Atomic Notes
- fleeting notes / rough journal entries →
- Zettelkasten main notes →
- public notes →
- blog posts / podcasts / videos →
- essays / articles →
- ebooks →
- physical books (and back to the start - it’s a cycle)
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Andy Matuschak’s Notes
A semi-public digital notebook, full of interlinked thoughts on memory, learning, and tools for thought. These are really mini-blog posts, surely with at least one eye to the reader. -
Soren Bjornstad’s Zettelkasten
A thoughtfully maintained collection of Zettelkasten-inspired notes, with strong links and clear explanations. This is based on TiddlyWiki, which I also use, and I’m full of admiration for this tricked-out iteration (mine’s a bit more basic). But it’s not a Zettelkasten, since Soren says his collection of notes has outgrown that term. -
Jon M Sterling’s Mathematical Zettelkasten
Dense, precise, and full of logical clarity — a beautiful, inspiring example of a Zettelkasten in a formal discipline. And I’ve written about it previously at A forest of evergreen notes. -
Maggie Appleton’s Notes
Designer, anthropologist, and digital gardener — her ‘digital garden’ is playful, exploratory, well-organised and yes, impeccably designed. -
Binny’s Digital Zen Garden
This is a creative take on the digital garden format — a bit philosophical, a bit experimental, and Binny wrote a book, Zettelkasten and the Art of Knowledge Management, so that’s cool. -
A Working Library by Mandy Brown
Not strictly a Zettelkasten, but a really elegant example of thought-in-process, evolving across essays and notes. I wish my site was as nice as this. Sigh. -
Barns Worth Burning OK, so this one’s not really a Zettlkasten either. It’s more like a pot-pourri of interesting fragments. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? Certainly. In other words, I like it a lot.
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Nikita Voloboev’s Wiki
Another sprawling and highly structured knowledge base, grounded in personal note-taking practice. I mean sprawlng as in “I approve”. -
Zac Burry’s Garden
Yet again more of a digital garden, but still grounded in Zettelkasten principles: atomic notes, dense links, no blog-post polish. -
Anagora
I don’t really understand this group site (if it even is that?) but it looks interesting. -
Nagitimi85
Here’s a nice public notes collection that’s just getting going - published using Obsidian and Quartz. -
Maggie Appleton’s Digital Gardeners Index
A growing collection of personal wikis, gardens, and knowledge work experiments. -
Lyz-code’s Best of Digital Gardens
A curated list of noteworthy digital gardens, tools, and workflows. -
Awesome Digital Gardens
Another great index for diving into the many styles and structures people are exploring. -
In-box
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Sleeping
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References
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Main
Why not publish all your notes online?
I saw a large collection of public notes and it got me thinking about publishing my own notes. Why not publish them all online?
In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public. (Writing Slowly)
I’ve been creating Zettelkasten-style notes for several years now, mostly to support the process of writing longer, more complete pieces. So my notes really aren’t intended for public consumption. Even though I’m keen on making my notes as clear, concise and modular as I can, still, many of them are rough, inconsistent, and probably incomprehensible to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves reading them. All the same, I can’t help feeling drawn to the idea of publishing them anyway.
That’s because I like the idea of “working with the garage door up” (as Andy Matuschak puts it), and I absolutely love poking around other people’s public note collections — their digital gardens, personal wikis, and half-formed archives. Some of them are beautiful and inspiring, full of loose threads and glimpses of thinking in motion. Others are baffling, and that’s part of their strange charm. They remind me of visiting craft villages in the 1980s where the potters, the artists and the metal-workers would occupy little studios in the converted stables of the old country house (in the UK, obviously!), and you could stand there watching them doing their thing. It was craftwork-as-performance, I suppose.
But should I do it myself? What are the upsides and downsides of putting everything — the messy, partial, and half-baked — out in the open, for casual visitors to gawk at?
Here are some reflections I’ve pulled together on the pros (+) and cons (-), mostly from a recent Reddit thread that helped me to concentrate my scattered thoughts and focus my ambivalence. I asked, ‘why not publish all your notes online?’ - and received some very interesting replies.
1. (+) Publishing makes writing feel more real — and more rewarding
For some people, making their notes public adds a bit of ‘shine’ — a small psychological nudge. If it’s out there, it feels more complete, more real, maybe somehow more legitimate. That can be motivating. Even if no one’s reading these public notes, the simple act of publishing gives a sense of purpose to the work.
Publishing-before-polishing might also help in pushing back against perfectionism — especially if you grew up with punishingly high writing standards or have internalised the idea that writing only counts if it’s finished, or polished, or part of something “serious.” Publishing unedited notes becomes a tiny act of kindness to yourself: this is where I’m at, and that’s enough. Dave Winer once said blogging is just “the unedited voice of a person”, or as Jana says, “just a person, putting out what they want”. And now that I think about it, that’s what I’m doing right now. Well then, maybe the next step is just to publish the whole lot.
