Atomic Notes
- Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
- Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
- Success!
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Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. (1935). Pp. 251-83 in Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings. 4: 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, and Others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. PDF | monoskop.org. There’s been a huge amount of commentary on this seminal but problematic text, and AI has given it a new lease on life, including:
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Szpakowski, Michael. 2026. “Art and AI—Benjamin’s ‘aura’ as a Locus of Resistance: Notes, Theses and Images” Arts 15, no. 5: 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15050093
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The same claim could be made of the very popular ‘ComicCon’ events around the world. Supposedly ‘disposable’, mass-produced pop culture thrives on physical presence. ↩︎
- Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes.
- So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies.
- A minimal approach to writing notes.
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Just now I discovered Marked3 will verify your hyperlinks for you and can even do so automatically. ↩︎
- Improve your notes and your life with two-word phrases.
- Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
- Even the index is just another note.
- Top level categories in my notes.
- When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
What comes after the golden age of prescriptive non-fiction
Tim Ferriss, the author of self-help classics such as The Four Hour Work Week, noted a very sharp drop in his book sales since the arrival of AI back in late 2022. He viewed this as a real turning point for the ‘self-help’ genre of writing. He asked, ‘Has AI already killed nonfiction?’ and concluded:
“The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.” – Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?
The solution? He suggested the way forward is to return to the basics:
I don’t know that the work of Tim Ferriss is a clear bellwether for the entire genre. He’s a unicorn and there will always be a few of those. My feeling is that the industry ran a little ahead of itself in treating self-help books as stand-alone products in their own right. I always saw them as derivative, secondary products. The books were never the main event. The main event was always none other than the author. People want a direct connection with a real expert who has actually been successful at the exact thing they’re writing about – or at least knowledgeable. The gold standard, the most desirable activity, would be a personal audience with that expert. Failing that, they want to meet the expert in some kind of face-to-face encounter of learning, exchange or connection. And only then does the book become an item of value. The book is always a proxy for the personalised encounter; it’s not really the primary expression of the encounter itself. The book is a kind of souvenir of the experience, which works, curiously enough, even if you didn’t actually take part in the face-to-face version.
I’m not saying anything new here. It’s obvious that people prefer the expert – not least in the amount of money people are prepared to pay for face-to-face encounters compared with a book of the same thing. Take popular psychology, as just one possible example. You might pay a psychologist $150 or more per 50-minute session, and you might even book numerous sessions, whereas you’ll only pay $10-30 for the psychologist’s book. The book is a real bargain, but you don’t care: what you really want is the real thing. For a live audience with a world famous therapist you might be prepared to pay ten times the going rate, or more. A similar dynamic is at work well beyond the subject of popular psychology: if you liked the book, you’ll love the live event. Consider how much you might be paying these days to see Tim Ferriss live.
And a similar value gradient is evident well beyond the prescriptive non-fiction genre. It seems to hold for writing more generally. The Sydney Writers’ Festival, for example, a week of live events with authors, had its most successful year ever in 2026, as measured by ticket sales and attendance figures. Just across the Tasman Sea, the Aukland Writers’ Festival also had its most successful year in 2026.
Then too, the annual Hay Festival in Wales had a very successful 2026, with 210,000 tickets issued and book sales up 35%.
At the last minute the Adelaide Book Week suddenly collapsed due to arguments about disinviting a writer over Israel-Palestine views. That was unfortunate, but despite this massive setback, the local writing and publishing community was determined enough to set up a one-off festival in its place, even at the last minute, with nearly fifty events, many sold out.
The spread and great success of these writers’ festivals shows that people are very keen to meet face-to-face to discuss books in one another’s physical presence, and especially in the presence of their favourite authors.1 These days every medium-sized town upwards seems to have its own festival of writing. Even a small but well-formed town like Berry in New South Wales, with a population of less than two and a half thousand, has its own very well-organised Berry Writers’ Festival. Perhaps your local town does too.
This might well be hyperbole, but apparently, writers’ festivals are ’the new raves’.
It’s rather curious. Why on earth would anyone want to sit in an audience gazing for an hour or so at an author whose books they like reading, then endure a question session made from variants of “Where do you get your ideas from”? Isn’t the book itself, just reading the book, the main event here? Well, yes and no. In reading a book the reader implicitly imagines themselves in some sort of connection with its author, and to see this connection come to life is valuable in itself.
If the book isn’t a souvenir of the live encounter, just try telling that to the line of people queuing patiently for the author to sign their very own copy.
Uncategorizable (’Quixotic’) millionaire David Walsh has opened an impressive new wing of his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, to house his library, which gives pride of place to expensive signed editions of works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Isaac Asimov’s PhD thesis. Presumably the paying public will treat these signed tomes a little like they treat the original art work of great artists. They have an aura, as cultural theorist Walter Benjamin would have said.
