Butter Docs (or, New writing apps don’t work so great)
E-book reissue of Forgotten Lives
Film: Past Lives
I’ve been trying out a new writing software recently.
I’m not sure why. Like many writers, any new writing software/device/monospace typeface/fountain pen intrigues me, but I’m also aware that, on a fundamental level, none of these things help us write better, which is ever the underlying quest.
I’ve used Ulysses for nearly a decade now, and apart from some nitpicks to do with exporting, I have very little to complain about – it keeps all my writing from the beginning of time to now in one cloud-backed place (and I’ve never lost a thing – it even lets you pick from conflicting versions if you accidentally rewrite an older version of a text on another device), it supports Markdown, and has excellent customisability when it comes to themes and typefaces.
The only thing it doesn’t do that I wish it did is outlining and corkboards, for which I’ve been using Aeon Timeline so far, and its research management is rudimentary. (Before you mention Scrivener, I do own a copy of that, and used it exclusively before I shifted to Ulysses, but I would often lose writing in Scrivener because of its convoluted export-and-reimport structure for Markdown files, and it has no library management features. Great software, but not my dream app.)
So when the makers of the free(ish) screenwriting software Arc Studio came up with the new Butter Docs, I was intrigued. The idea is, once again, to have all your writing in one place, and it has a corkboard, plus collaborative writing (not that I need that, personally) and MS Word-style versioning which lets you track changes across versions and re-merge them as needed.
So far so good, but there are a few drawbacks. One, it’s in Beta, so a lot of stuff doesn’t work great, like their handling of Markdown, which is a basic requirement for me. Second, it’s $100 per year for a Mac-and-web-only app, which is a lot compared to Ulysses’s $40 annual pricing for bespoke apps for all your Apple devices and Scrivener’s one-time purchase. And that $100 is an introductory price, at something like a 60% discount. That’s a lot, given its sister app Arc Studio’s pro version is $70 per year.
The funny thing is, apart from the versioning stuff, writing in Butter Docs is very close to writing in a modern block-based notes app like Notion or Capacities or Craft. So I found myself, instead, rediscovering Notion as a note-taking app. I still scribble down ideas and recommendations in Apple Notes, and do my proper writing in Ulysses (which I’m writing this in), but the middle stuff, where you’re expanding on something but are still to move into full-blown writing mode – that’s great in Notion. In fact, I wrote the first draft of this post in Notion before moving it to Ulysses. Worked out great!
Thankfully, Butter Docs has a 30-day money-back guarantee, so I’m going to play with it for a couple of weeks then get a refund if it doesn’t work for me. I’ll be very happy to check back in once a few months have passed and the app is a bit more mature, but at the moment, it really doesn’t feel like enough of a bang for the buck.
Work-wise, this week saw the release of w0rldtr33 #7.
I lettered Dawnrunner #3, did revisions on Dawnrunner #2, Christopher Chaos #9 and True Weird #10, and started working on Hellblazer: Dead in America #3, which I’m aiming to finish by Monday. Also started developing style options for a DC mini-series that hasn’t been announced yet.
I discussed my work organisation system with a friend who has used different project management software over a long period of time, and I’m planning rejig my system a little more since I have the time to play with it. My aim is to have as few tabs open at once as possible. Task management (currently Things) and invoicing (currently Zoho) is non-optional. Let’s see if I can collapse the rest into one place. Currently playing with Linear, which has a fully functional free version.
Writing-wise, printing out the outline for SEASIDE worked out great. I was taking care of my dad earlier in the week, and while he was watching a movie, I read through the whole thing, made all the notes I needed to make, caught several repetitions and typos, and actually had a big realisation about the structure of the last two issues which has improved them by far. I’ve started typing out the new version of the outline, and I’m glad I didn’t send the last one to my first readers, because things really came together after taking a break, and while this is largely the same outline, the changes make a big difference in overall tone and flow.
