Writing Slowly

Writing, at least for me, seems to be a messy, back-and-forth kind of thing. It’s a seemingly never-ending loop of laying ideas down, arranging them in some kind of order, and then wrangling them into something that vaguely resembles coherence. It would be nice to imagine that writing is just a matter of sticking a bunch of pre-existing notes together like a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s just wishful thinking. In reality, it’s more like collage created with scissors and glue — messy, iterative, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.

Here, I’m laying out my personal writing workflow, some thoughts on drafting (and redrafting, and re-redrafting), and how I juggle note-making with actually getting words onto the page.

A basic writing workflow

My basic writing workflow is:

• rough notes and annotations (written anywhere) ->
• main notes (Zettelkasten) ->
• structure notes (working towards outlines) ->
• early drafts ->
• edited drafts ->
• final drafts ->
• final final drafts LOL
• published work

A key venue for my rough (fleeting) notes is my daily journal. I write freely about anything and everything, then excerpt interesting stuff into a proper note (aka a main note).

Writing involves drafting and re-drafting

It’s not very realistic to imagine producing completed work simply by mashing together the contents of my notes, nor to create finished writing just from a pile of notes. That’s an attractive but hollow illusion However, my notes certainly help the drafting process tremendously.

It’s tempting to make light of the amount of work the drafting and redrafting takes, but for me it remains a substantial part of the writing process. The Zettelkasten offers a massive head start though, because it means I always have material to work with and because it’s a workshop in which to play with the structure and order of my ideas. It also allows me to continuously develop my unfinished thoughts.

What to do with new thoughts while writing

I use my Zettelkasten notes to construct and inform drafts, but during the drafting process a new thought might come to me, or I’ll notice an idea that I need to add to or expand.

By this time though, I’m already well into the drafting and editing, so I don’t usually go back to create more notes. Perhaps I should, but that would interrupt the flow of the editing work. The exception is when I realise I need to leave the draft and do some more involved thinking/writing. I’ll usually do this by means of my Zettelkasten.

The consolation to not making more notes is that if I’ve actually finished a piece of writing, I can always cite that as a source in a future note, should the occasion arise. This has been a bit of a process of trial and error. Make too few notes to start with, and my drafting process feels under-fed.

There’s no ideal number of notes

It takes quite a lot of notes before I’m happily drafting a piece of writing. But I’m not really sure what the ideal number of notes would be to create a certain length of finished work, and I suspect there isn’t really a definitive way to know that.

That said, I heard an interview with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators), where he mentioned that while writing a book he makes 200-300 notes on index cards prior to writing each chapter. (Link - 32 minutes onwards). That may seem like a lot, but each of these notes may contain just a few words.

Meanwhile, for each book he reads, author Robert Greene writes very approximately ten notes:

“After going through several dozen books, I might have three hundred cards, and from those cards I see patterns and themes that coalesce into hardcore chapters. I can then thumb through the cards and move them around at will. For many reasons I find this an incredible way to shape a book.” (Source)

When to stop writing notes and start writing drafts

So when does the note-making stop and the drafting start? Again, I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer to this question. Start too early and I don’t have enough material. Start too late and I’ve gathered far more material than I can use. Perhaps the ‘Goldilocks’ moment - when there are just enough notes to make a worthwhile first draft - becomes clearer with experience. Further, I find that starting a draft makes it easier to see what my writing is missing, so the note-making and the drafting overlap in time to a significant extent.

Towards the end of his career, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, godfather of the Zettelkasten approach, increasingly worked on the many unfinished manuscripts he had started, rather than on creating lots of new Zettelkasten notes. His Zettelkasten had been so productive that it had helped him write far more manuscripts than he had time to publish. Several of these have been edited and published after his death, and I understand there might be more still to come, since the gigantic task of digitising his archive isn’t due for completion till 2030.

At the end of the day, my writing process isn’t just about jotting down thoughts—it’s about playing with them, reworking them, and eventually, after plenty of trial and error, shaping them into something worth reading. My Zettelkasten system helps keep the whole chaotic process from completely derailing, but the real magic (or struggle, depending on the day) happens in the drafts. There’s no cut-and-dried answer to when to stop taking notes and start writing—too soon and I’m flailing, too late and I’m drowning in material. Over time, though, I’ve started to get a feel for the back-and-forth of it.

Maybe writing is less about finding the perfect method and more about learning to live with the imperfections of the process. Or maybe that’s just me.

How do you work? Please let me know.

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Artwork by Louise Bourgeois. I saw this at an exhibiton of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW.

A few weeks ago I happened to win a voucher for the mainstream cinema chain in Sydney where I live.

I checked what was showing, and as a result didn’t even bother claiming the voucher. The kind of ‘top’ movies on offer are really not what I could imagine enjoying. Even if I did enjoy Marvel superhero movies, I can’t imagine wanting to see 45 of them (Wikipedia).