So, what’s the future of prescriptive non-fiction? Not just to reconnect with a thousand true fans, but to do so in a very particular way: in person.
In person matters now more than ever. The rise of AI makes people question their purpose, given that machines can now ‘do it better’. There’s a kind of shame at being human.
As artist and film-maker Michael Szpakowski says:
“AI renders culture a succession of isolated and static (and largely digital) objects rather than an ongoing dynamic and historical dialogic expression of our embodied and reflecting humanity.”
The more AI subverts and destroys the very idea of human agency, the greater will be the push-back towards real, physical presence – something humans are still quite good at. We’re seeing this in many areas of culture, and we’re certainly seeing it with books and writing.
Further reading:
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.
The swamp and the swamp monster: On seeing like a data structure
As human knowledge fragments into trillions of data-points hidden in unreadable databases, there’s a sense of something — legibility, coherence, correlation — dissolving or liquefying. In a very interesting article, [Fear of oozification], the consultant Venkatesh Rao, clarifies this process by naming it, and he charts a path to help us learn “how to stop worrying, and learn to love the ooze”.
Oozification? What are you talking about? Well, here’s Venkatash’s working definition:
“Oozification is the process of recursively replacing systems based on numerous larger building blocks, governed by many rules, with ones based on fewer, smaller building blocks, governed by fewer rules, thereby increasing the number of evolutionary possibilities and lowering the number of evolutionary certainties.”
Oozification is an evocative but perhaps clumsy term. If you don’t like it, you can look at it another way: the triumph of data abstraction and indirection. The authors of another worthwhile article, ‘[Seeing like a data structure]’, offer a clear, practical illustration of the process:
The Destiny of Your Notes Depends on Their Data Model
It feels a little overwhelming to observe the sheer number of note-making apps that promise to “revolutionize your thinking” or something similarly impressive.
I came across a website called the [Markdown Handbook], which lists about forty markdown editors and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’ve felt it’s too much, you’re not alone. Most of these tools offer endless variations of the same features, minor tweaks disguised as major innovations. We have an abundance of options, yet precious little genuine progress.
And with AI ‘vibe-coding’ the field is expanding beyond all comprehension. Everyone can build their own writing app now and some of them look pretty good too. Joan Westenberg’s app [Kerouac] is just one example of how good the results can be.[^1]
Recently I read Matt Brown’s essay “[Your Data Model is Your Destiny],” which explores how software companies are shaped by their fundamental data structures. Now he’s an ‘early-stage investor’, writing for a tech start-up audience, but I got it into my head that his principle very much applies to note-making too. Even for something as simple as making notes, the underlying data model, the way your knowledge is stored and connected, determines a tool’s power and longevity.
“do not research simply to decorate your writing with impressive names and references. Research should extend your thinking, not replace it.” — Alexis McElroy, The Muse & The Melody, How to Turn Your Thoughts Into Something Worth Reading. Substack
nvALT is back from the dead?
Surprising news that Brett Terpstra has resurrected the venerable note making app nvALT. Yes indeed, nvALT is back from the dead.
True, we’ve been waiting what seems like centuries for the long-promised, upgraded and massively improved version, nvULTRA to appear, but since it isn’t yet available, at least now there’s an interim solution, a revamped nvALT.
I expect almost everyone who might need a simple note-making app that plays nicely with Markdown files has already long since moved on to other options, such as any one of many text editors, or MarkEdit on the Mac, or nvENVY, or The Archive or Zettlr, or Obsidian or Bear — or you name it.
Still, it’s nice to see nvALT, the (almost) original and (possibly) the best, back in action. Maybe it’ll also encourage a few people to check out Brett Terpstra’s app Marked3, which for anyone working with Markdown files is rather useful. It’s billed as a ‘Markdown preview’ app but it does a whole lot more than that, including things I didn’t know were possible1. And I can confirm that the latest release of nvALT works well with Marked’s ‘streaming preview’ feature.
A while ago, Christian of zettelkasten.de produced a handy guide for using nvALt as a Zettel note archive, though the specialised Zettelkasten apps, The Archive and Zettlr add features that some fans of this approach to making notes may well find indispensable. But since life is complicated enough as it is, I’m an advocate of using the simplest tools you can get away with for A minimal approach to writing notes, and nvALT is useful, fast and simple.
And talking of simplicity and of the (almost) original, the real OG, the venerable Notational Velocity, has been receiving updates recently too, after a long dormancy. It seems to have come back to life with a new release after a remarkable fifteen year gap.
Interesting that these note-making apps still seem useful and relevant after all these years. And hold onto your hat: for the long-awaited nvUltra release, apparently Brett is ‘shooting for 2026 still’.
