Notes on writing
Since my last essay touched on writing processes and note-taking, I figured it might be useful for me to outline my current process. Mostly for myself since you can only really track how your process evolves if you actually document your process.
It always starts with plain text notes. Sometimes they have markdown formatting. Occasionally they’re written in an app that supports rich text, like Notes on iOS, but I usually don’t use the formatting features.
I generally don’t use linking for organising the notes. Linking is amazing for connecting to references, but whenever I’ve tried to use linking to organise my notes it’s only added to the jumble. Admittedly, the last time I went all-in on linking was twenty years ago using Tinderbox to manage my PhD, and that app has always been eccentric as hell.
My note-taking “system” is laughably simple: separate things have separate boxes. And since most note-taking apps are “everything buckets” I end up using separate apps for each box.
- Drafts for the bookmarks. Used to be micro.blog but I got fed up with both the lack of progress on basic functionality and a few other annoyances.
- Apple Notes on the phone for personal notes and life stuff.
- I’ve been shopping around for a good “box” for newsletter related stuff and finally settled on Standard Notes, which Ian Betteridge linked to the other day. It seems to work fine.
- When I’m working on a book, the notes “box” for that book is generally a folder of text files open as a project (or the equivalent) in a text editor or markdown writing app. Usually these are also git repositories. I tried to use a single repository to store all of these notes for multiple books, but that became unwieldy so now I’m mostly using separate repositories for each box.
Everything is usually archived as soon as it’s used somewhere else. Bookmarks get archived as soon as they are posted to the blog or moved to a book box.
I usually create a book box out of a group of newsletter notes that I think have some sort of conceptual through-line. Usually that thread is quite tenuous and vague. If it gets clearer as I add to the box then that’s a signal that there’s something “there”. If it doesn’t, then that box usually just languishes and I move on. I also archive a box once the book is done.
I usually work on the outline of the book , each chapter, and each sub-chapter using paper notes. Sometimes they’re sets of single-concept index cards that can be rearranged easily. Sometimes as drawn maps in a notebook. Complex things need bigger maps, because it’s important to keep everything visible in a single space at a time, which is why I keep a couple of A3 dot grid Rhodia notepads around. The various notepads (A3, A4, A5) also serve as working memory extensions. I jot down things I need to keep track of that are specific to the current writing context.
That the “everything bucket” is the default for almost every note-taking app is one of my long term beefs with this app genre. Mushing everything together in a single space means I have to do much more work to organise that space and it makes it harder for me (your mileage may vary) to make sense of things.
I also don’t want to use folders or tags to manage separate “boxes” or projects within a single space. I want to use folders and tags to manage stuff within each box, each of which is a separate space. The project should be a higher level concept and I should be able to switch between them easily. I also like the fact that the difference between the book draft and the book notes is entirely conceptual. They’re both folders of text files, usually side-by-side in the same repository.
My process for the longer newsletter or blog essays is effectively the same as for the books just at a smaller scale. I figure that a set of notes have a through line, some conceptual cohesiveness so they get pasted together in a draft and I sketch out an outline of the post on the notepad.
For example, the first draft of the essay, The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems, was composed of three separate notes I’d jotted down over the past few weeks, about 1200 words in total. One note connecting the nature of reading to Tolstoy’s What Is Art? A second note on how hard it is to tell if a productivity system is genuinely working. And a third note on the shoddy taste in books many of these note-taking promoters have, with an extended paragraph on the mistake of taking Kahneman’s work at face value. Then I jotted down a quick outline and began to flesh it out. I like to write comments to myself inline with the regular text as I go to help me keep track of what needs more work, what needs to be added, and what needs to be replaced.
Parallel to this, I begin to gather the references and links. Some of these come from my bookmarks but most of it is researched specifically while I’m writing, which I then add to the bookmarks.
And, yeah, that means that the bookmarks are more often the output of work than they are the input to work.
Even though the original notes provided the structure, I ended up dropping everything except for a couple of paragraphs. Less than two hundred words of the original notes remain in the final essay. This is also quite normal.
I strongly prefer to keep all research for any given essay or book in tabs in a dedicated browser window for easy reference – “Bookmark all tabs” is your friend – but bugs and poor performance in most browsers makes this difficult. Firefox and Chrome are mostly okay with a large number of tabs. Vivaldi and Edge tend to get sluggish or weird. Safari is just a mess that regularly does something to lose all open tabs. The “eject this tab from memory” features many browsers have help with performance but they tend to make other tab management features unreliable, like their “switch to this tab” autocomplete features sporadically forget that the page is already in an open tab but finds it in your history. This often results in five or six copies of the same page being open in separate tabs. Overall, I’d give browser tab management a C- across the board and the features they add generally either don’t help at all (toys) or are too unreliable to be useful.
To actually manage the reference lists themselves, for the books, I tend to use ZoteroBib and BibTeX files. Like I noted above, I strongly dislike “everything buckets” and Zotero is the most “everything” of all everything-buckets.
Interspersed throughout this process is a lot of walking. I pace as I’m thinking. I walk to clear my mind. I walk to get ideas. I walk to get perspective. I walk a lot as I work.
Once the essay is done and posted or the book released, I clean up. Windows and tabs are closed. Notes are archived. Leftover notes and clippings filed way into the regular notes box. I move on.
As for coding, I use the exact same process as I do for writing essays or books.
- Notes.
- Research and references.
- Outlines.
- Notepads.
- Notes to self.
Except with more tests.