2. (-) But it might make you second-guess everything
If your Zettelkasten, your collection of notes, is truly for thinking — not presenting — then it will inevitably include contradictions, changes of mind, odd tangents, and things that just don’t make sense outside your own head. And let’s face it, a lot of things don’t make sense outside my own head.
One person put it bluntly: “The Zettelkasten isn’t a place for refined thoughts. Mine is messy, gross, tangled, and full of opinions I might not want others to see.”
This reminded me of how sociologist Niklas Luhmann, he of the massive Zettelkasten, likened his notes to a septic tank. Now a septic tank may be useful, but it’s not a part of the house you’d usually show to guests.
And that’s exactly true for your notes, surely. The moment you imagine someone else looking over your shoulder, your writing starts to shift. You start trying to make the sludge less sludgy. You edit more. You second-guess your phrasing. You may even worry about being misunderstood, judged, or taken out of context. Maybe that’s the down-side of ‘shiny’. This kind of self-censorship, if it happens, risks getting in the way of the very thinking process — largely private and interior, says I — that the Zettelkasten is meant to support.
3. (-) Not everything belongs online
There’s also the question of privacy. A few people mentioned that their note collections include sensitive material — references to clients, personal memories, login details (eek!). It’s easy to blur the lines when everything’s in one system. You might start writing something private and only later realise it shouldn’t have been there.
You can, of course, separate public and private notes. Soren Bjornstad does this very clearly: what’s visible online, he says, is just one layer of a larger, mostly private system. That approach makes a lot of sense — but presumably it’s also a bit more work. The truth is, I’d almost certainly get this wrong. A single ‘public’ tag placed in error and all my deepest secrets would surely be revealed. The horror! (OK, no one would care, but still.)
4. (-) Other people might not find your notes useful — or even legible
My individual notes aren’t articles. They’re often fragments, sentence-stubs, or even diagrams, that mainly make sense in a wider web of meaning. A lot of the meaning resides in the links. Even when shared, they’re not necessarily built for outside readers.
One commenter was blunt: “Publishing notes in their native form must be the lowest energy effort I’ve seen so far.” Another said: “Unfinished thoughts online are pointless — no one but yourself would understand them.”
That may be true. But I think it depends on the format, the tone, and the audience. One person commented that they’ve seen and enjoyed notes that feel more like blog posts: short reflections that are personal but still intelligible. When someone’s writing with just a hint of awareness that others might be reading — even if the writing is still in note form — it changes the texture, and for the reader at least, this may be for the better.
5. (+) But sometimes a note is all you need
For others, sharing notes is about being part of an ongoing conversation. You don’t need to write a whole article every time you want to contribute something (looks like I do, because I’m fatally verbose, so sue me). A link to a note — if it’s relevant, coherent, and on-topic — can do the job. Especially in professional communities, it can be a way of saying, “I’ve thought a bit about this — now here’s where I’m at.” In this sense, public notes are a lot like social media posts. You’re happy to put them out there as a means of ‘finding the others’, but you don’t necessarily want them to be held up as your best work ever.
When your notes are already in reasonably good shape, and already feeding into talks, posts, and projects, publishing them just makes sense. They don’t need to be perfect — just coherent enough to be useful. And perhaps that’s the threshold that matters most.
6. (-) It’s not always easy to find the good ones
One reason I don’t always browse other people’s notes is simply that they’re hard to find — especially in niche areas. If someone’s notes intersect with something I care about, it can be a real delight to find them. But discovering those little gems usually takes time, context, or whatever the internet equivalent is for word-of-mouth.
Bring back webrings, someone said. I agree - at least with the sentiment. We definitely need new ways of unearthing this stuff. Personally I’m still keen on RSS as a kind of glue for the indieweb (I know it has issues but I just like it).
7. (+) Still, I’m always on the look-out
Even if I know I won’t “get” much of it, I can’t resist looking. I love the aesthetics of notes — the eccentric emoji-coding, the fiesta of links, the mad web-design skillz, the rhythm of someone else’s thought process made quirkily visible.
Note system aesthetics. What a niche to be in love with!
Sometimes I’m inspired, sometimes my curiosity is piqued. And sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.
8. (+) Public notes are a useful staging post
So this is where I’ve ended up: thinking of public notes not as polished end-products, but as sitting somewhere between private scraps and finished writing.
That’s the principle of the digital garden — you publish early, and let your saplings grow in public. Notes start as “seeds”, then grow into “shoots”, and eventually into “trees”. Some fall by the wayside. Some are pruned. Some sprout surprising branches. And by this time, the metaphor has worn a bit thin.
In his excellent collection of public notes Bill Seitz describes this as “tending your inner and outer gardens” — maintaining both a private system (where you’re free to be messy), and a public-facing one (where ideas get air, attention, and refinement). I quite like this approach.
In fact, it’s already what I do — at least loosely. My private notes feed into slightly more polished pieces: blog posts, public notes, odd fragments I toss online (I have an ineptitude for Mastodon and BlueSky). Some of those get reshaped later into longer essays or more structured arguments. Some don’t. But publishing early makes the next stage easier — and the stages after that more likely.
