Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all
“My notes were like plans for a bridge”.
I’ve argued that you can’t create good writing just by mashing your notes together and hoping for the best. That’s the illusion of connected thought, I’ve said, because you can’t create coherent writing just from a pile of notes.
Well, maybe I was wrong.
Perhaps a strong or experienced writer can do exactly that. Here’s John Gregory Dunne, the journalist husband of Joan Didion, in the Foreword to his 1968 book on Hollywood, The Studio:
I imagine he wasn’t just a good writer, though.
Surely he was first a very good note-maker.
I’d like to hear about people’s experiences, good and bad, of using their notes to create longer pieces of writing. Was it like building a bridge, or perhaps like building a bridge out of jelly?
HT: Alan Jacobs, who draws a different but very valid lesson from the anecdote.
Stay in the Writing Slowly loop and never miss a thing (unless you don’t get round to opening your emails, in which case, yeah, you might miss a thing. Anyway:
Richard Carter, FCD 🪲🇺🇦 Like you, I’m sceptical of the idea you can create coherent writing just from a pile of notes. Writing is hard—which is my excuse for why it takes me so long. But I find my notes are invaluable in helping knock something coherent together, albeit slowly.
I use my digital notes when outlining each chapter of the book I’m currently writing. I write my outlines in a separate note as a bullet-list, indenting to different levels of granularity. When any particular bullet-point has an associated note in my Obsidian vault, I link directly to that note from the bullet-point. This has two benefits (the first, I expected; the second was an unforeseen bonus):
- When writing the chapter following the outline, I can easily jump to the detailed note to remind myself of key points I should be making;
- Afterwards, having completed my chapter, I can easily compile a list of references by going back to each note linked to in my outline to see which sources they reference. (This second benefit has saved me a huge amount of work.)
Two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Converting my notes into a chapter about how referring to my notes had drastically altered one of the chapters in my book.
Tracy Durnell maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I recently documented/ made my drafts public for a long blog post
Writing Slowly @tracydurnell Thanks! This confirms my sense that it's hard to dash off a worthwhile long post, and that editing is time well-spent - at least in terms of the resulting quality boost. What's more, it shows that editing helps clarify thought.
Have you submitted your article to the indieweb carnival?
Writing Slowly @richardcarter this is very helpful, thank you. People underestimate how time consuming the referencing can be (by which I mean me 😂)
Tracy Durnell I wound up writing a different post on friction in indie web communication for the Carnival 😄 I'd had half of it sitting as a draft that wasn't working but realized friction was a good framing to tie it together