Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto 📚. Ok, I finished it a while ago, and here’s my enthusiastic review
Finished reading: The Looking-Glass by Machado De Assis 📚 My favourite late 19th century Brazilian author. His novella ‘The Alienist’, included in this collection, is hilarious. The style and tone strongly reminds me of my favourite contemporary Argentinian author, César Aira.
How to get Strata for micro.blog up and running
I’ve decided to make use of the ‘notes’ feature in micro.blog.
This is like making private posts in a blog. But my main use case is brainstorming future blog posts. I want to take notes of half-formed ideas, which may or may not end up as blog posts. They’re not quite draft quality, but I have a hunch they’ll end up as public posts, not just remain as private notes.
The Notes feature is very easy to use. You make notes from the main page by clicking on the ‘Notes’ menu item.
And you can set up multiple ‘notebooks’, which you can rename at will.
But there’s also an iOS app called Strata to make the experience easy and fun. That’s what I wanted to try.
📷 Kookaburra of the day
I know nothing about breakdancing 🤣 but back in October I attended the qualifying event for the Australian breakdancing Olympic team, where I saw Raygun win. So… AMA
Great evening light on the way home 📷
Feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes: Jane Austen's timely advice for writers and creators
Jane Austen died in the cathedral city of Winchester on July 18, 1817; she was 41 years old.
Towards the end of her too-short life, in a brief five-year period between 1811 and 1816, she published four great novels. Originally released anonymously to a just a handful of positive reviews and scant financial success, these works are now among the most celebrated in the English language.
My favourite tool is this notebook I made
I couldn’t find a note-making app that really suited me so I made one myself.
OK, that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s really just a heavily modified version of TiddlyWiki but it feels tailor-made. And working with it fits me like a glove. It’s a great example of making a creative working environment. That’s important. You have to make your own environment. Some people hate TiddlyWiki. That’s fine too.
I wanted a notemaking environment that would let me:
- write atomic notes,
- write in Markdown syntax,
- link notes easily,
- re-combine notes by transclusion,
- easily search through all my notes without clutter; and
- export notes without stress.
Here’s how I made my personalised notemaking app.
Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget
Do we really need to remember everything?
This is the question posed by Lewis Hyde’s memorable book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past 📚
He says:
“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.” ― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
Forgetting is the essence of what makes us human
The subtitle of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, promotes the art and science of ‘remembering everything’. Yet Foer accepts that forgetting is an essential aspect of memory. He quotes the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges:
“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.” – Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven't got one
This week I was making notes about a presentation when my colleague looked over and offered to just give me the slides. I said thanks, of course. But really I was making my notes to help me remember the key information. If I just referred to the slides, I’d never assimilate the presentation - I’d just listen then forget. Conversely, while I might never look at the notes again, since it was me that made them, some of it has now sunk in.
Many people make notes to help them remember things, but how do you do it?
Thanks to @guidostevens@kolektiva.social I found this great quote from Cal Newport, from his book Slow Productivity.
“You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.” - Cal Newport
See also: writing slowly is back in fashion.
💬"The note you just took has yet to realize its potential." - Bob Doto, A System for Writing
A System for Writing by Bob Doto
“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto
Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical.
📚A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!
If you’ve become confused or cynical watching those endless videos in which an influencer who discovered the Zettelkasten five minutes ago is suddenly the expert; or if you’ve read Sönke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes and thought “now I know why I should make notes but I still don’t really know how”, well here’s the antidote: the only Zettelkasten book you’ll ever need.
My paperback copy of A System for Writing arrived just in time for weekend reading. It’s a deliberately useful book, with a clear three-part structure. It gets to the point quickly and stays there: how to write notes, how to connect them and how to use this system to produce finished written work.
Things I especially appreciate in A System for Writing:
- Plenty of clear and specific examples of notes of all sorts. People often ask ‘but what should a note look like?’ Here’s the answer, visually.
- Many helpful workflow diagrams. People also ask ‘how does the system operate as a whole?’ This book shows exactly how the Zettelkasten process works, and in what order.
- Clear references both to Niklas Luhmann’s process and to other relevant predecessors. If you want to refer back to the sources, there is a wealth of pointers here.
- At the end of each chapter, a checklist of specific activities to try, to implement the ideas just covered: what to do, what to remember and what to watch out for. If you’re wondering exactly what to do next with your notes, this book shows you (also, what not to do, especially in ch. 7).
- Helpful writing advice, which shows how to use your Zettelkasten to produce four different kinds of material: short-short items (i.e. social media posts), blog posts, articles and books.
- Overall, a clear, step-by-step, repeatable writing process to follow, from capturing your thoughts (ch. 1) right through to managing your writing workflow (ch. 9).