In news on already-written stuff, Obverse Books is finally publishing e-books of their Doctor Who charity anthologies Forgotten Lives Volumes 1, 2 and 3. If you aren’t familiar with these, Forgotten Lives contains stories featuring the pre-Hartnell Doctors seen in The Brain of Morbius, which were made “canon” (whatever that might mean in the context of Doctor Who) in “The Timeless Children” by Chris Chibnall. (If you have no idea what any of that means, god bless you.) All profits from these books are being donated to charities for Alzheimer’s disease. These books exist on the BBC’s forbearance, so will only be available for the month of February.
I have a story in the first two of these, featuring the Doctor as “played” by Graeme Harper, who was production assistant on Doctor Who at the time, and would later direct episodes of both the old and the new series. Personally, I don’t think you need to be familiar with anything other than the basic concept of Doctor Who to read these.
- “Valhalla Must Fall!” is my story in Forgotten Lives I. This was my attempt to reconcile the two pop-cultural objects I have some fondness for – Doctor Who and superheroic bombast. To this end, I wrote a story that travels through Jack Kirby’s universe via Doctor Who, and there’s a framing sequence with a sentient mountain worshipped as a God, if that doesn’t entice you enough.
- “In the Land Beyond the River”, my story in Forgotten Lives II, was my attempt to see how far I could push the idea of Doctor Who while staying recognisably Doctor Who. In this story, the Doctor and his companion find themselves in a world that works along the logic of fables and tall tales, and we’ll see how the Doctor might fare in this environment. This story was inspired by my love for Native American, African and Indian religious myths and folk stories, Paul Bunyan and other tall tales, Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and the stories my grandmother used to tell me when I was a kid (and there’s a nod to my favourite bit from The Robots of Death).
Links for the week:
- There are two articles floating around on BlueSky this week – a Vox one about how today’s creative environment is less about creativity and more about selling yourself and a Verge one about authors who write “potato chip” books using AI to write their books – and they feel like two sides of the same coin.
- This is a lovely history piece about the question of India vs. Myanmar’s ownership of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
- Sreelekha Maitra delves into her family history to talk about India’s pre-independence self-sufficiency movement and the development of Sulekha Ink.
- This is useful largely for readers outside India – Isaac Chotiner interviews Mukul Kesavan on how the Hindu Right took over India.
I watched three movies this week – two of which I liked far more than the one I’m writing about below. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and Beau Travail are both tremendous movies that require some thought before I write about them, and I’ve got a bit too much work at the moment to do them justice. So I’ll be writing about them in the next status update, or during the week, in … I think they’re called blogposts?
Past Lives is what you get when you let in the audience too early while you’re in the process of writing a story. This is a pity, because the story has good bones – it begins with the image of a woman sitting between two men, one Korean and the other white, as she wonders what the people across the bar might think of the configuration, before flashing back to the childhood romance between Na-Young (later Nora) and Hae-Sung. This section is very strong, well-observed. There’s a desire to capture both the commonality of childhood love everywhere and the specificity of life in South Korea which works in the film’s favour.
Things begin to go wrong in the second part – twelve years later, Nora and Hae-Sung reconnect, largely on Hae-Sung’s instigation. This section is creaky, and in fact plays out like a montage that has been stretched beyond its natural length. Once again, there are small well-observed touches, but this time, the story is marking time till it can move on to the next part, like the characters themselves, or at least Nora, who is both the object of affection here and the one with the power to step away. This section ends with Nora meeting Arthur at a writing retreat, completing the trifecta of main characters.
By this point, it is clear that this story’s universe has no room for anyone other than these three people. Nora’s sister, so important in the first section covering childhood, is never mentioned again. Her mother appears on the phone once in the second part, and there seems to be subtle indication that her father might have died after they moved to Canada, but, as it turns out, he’s alive, just extraneous to the story.
There is a prime example of diaspora-style writing in the meet-cute between Nora and Arthur, in which she explains the Korean concept of InYun to him, before admitting that she’s using it as a pickup line. This is Song trying to lampshade that she understands that writing like this is trite, but she can’t desist from using it, because she knows what her audience expects.
Between this, and the fact that several key scenes in the film are constructed around Deep, Meaningful lines that don’t sound like anything anyone would naturally say, it becomes clear that Song is stuck between what she wants to be writing, and what she’s supposed to be writing.