Thoreau and Emerson, those legendary nineteenth century American writers, wrote in their journals, gave public lectures, edited those talks into essays, and then eventually collected and revised them again for publication. Multiple iterations. A rhythm of emergence.
Maybe the 21st-century equivalent looks something like this:
Of course, not every idea travels the full distance. But the opportunity is there. And each stage helps shape the next.
So, should I publish all my notes online?
No, I don’t think so — it’s just not for me.
I like the rhythm of keeping the first iterations private, then working them into something a bit more coherent and longer, like this post you’re reading now. That’s what feels right for the present.
The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost. writingslowly.com
But I’ll keep reading the note collections other people publish. And rest assured, writing slowly and selectively, I’ll keep sharing little bits of my own.
Some public Zettelkästen worth exploring
If you’re curious to see how others do it — and what kinds of forms a public Zettelkasten might take — here are a few that I keep coming back to (tbh this list is mostly for my own reference but you might also be curious):
Public Zettelkästen and Digital Gardens
Curated Lists and Directories
If you’ve got others to add, please let me know. And since you’ve read this far you might even like to subscribe to my weekly email digest - all the posts in one handy package.
In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public edwinwenink.xyz.
These notes are a constant work in progress and not necessarily intended for your reading. Nevertheless, I submit them to your “voyeurism.”
(HT: Annie)
And previously, Andy Matuschak has recommended working with the garage door up.
But where’s the limit?
Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:
It’s a great time to be writing the future.
Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?
They just innovate harder.
Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.
Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.
Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection
Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?
1. Write notes in your own words
It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.
Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.
2. Refer to the Internet Archive
Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is
Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.
Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.
3. Create your own personal archive
A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.
Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.
Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.
With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.
4. Don’t worry, be happy
Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.
More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?
Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?
5. Sow and then reap
The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.
Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.
None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.
I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.
Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes
Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.
These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.
Here’s a very brief summary of the process:
The In-box
Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.
Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.
The Sleeping folder
The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.
The Reference folder
The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.
The Main folder
Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.
Taming the chaos
That’s it.
Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.
Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.
💬 This is a quiet space…
Moving to Sydney offered cheap train travel compared with Europe. “Never mind arriving,” I would say, “it’s great value just for the view.”
Looks like they’ve finally worked out the real value proposition.
Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to
It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?
I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.
Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.
He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.
Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:
“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”
By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.
That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.
“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’
According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.
In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:
“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”
Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:
“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”
Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.
If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.
That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.
In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.
Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.
The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:
“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”
Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.
So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.
Footnote:
Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.
“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion
Acknowledgement
Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?
References
Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.
Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.
Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…
Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary
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The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive
Georges Didi-Huberman’s extensive collection of over 148,000 notes exemplifies the enduring relevance and creativity of the Zettelkasten method in art and philosophy.
Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes
Note-taking should mainly serve as a means to enable writing rather than being an exhaustive record of knowledge. At least, that’s my approach.
My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts
Writing is a messy, iterative process involving rough ideas, multiple drafts, and the challenge of balancing note-taking with drafting to ultimately create coherent work.
I’m always comparing my sloppy first drafts with other people’s heavily-edited published work. So it’s no wonder I’m down on my own stuff; this is a completely unfair contest of my own making.
That’s why I’ve found Dan Harmon’s advice enduringly helpful:
💬 Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit.”
In other words, ‘perfect’ is for editing, not for writing.
💬“I had in my mind to write three books about the world as it was, using concepts and images almost like characters. But I ended up making a long detour.” — Italian author, Roberto Calasso. (Source).
“Long detour” is an apt summary of a writing life, and fitting inspiration for my latest project.
I’ve found writing on Wordpress a bit of a chore. Plenty of features when all I wanted to do was post a little article. These days micro.blog suits me very well.
If you use Wordpress but would enjoy a simpler editing interface here are two newish options:
HT: John Jonston
What comes after content?
The decline of Hollywood has been attributed to the rise of AI-generated ‘content’, leading to a potential cultural shift towards more authentic human creativity. This article explores what comes next and points out the radically new may not be quite as new as it appears.
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)
My notes were full but my heart was empty. Doug Toft travels beyond progressive summarization
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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Well the book arrived this morning. Now I really am publishing slowly!
Publishing slowly
I’m writing so slowly that you might be wondering if I’m ever going to get anything published.
Well wonder no more. I’m happy to say extracts of my memoir, ‘The Green Island Notebook’ are published in the anthology Destinations & Detours: New Australian Writing.
Published by Detour Editions, the collection launches here in Sydney on Sunday 2nd March 2025, and if you happen to be in the vicinity, I’d be delighted to meet you in person.
Book Launch 2pm, Sunday 2nd March, at Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick NSW
Watch out too for news of how you can get your hands on a copy, wherever in the world you find yourself.
And this isn’t the only news on the publishing front. I’ll be sharing details of some further publishing adventures very soon.
But don’t worry, whatever happens, I’ll still be writing slowly.
Randwick Literary Institute, the venue for our book launch, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025. Here it is in 1957, and it hasn’t changed much since then:
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