Will anyone be disappointed? Well, if you’re only looking for a manual on a particular piece of software, this book won’t satisfy you. It tells almost nothing about whatever the popular app-of-the-day is. You are not going to be told here whether Obsidian is better than Obshmidian. Software comes and goes, while the underlying principles of the Zettelkasten approach, as presented here, can be applied in many different contexts.
What about those who aren’t all that interested in actually publishing anything, who instead just want their notes to help them remember stuff, perhaps for tests? Well, although this book focuses without apology on writing, it will still be really useful for anyone making notes as a ‘second memory’ (Luhmann’s term) because by reading this (especially the first two parts) they’ll soon be making clearer, more concise and more accessible notes, whatever they intend to use them for.
And what of those who have absolutely no interest in obscure terms like ‘Zettelkasten’, who recoil from any kind of dubious productivity fetish, and just want to get things written? This is where the book excels and where it really comes good on the promise of its title. Yes, this is a system for writing. The author, who has himself written several books, shows from his direct experience how an effective note-making practice can lead to a more natural, unforced, effective and consistent writing practice. The Zettelkasten as presented here is an approach to note-making that will simply aid writing, without wasting time or effort.
This has certainly been my experience. Before I implemented my own Zettelkasten approach I was struggling both with organising my notes and with producing coherent writing. Since then, it’s been a different story. But until now there hasn’t been a Zettelkasten guidebook I’d wholeheartedly recommend to others. Now there certainly is.
So if you want to learn quickly how to capture your ideas effectively and write productively, stress-free, then get hold of A System for Writing right now.
More about Bob Doto.
Read about the illusion of integrated thought, which is cited in chapter 7 of the book.
My take on starting a Zettelkasten: How to make a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience.
Here’s why Puss in Boots is my hero: he made something from nothing, and so can we.
This article was part of the June 2024 IndieWeb Carnival: DIY - Something from (almost) nothing, hosted by Andrei. There’s a great roundup of the submissions.
Why not take part in the Carnival? July’s theme is Tools
Something from nothing is no fairy tale
As an adult, one of my favourite fairy tales is Puss in Boots.
I have immense respect for this talking cat. He has nothing going for him - not even a decent pair of shoes. And to make matters worse he finds himself lumbered with a pretty mediocre human owner.
Folklore academics have a way of classifying the tales they study. It’s called the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU). And in this index, Puss in Boots is Type 545: the cat as helper.
That’s completely wrong.
Read it for yourself. This story is not about the frankly lacklustre youngest son of the mill. No, it’s about the cat, a cat who has almost no help, who has to do practically everything himself, and who never gives up until finally he gets what he needs.
The great writer Angela Carter would have agreed with this. She observed the cat was “the servant so much the master already“. But this is hardly controversial. Perrault’s version of the story actually has the title “The Master Cat“.
So as you probably remember, the tale begins when the cat experiences an unexpected disaster. The old miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son.
But the mill’s cat he leaves to the youngest son.
Not only is the cat suddenly homeless, but to make things even worse his fate is now shackled to a penniless human without prospects.
So what’s a homeless cat to do?
Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Yes indeed, why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Here’s Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, on working at the University of Melbourne English Department library as a student:
“It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?” - Every book you could want and many more
My take on this?
- What is the real work of serendipity?
- A library of good neighbours
- The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison
HEAJ:Mundaneum by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0
A minimal approach to making notes
I want a minimal approach to making notes.
I don’t want anything fancy, just enough structure to be useful.
When I see people’s souped-up Obsidian note-taking vaults my head spins (OK, I’m jealous). I also wonder, though, what extra result is achieved with a fantastically complex system. Having said that, I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them, and I do admire people’s creativity in this area.
I just can’t be bothered to do it myself.
When discussing the Zettelkasten approach to making notes, it seems there are a lot of different note types to consider, which confuses people. The extensive discussion about different types of notes caused by reading Sonke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes makes me think this multiple-note-types approach is just too complicated for me. So what do I do instead?
Five useful articles about writing
Here are five links with worthwhile writing advice. 🖋️
- How to think in writing, part 1: The thought behind the thought by Henrik Karlsson.
- Chase your reading by Robin Hanson.
- Learning by writing by Holden Karnovsky.
- How to make writing less hard by Oliver Burkeman.
- When to begin writing by Sheldon Richmond (it’s an old one but a good one).
Finished reading: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa 📚
This made me want to visit Kanda Jimbochu, the second-hand bookstore quarter of Tokyo, where the novel is set. Perhaps it’s a bit of a tourist trap, but hey, books!
The story is a little thin, but then just yesterday I heard an amazing true story about a book shop, that would sound unbelievable if it was ever put in a novel - so maybe this experience has set the bar a little high.
Image: Kenichiro MATOHARA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
