Atomic Notes
“Sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.” - writingslowly.com
Don't let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever
The Zettelkasten note-taking system offers a structured approach to organizing thoughts but might induce “archive fever,” which may lead to an obsession with preservation over actual writing. Here’s how to protect yourself.
📷 Photo challenge day 25: decay.
My worm farm is amazing! By turning waste into compost these little wrigglers perfom a kind of magic.
It’s also a metaphor for my writing process. I don’t worry if the input is rotten. The output will be quite different.
See also: No writing is wasted
Don’t throw away your old notes
Don’t throw out your old notes, even if you feel overwhelmed by them. Here are some helpful ideas on what to do instead.
What to do when you've made some notes: Start writing
The next step after taking notes is to create a finished piece of writing, acknowledging that the first draft may be disorganized but serves as a foundation for improvement.
What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book
Historian Dan Allosso led a discussion on Bob Doto’s insights on flexible note-taking and writing processes. It emphasised the importance of iterative development and audience engagement. Here are my notes.
Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress
What happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind?
I’ve often felt the culture moves on too fast, leaving so much on the table in terms of untapped potential. This is certainly true for pop music. Fashions come and go so fast that they leave great concepts stranded in time. You could write a great glam rock song in 2023, but you would have needed at all costs to avoid staying stuck in 1973. The trick is to avoid descending from homage into mere pastiche.
The Nemesis guide to being early described the fashion cycle as an endless process in which:
“each new thing is supplanted by another new thing, and no linear pattern emerges. Things very rarely reach the plateau of productivity, more often falling straight to Hades through the trough of disillusionment. No one seems to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday.”
THE NEMESIS GUIDE TO BEING EARLY nemesisglobal.substack.com
But it’s worse than that. It’s not just that, mysteriously, no one merely seems to follow up. It feels like they’re not allowed to.
💬“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.
A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has got me thinking about memory, identity, the fallibility of writing, and the paradox that intrinsic value might be created rather than found
💬 “There’s a left-field way of thinking about the world that doesn’t follow the straight path. The route forward doesn’t have to lead in one true direction but potentially many.”
Non-linear narratives inspire non-linear notes.