There is a complex story underneath Past Lives, of young affection that remained unconsummated and therefore luminous in a way that real love has no possibility of being, but when it comes to laying raw emotions on the table and letting them do the talking, Song shows a mistrust in her story, instead simply telling you what you’re supposed to think.
There’s a lovely scene in the final section, when Hae-Sung has come to visit Nora in New York, and Nora and Arthur have by this point realised that he’s here only to see her and for no other reason, when Arthur tries to articulate the messiness of his feelings about this other man, without demanding specific action from Nora, and Nora accepts this without making false reassurances and promises. This is the scene that most shows us what this film could have been, and it had the potential to be a masterpiece.
But there’s something common between this scene and the other good scene in this section, which is the conversation between Hae-Sung and Nora as they try to piece together what has happened to them and what each feels towards the other. Hae-Sung, here, is vulnerable, messy, and earnest when he’s not lying to himself, while Nora is poised and self-assured. Confused about what she feels, but not about who she is.
Which is strange, because we get a nuanced sense of who the two men are, and how they feel about Nora, but Nora is simultaneously passive but poised, unflappable till the final scene where she breaks down. Sandwiched between two messy characters, she feels uncomplicated – a heroine in a way neither man is a hero. And what is a heroine but a simplification of a person, someone who isn’t allowed the messiness of reality.
Here we come to the principal way in which, I feel, Song is too aware of an audience. Nora is a semi-autobiographical character, just as Arthur and Hae-Sung are based on Song’s real-life husband and former childhood sweetheart, and the film itself is based on a dinner they had, in which Song imagined what people might think looking at the trio.
Performing Nora in front of this imagined audience, Song isn’t entirely willing to let the audience into her own avatar, as she is for the other two. Nora is very much the point of view of the film, watching the audience and the other characters. You don’t see into Nora, you see out of her – she remains empty, the 2023 millennial’s Bella Swan, a vessel to be filled by you, the audience, sharing her sight.
This audience that comes along with Song, of course, is crucial to the story. The films begins with Nora imagining an audience watching them, and towards its conclusion, the only time Hae-Sung and Nora are able to be fully honest and articulate with each other is when they have Arthur as an uncomprehending audience. In this scene and the next, the theme is spelled out – InYun comes back, this time deployed seriously, because this is, after all, diaspora writing, just in a post-irony era. In the final scene, we’re told in plodding detail that in fact, it is the children within Hae-Sung and Nora that were in love with each other. And in case we didn’t get that, the adult Nora and Hae-Sung are replaced by their child selves, Kung Fu Hustle-style, as if we might have forgotten the first third of the film, or, hell, the rest of it. All this exists purely for the audience, not for the story. Nothing is added that hasn’t been shown before, or that the characters haven’t figured out by now, but it’s all repeated for our benefit.
This is, though, part of why this film has been so well-received. It’s not willing to trust the audience, which means that there will be no child left behind when it comes to understanding this film. It is tackling hard emotions, but it’s doing so in a palatable, inviting way that tells you every step of the way what you should think, and that allows you to comfort yourself with the story rather than challenge yourself with it.
You might think I hated the film based on this, but I didn’t. I quite enjoyed it, though I don’t plan to watch it again. But it annoyed me that I could see a better film between the chinks of this one, and if I’d been watching that film instead, this would’ve easily been one of my favourites of the year. As it is, it’s a decent debut, and I will wait and see if Song continues to indulge in the same excesses as this, or is able to strip back and make something profound.
At the very end, Nora walks back home in a gorgeously long, quiet sequence (except for the thump of her boots on subway grates) in which we watch her walk back home, where Arthur is waiting on the stairs. When she reaches him, she breaks down crying, and the film ends before we make the connection between this moment and the conversation where Arthur says he’s never seen her be a “whiny crybaby”.
Except it doesn’t. Instead, we cut to a shot of Hae-Sung’s cab on the way to the airport, as the night gives way to the dawn. Personally, I liked the shot itself, but it’s a moment that exists purely for our comfort, so we don’t end on an ambiguous shot of a woman crying. Yet again, Song shrinks from that vulnerability, and I continue to wish she’d left us behind.
I assure you the upcoming reviews will be more positive than this one.