Now read:
💬 “Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 89.3. Cited by Michel de Montagne in ‘On Experience’ in The Essays: A Selection. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 3.13, 366.
This is true, potentially, of writing notes. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.
The solution? Link your notes and create hub or structure notes (there is a difference — see Bob Doto’s post for details) that cluster separate ideas together and lead in useful directions.
What I'm writing in October 2026
The main purpose of my collection of notes, organised according to the Zettelkasten principle, is to help me complete writing projects, mainly small but sometimes large too.
I’m always jotting down thoughts and ideas to use in my ever-expanding blog empire. For example, for some time I’ve been making notes on ideas about data structures. Soon these notes will see the light of day as an article or two.
And I’m constantly working on larger projects which inch very slowly towards fruition. At the moment I’m working on a sequel of sorts to my book, Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning. And I’m also working on a memoir about a journey around Ireland with my father thirty years ago.
As I’ve written about, my writing process oscillates between notes and drafts, so really it’s quite hard to separate the Zettelkasten notes from the drafts. Together they constitute a miniature working environment in which I think and write. Having said that, my writing system does keep them separate. The drafts are on a one-way journey to publication of some sort, whereas the notes are modular and can be used again in different contexts.
My aim is to reconfigure networks of concepts to create new knowledge and insight.
One area where I feel there’s scope to do things differently is in my reading. At the moment I seem to be reading more material than I’m making notes on. This feels a bit like a wasted opportunity. I need to be more systematic with my process here. Perhaps I can slow down my reading pace to let my notemaking keep up. I’m not one of those people who frets if I haven’t made 300 notes about a single book. I’m content with a dozen (provided it’s the right dozen, of course). But there’s a couple of books with nothing at all noted. I must make a time to correct this.
Read more:
How to write an article from your notes.
Why not publish all your notes online?
I found a way to create order from my jumbled notes
Three worthwhile modes of note-making, and one not so worthwhile.
Bookshops in Sydney. How's it going?
In the house by the ocean where we’re currently staying there’s a copy of Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, For the Time Being. In the inside back cover there’s a label from the store where it was purchased: Norton Street Books in Leichhardt, Sydney. That book shop has long since closed, so long ago that I’ve never personally heard anyone mention its existence. But then this year when Berkelouw Books, also on Norton Street in Leichhardt, announced they were shutting down I realised I’ve been living in Sydney for long enough now to have experienced the closure and opening of many bookstores over the years.
A good decade before COVID, around 2010 there was a period when it felt as though there was a real culling of Sydney bookshops. This was around the time Dymocks closed several of their CBD branch stores to focus on just their flagship store on George Street. Each closure felt like the end of an era. Cumulatively it was seriously worrying. And then the turmoil grew worse.
Faint praise for categories
Author and activist Rebecca Solnit isn’t too keen on the apparent eagerness to categorise.
“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.” — A is for Airtight Categories
I’m not all that keen on the established categories myself. Not in my notes, anyway, and often not in my life. I’m not looking for categories. Instead, I’m usually looking for patterns.
I feel that placing an idea or concept in a category tends to close down further thought, like closing the lid on a box. In contrast, discovering a pattern tends to be just the start of consideration, of enquiry, of conversation, not the end of it.
Patterns invite a sense of wonder; categories tend to deny it. As Solnit said I her book Hope in the Dark, “the Moon is profound except when we land on it”.
Being quick to categorise can look like a neat short-cut to understanding, but it often doesn’t work out that way. Established categories can hide more than they reveal. Relying on them can be a way of fooling yourself into believing you know more than you do. One of the reasons I write slowly is to allow myself space and time to think through my ignorance — and to think things through by writing them down. Solnit says:
“We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted.”
Well, I feel being uncertain or uncommitted isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and writing slowly isn’t necessarily a sign of laziness. Look where certain, committed and fast has got us in recent times.
And admitting that you don’t know, far from being a sign of ignorance, is often a hallmark of expertise. That’s the paradox of mastery. It’s why the expert must remain a beginner.
One kind of category I do have time for is the category that no one has thought of yet. Creating new categories of thought is how the world is re-made. It’s curious that those who are the keenest on categories tend to be the least receptive to the idea that we just made them up.
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Further reading:
There is something you find interesting
💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989.
I’ve mentioned Annie Dillard previously, and in fact have quoted another section from this very article.
Anyway, Dillard put her finger on the reason I wrote my little book, Shu Ha Ri, the Japanese Way of Learning. Not that no one else understood the concept (I mean, almost everyone in Japan probably understands it better than me), but that I’d never seen a satisfying book-length treatment. So that’s where I began, by expressing my own fascination.