Novelist Arthur Golden

Arthur Golden is the author of only one novel, but what a novel. His Memoirs of a Geisha (Knopf, 1997; Vintage Books, 1999) has sold more than four million copies in English alone, has been translated into dozens of languages, and may soon become a major motion picture. Arthur has long been a Mac user and is one of those Mac fans who has stuck with the Apple Computers for almost twenty years.

Beginning in 1984 with an Apple II, Arthur jumped ship briefly, trying out Windows about five years ago, "but that only lasted a few months before going back to the Mac." His inventory of Macs reads like that of a small company: he's currently got a Titanium PowerBook with a 22-inch Apple Cinema display, so he can work with several windows visible at a time.

In his second home, he's got another 22-inch display, so he feels comfortable when he's working there as well. His wife and daughter have Macs, as does his assistant, who has a 12-inch PowerBook. Add to that a G3 Mac upgraded to a G4, used for "general purposes, including music," and a G3 PowerBook at his second home, as well as a second iMac for his daughter and an old PowerBook in his wife's painting studio for playing music. That's eight Macs in all! (Oh, and they've got a couple of iPods as well.)

Arthur likes wireless devices he's got a wireless Logitech keyboard and trackball, so he can work without being tied to his desk. He also uses an Olympus DSS 660 Digital Voice Recorder to dictate letters and notes that his assistant later types for him. All his Macs are networked, some with Ethernet cables and others with AirPort cards. He even uses the Mac in his library to control lights and other electronics in his house.

For Arthur Golden, Mac users are like a fraternity. He says, "I feel an instant bond with other Mac users, almost as if we went to the same college or grew up in the same town." When asked about being in a minority, he retorts, "Generally speaking, any good quality puts you instantly in the minority. I'm proud of being more discriminating and having superior taste." And as for PCs, he says, "I can't stand them. I can't even stand to look at them."

Different writers work in different ways, and Arthur Golden does a great deal of research before writing his novels. His favorite program for organizing his notes and ideas is Inspiration, a fully-featured outline program that provides both text and visual outlines.

Other programs that Arthur Golden uses include Microsoft Word (www.microsoft.com), QuicKeys (www.cesoft.com; a program to assign keyboard shortcuts to just about anything), and the shareware graphics program Graphic Converter (www.lemkesoft.de), which Golden calls the "Grand Central Station for all my graphics files, which include photos I've taken during my research, maps, and other historical images I've found on the Internet that help me imagine the world in which my characters dwell."

Golden's favorite feature in Mac OS X is Expos (see Chapter 4), which he calls "brilliant," and his favorite Apple program is iCal, which everyone in his family relies on to coordinate their schedules. He also likes the redesign of the Finder windows and the Open and Save dialogs, which bring more consistency to the way he works.

Arthur Golden is hard at work on a second novel, so keep your eyes out for it sometime in 2005. .

The Versatile Outliner

I’ve got to admit: one thing I’ve got in common with Arthur Golden is that I, too, couldn’t work without Inspiration (www.inspiration.com).

This book, like just about every book and article I’ve ever written, began in Inspiration.

Inspiration works in two ways. First, you can create text outlines, in the usual hierarchical fashion that you probably learned in high school.

But you can also create visual outlines, which resemble mind maps, to highlight relationships and move ideas around from topic to topic.

An Inspiration outline in text and graphical form

Arthur Golden says that Inspiration helps him tame his “messy thought process”, and lets him organize large amounts of notes to “bring out hidden aspects of the story”. His Inspiration file for Memoirs of a Geisha was over 200 pages long, and the research he’s doing for his next novel is only half-completed and is already that many pages.

Inspiration is flexible, offering powerful formatting, searching and printing features. From simple outlines to the most complex repositories of research and notes, Inspiration is a valuable tool for writers who want to apple order to complex ideas.