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 a collage created with scissors and glue. It’s scrappy, iterative, and 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, including my journal) ->
  • 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. Keeping a diary is a way of living. I write freely about anything and everything, then I excerpt interesting stuff into a proper note (aka a main note). Or instead I might just move straight to creating a new note. There’s no rule about which comes first, as long as I capture it.

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. All the same, my notes certainly help the drafting process tremendously. Old writing manuals recommend creating an outline then drafting an essay. For me that would be a disaster. Where would I get the outline from? My notes allow me to work from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

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 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. My notes are a creative working environment.

A red pair of scissors is depicted against a light blue background with handwritten text at the bottom.

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).

As for me, there isn’t a set number of notes but approximately a dozen per book would be fine. Of course, an especially interesting or relevant source would merit considerably more.

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. There’s more information (in German) on Luhmann’s process at The Luhmann Archive. Apparently he inserted typewritten pages into his manuscripts in a manner similar to the way he inserted notes into his Zettelkasten.

At the end of the day, my writing process isn’t about jotting down thoughts. It’s about playing with my ideas, 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. Start too soon and I’m flailing, too late and I’m drowning in material. Over time, though, I’ve gradually developed 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.

Now read:

What to do with your notes: start writing.

How to write an article from your notes: an example.

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

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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.