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.
📷 Photo challenge day 19: equal.
💬 “I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else” - Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning.
Yes, we all do.
#mbjune #zettelkasten
Bob Doto is the author of ‘A System for Writing’.
From reading to note-making to finished draft, his approach connects it all.
I watched his discussion with historian Dan Allosso and took notes so you don’t have to.
#WritingCommunity #NoteTaking #PKM #Zettelkasten #BookWriting #SlowWriting
📷 Photo challenge day 18: texture.
Furry or spiky? Spotted on a boardwalk in the Royal National Park near #Sydney - as featured in day 2.
#mbjune
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.
📷 Photo challenge day 17: warmth.
We saw a curious warning at this year’s Vivid, the big winter festival of light in #Sydney. #mbjune
📷 Photo challenge day 16: blur. A smoking ceremony at Prince Alfred Park, #Sydney. #mbjune
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.
Finished reading: Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling by Henry Lien 📚
A ‘how-to’ book on kishotenketsu, a Japanese storytelling concept that’s an alternative to ’the hero’s quest’. Like many such books, it’s worth reading just for the summaries of example stories.
💬“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.