Writing Slowly

Do you have so many ideas that they overwhelm you?

Do you make brilliant notes then wonder how you’re ever going to keep up with the extra work they seem to entail?

Did you ever read a book, take notes, then get excited about all the new possibilities you’ve discovered, only to end up feeling oppressed by the masses of half-finished thoughts you’ve started to entertain?

Has your pile of notes made you wonder about doing some idea ‘spring-cleaning’?

Have you started to consider: perhaps I should delete some of this? Maybe I could just start fresh?

Tech writer Scott Nesbitt has. In a post entitled Dealing with your ideas he suggested a plan. Addressing those who just can’t let go of their ideas, he said:

“ask yourself these questions when confronted with your ideas:

• Will you be able to devote time to those ideas in the near future? By near future, I mean the next two to four weeks.
• Are there markets for those ideas?
• Can you fully develop the ideas into something tangible?

If your answer to any of those questions is no then send the idea into the trash bin.”

This approach, I must admit, is quite tempting. It reminds me of an interview in which Paul McCartney said he forgot dozens of tunes he and John Lennon came up with.

“We didn’t have tape recorders. Now you can do it on your phone. So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it. Now, because you can get things down on a device, I’ve got millions of things I want to record and do.”

He said this was probably for the best, though, since the only tunes they could remember for long enough to get down in the recording studio were the very best, most memorable ones.

The Beatles recording in 1966. Public domain

Perhaps we’re recording too much these days. If you make your own notes, your ideas will gradually pile up. “Millions of things” might begin to feel a bit much. You might think of culling the least useful ideas. But is this approach best for your Zettelkasten or any other note-making system?

I think not. Don’t throw away your old notes says Bob Doto, author of A System for Writing. He argues you should keep your notes and add new notes that comment on them.

“Instead of erasure, we want to create possibility. We want to create the conditions for serendipity and insight to take place. To echo Jakob Greenfeld, we want to create enough surface area for luck to have a place to land. We want to create the conditions where opportunities for writing are always at the ready.

I agree fully with Bob Doto here. Some of my most worthwhile notes are the ones where I’ve gone back and instead of throwing out an old idea, I’ve argued with it, revising the original note not by erasing it but by writing a new one. Instead of deleting the old thoughts I create for myself a commentary, a secular midrash.

The Babylonian Talmud. Notice how the commentary around the edges is considerably wordier than the original text in the centre, which it interprets without erasing. Public domain.

In this way my Zettelkasten becomes a conversation partner between my old self and my current self, between the past and the present. And that trail of back and forth discussion becomes a resource for my future self. If I threw out my notes I’d be losing that wonderful resource.

So I respectfully disagree with the idea of throwing out old ideas. Besides my Zettelkasten I have old notebooks going back years - right back to the age of 13. Every so often I revisit them to get back in touch with the person I used to be, who seems so different from, yet so familiar to my present self. This isn’t just nostalgia. I use this material as a resource, a source of inspiration and a prompt for disputation. I see my Zettelkasten, similarly, as a permanent companion.

What’s more, reading my old notes, most of which I have forgotten, is a fruitful and creative source of surprise. My past self surprises my present self, which leads to new insights and new directions.

Isn’t forgetting just as important as remembering?

I guess there’s some kind of basic tension between keeping things and getting rid of them. (I’ve read Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book, A Primer on Forgetting). Many systems handle this very well - my worm farm, for example. It doesn’t destroy the unused veggies, it transforms them into something new. But written records tend to stick around rather than decompose elegantly. My view is that notemaking helps you remember… and it also helps you forget.

I very much approve of Luhmann’s concept of the Zettelkasten as a ‘septic tank’ or ‘settling pond’. But I also appreciate the challenge that what really matters is not the notes but the uses to which they are put.

But what to do with old fleeting notes that are just hanging around?

Well yes, it is an issue. Scott Nesbitt’s article, the one that got me thinking about this, has a clear answer (for him):

“Get rid of those ideas. Stuffing them away like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter isn’t going to do any good. It won’t get you any closer to making those ideas a reality. You’ll just increase your digital or paper clutter. Older ideas will be buried under newer ones.”

Personally, I just don’t bother. Not only are my old ideas not in the way (they’re just parked, and probably fermenting), but also, it’s sometimes useful to be able to uncover them. I have a tag for my notes, “archive” (see Tiago Forte’s PARA system). If there’s something I’m really not using any more, it goes in that bucket. Then I forget about it. But if I’m ever searching for something related, it will still resurface.

I find it more of a problem to lose stuff than to have it hanging around, but that may not be true for everyone. An American journalist once interviewed the great and prolific French novelist Jules Verne. Verne said he had 13,000 notes on fiches, paper slips. But he also said he destroyed all his old notes so he wouldn’t accidentally repeat himself in his newest novel.

And I’m not going to argue with Jules Verne.

I should also add that I have certainly destroyed or lost plenty of “fleeting” notes of all kinds. Actually, I don’t care about them at all. Only when a note makes it to my Zettelkasten do I start to love it :)

What about you?

Were you ever tempted to throw out your old ideas? Are you happy to have reduced the load, or do you miss them now they’re gone?

This article is based on my previous post on the Zettelkasten subreddit, entitled What should you do if you have too many ideas to process?