sentence “He saw a man of fifty” can render several meanings according to the context of the narrative and the position of the reader. It is firstly a description of age. In the context of other message vehicles that would define the text as a ’spy thriller’, the man is unidentified and signifies a ‘possible threat’. In the context of the eighteen year old reader he is a significantly older man, and so on. Barthes also points out that functions are correlative to one another, contribute to the meaning of one another. The function ‘he replaced the receiver’ only gains meaning in relation to its correlate ‘he picked up the phone’.

The second units given a term are ‘Indices’, which locate the ’scene’ of the text. Such units provide information about atmosphere, character, time and place. While these units do not directly contribute to the narrative, they serve to place the text into the ‘real’ world. For example, the indice “The night was stormy” gives us information about the temporal context of the narrative (it is night-time) and the atmosphere (stormy – foreshadows ‘doom’).

If narrative can be broken down into ‘units’ it follows, that these units can be ordered into a structure; a structure of messages that relate to each other. In books and films this structure is linear, is the Classic Realist structure of the text.

I recently reviewed Bean 2.4 – a brilliant, free and very lightweight Mac word processor – for Macworld. Here’s my redux version of that review:

My quest for the ultimate writing tool continues with Bean, a stripped down and superfast word processor. Most of the applications Apple bundles with OS X are great – but TextEdit isn’t one of them. As a document viewer, it’s handy to have in the absence of Adobe Reader or MS Word. It supports RTF, HTML and even .webarchive files. As a word processor, I’d rather write with a sharp stone on the pavement.

I’m sure I can’t be alone in finding TextEdit clumsy to look at and cumbersome to use. Worst of all, it screws up perfectly good documents. Apple’s idea of ASCII text format seems to differ from everyone else’s.

If you can afford it, there’s MS Word. If you can’t, that’s where tools like OpenOffice.org come in – giving you the commercial standard features TextEdit can’t. Features like word count and print view. But, OpenOffice.org is pretty cumbersome, installing a suite of tools and requiring Java to run.

Bean is the ideal compromise. With a disk footprint of just 8 MB compared to OpenOffice.org’s 400 MB, it’s small – starting up in less than a second on our test machine.

It lacks a full word processor’s more advanced features, but Bean handles all the same files as TextEdit in an interface that’s very easy to use – with nice big icons and a clean and uncluttered work area.

Sure, it’s small. Compared to tools like Word it feels distinctly chopped down. But, it feels like Bean was designed by someone who writes for a living. All the features that have been left in are features you’ll actually use. With live word count, auto-save, spell check and page layout mode you won’t feel deprived. Though, used to using Scrivener recently, we did miss having full screen mode.

I’ve found myself using Google Docs a lot lately. Bean gives you the same simplicity, power and lack of clutter at the same price; nothing. Still – Google Docs has one thing Bean doesn’t. It’s cross platform. And you can access it from anywhere. So, make that two things Bean doesn’t have… I switched to Google Docs so I could access my writing on any machine I was logged in to – but it’s far from perfect. It’s ugly to look at, and it doesn’t quite know whether it’s using folders or tags to file your work.

These are petty issues – but there’s one major problem with Google Docs that can’t be overlooked: it screws up RTF export. Big time. That’s a big consideration when you’re writing professionally.

So – whenever I’m on a Mac – I mostly use Bean instead. Sometimes, I use it in conjunction with Google Docs, bypassing the export command and pasting my writing into Bean for final formatting. Either way, it’s free and takes up as much space as a couple of audio tracks. Win and, indeed, win.

Download Bean from www.bean-osx.com

Ploughing through the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I’m reminded of several other artists, not all of them writers.

The first is Jack Kerouac. The stream of consciousness narrative, poetic and vibrant real-time description and epic sentences. Full stops are few. My first attempt at reading was fruitless. Only going back and reading as though aloud and in character seemed to work. It was a child-like approach, but once I did that, I was there – in Woolf’s lucidly illustrated world.

The others are film-makers. Wim Wenders and Robert Altman (and his greatest imitator Paul Thomas Anderson). It flits in and out of different threads, from one viewpoint to another, aggregating into a whole. It puts me in mind of the first half of Wings of Desire as we move from the thoughts of one character to another, the focus becoming finer as the story progresses and coalesces. Very modern, difficult and rewarding.