The decline of cinema is a bit sad, because I’ve loved going to the movies ever since the days when my aunt took me to see The Jungle Book, and since my dad took himself (and me) to the first Star Wars movie, and since even before that, my grandmother accidentally took me to see a war movie called Zeppelin. We were the only two people in the darkened village hall, but still, the sight of burning airships dropping from the sky was quite the deal for a seven-year-old.

I thought of this experience while reading an article by Justine Bateman entitled Hollywood is dead. It’s a shame to announce this death, and her take is a little overly-nostalgic. I mean, Hollywood was always a ruthless money-making monster. All the same, her prognosis seems accurate enough.

But what killed it, I hear you ask. The author’s opinion is that ‘content’ killed Hollywood. And yes, I’ve been negative about ‘content’ myself. If we’re not making content what are we making?

According to Justine Bateman, not only has ‘content’ dominated Hollywod, now the production of ‘content’ is being automated by AI in a creative death-spiral. In short the movies are turning to slop and as a result, the AI Grim Reaper is now knocking on Hollywood’s door.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, she says. People are soon going to reject the AI ‘content’ slop bucket and look for something else: something that’s better because it’s more human. Bateman predicts:

“filmmakers will have to differentiate their work from that which AI can easily imitate. That means they will make unique, raw, and creatively daring work.”

Not only that, but audiences will rebel against AI in their wider lives and certainly reject it in the movies: “They will want something real, raw, and obviously human.”

If she’s right (and that’s a big ‘if’) this means that what we’re moving towards is something completely new and different. We’ve been wrong about AI. AI isn’t the start of a new era but rather the final scene of the old era. And it’s not only movies, there’s books and music too.

So what lies just beyond?

“the birth of the most incredible creative genres we’ve ever known. It will be new to us in the way jazz or rock and roll were new at the time, or French new wave films were back then. However, this will not be a return to anything from the past, but be something entirely new. Just The New.”

I’m mentioning all this because I think the argument also stands for writing generally.

I believe we’re on the cusp of a seismic change in the culture every bit as significant as the shift around 1910 when it was suddenly impossible to be a Victorian any more¹. Just as no one can be Charles Dickens these days, very soon, no one will be able to market anything that looks like what AI could produce. Sure, we’ll make use of AI tools in the background, but readers, listeners and viewers won’t accept what AI offers unless it has first passed through the distinctively human creative imagination.

Ultimately this is just the iron hand of fashion. What looks cutting edge today will date very quickly, so that before long AI will be what you won’t be seen dead wearing.

Things are going to be very different. And I agree with Justine Bateman when I say: more than ever, embracing our humanity is the way forward.

Her three-word manifesto, “Just The New”, has clear echos of the poet Ezra Pound’s late-to-the-party summary of the modernist movement, “Make it new”. Ironically we’ve been here before, in 1928, nearly a century ago. But then Pound was hardly being original. He was paraphrasing an old Chinese text from the 12th century.

Novelty is like that: everything’s new, but it’s made from the old pieces we find lying around us.

What comes after content isn’t really new at all. It’s the oldest thing we know: our desire to connect with another person’s imagination. When we get tired of supposedly ‘perfect’ AI creations, we’ll go back to loving the beautiful mistakes that make human art special. And this will happen sooner than we may expect.

The future belongs to artists and writers who remember what makes us human - our messiness, our feelings, our strange ideas. In a world over-run by AI, being truly human might be a competitive advantage or it might not, but it’s what we’ve got.

References:

Michael North, 2013. Novelty. A History of the New. University of Chicago Press.

Stansky, Peter, 1997. On or about December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World. Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press.

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The Lost Medieval Library Found in a Romanian Church medievalists.net

Old news, but new to me. I’d love to find a lost medieval library in a tower somewhere, but I might be on the wrong continent for that kind of discovery.

HT: @glynmoody@mastodon.social
Image: Ropemaker’s Tower, Mediaș, Romania (Source. CCby SA4.0)

Doug Toft explores his journey to making better notes on his reading. He found trying to summarize what he’d just read was heavy work. And Tiago Forte’s approach of ‘progressive summarization’ wasn’t really helping him.

Perhaps there’s a better way. He quotes Peter Elbow’s great book, Writing With Power. The author says:

“If you want to digest and remember what you are reading, try writing about it instead of taking notes… Perfectly organized notes that cover everything are beautiful, but they live on paper, not in your mind.”

Elsewhere (maybe I’ll find where) I’ve written about how a good way to summarize or paraphrase, to ‘write in your own words’, is to imagine discussing your reading with a friend. You might say: “I read this great book. It was all about…”.

We can easily do this kind of summary in everyday social life, so why not try it with our notes?

Image: Detail of a relief from Ostia showing writers at desks. (Source)

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