article
- Enabling environment
- Enacted experience
- The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
- Taking knowledge work seriously
- First I made notes on Andy Matuschak’s process, without quite knowing what I’d use them for.
- Then by writing these notes I realised I was interested in ‘how to write an article from your notes’.
- This became a kind of bucket, even though I didn’t yet have the words to call it that.
- And then, weeks later, when I read the stuff about the ‘bucket theory of creativity’, my latest reading was magnetically attracted to my pre-existing theme or preoccupation, and I added it to the draft of an article.
- The draft still needed to be drafted. I didn’t just copy my notes one after another. But the process was made straightforward becasue I never had to wonder what would come next, or what the point was. These decisions were already formed.
- First I logged into the webpage for micro.blog on my PC.
- I clicked on ‘Notes’, near the foot of the main menu to the left of the screen.
- Just to the right of the ‘New Note’ button, there is an ellipsis button (…) that presumably indicates more options. I clicked on that.
- The ellipsis button gave me three choices, import, export and settings. I clicked on ‘Settings’.
- Success! There’s a button that says, ‘Show Secret Key’. I clicked on it. This gave me a long string of letters and numbers that I didn’t feel like copying.
- Fortunately there was also a big QR code. “Scan the QR code for easy setup on iOS. Android coming soon.”
- I took a photo of that with my iPad, which immediately offered to open it with Strata.
- I allowed this and the key copied straight to the Strata app. I was in.
- 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.
- Base: TiddlyWiki. I can’t stand the look of the plain OG version but I love the notebook theme that can easily be added.
- Backlinks: To enable backlinks I have found a couple of basic plug-ins really useful and would strongly recommend:
- TWCrossLinks. This adds a footer to your notes to show backlinks and freelinks.
- Relink. This enables automatic renaming of titles and other items across links.
- To-Do: For a to-do list, I greatly admire Projectify, which I have used for work, but for personal use I like the super-simple but effective Chandler, written by the late Joe Armstrong (godfather of Haskell). He talks you through how he wrote it, which in itself is a mini-masterclass in how to customise TiddlyWiki.
- Help: Finally I’ll mention the active and very helpful TiddlyWiki user forum.
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Me too! I hate the name TiddlyWiki, and I hate the word ‘tiddler’ and generally I hate the aesthetic. That’s why I’ve changed it. ↩︎
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Does anyone ever say this any more!? I’m showing my age! ↩︎
- 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).
- What is the real work of serendipity?
- A library of good neighbours
- The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison
- Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology.
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Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia
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Document your journey through the deep forest
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Avoid inert ideas
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Converse about what really matters to you
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Imagine, then build, new knowledge products
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Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from
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An example
- Maureen Murdock (1990) and later Gail Carriger (2020) have both presented feminised versions of the heroic quest narrative. I’m not convinced that these heroine’s journeys are really all that different, though, since they still assume that heroism, albeit that of women, is where it’s at. At least there’s an attempt to re-balance the faulty idea that only men are at the centre.
- The New Yorker published a moving non-fiction account by Laura Secor of an Iranian woman’s bravery. The true story of journalist Asieh Amini doesn’t rely on a standard heroic arc, yet is highly effective. This is only one example of very many alternatives.
- Novelist Becky Chambers points out in a talk on YouTube that real life has no protagonists. Surely this can help us to question stale narrative forms, especially those which claim to be true to reality.
- Meanwhile, Christina de la Rocha is on a noble quest to put an end to the hero’s journey in literature and beyond. OK, not a quest. Perhaps she’d approve of Ursula le Guin’s claim that “the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story”. More on that in a moment.
- Screenwriter Anthony Mullins has written a whole book showing that there’s plenty more than only one kind of character arc.
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See also Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1994) on women’s role in technology, textiles and the string revolution. ↩︎
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If you’re not sure what website feeds are, see IndieWeb: feed reader and how to use RSS feeds. ↩︎
How to write an article from your notes - an example
In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.
Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.
Reverse-engineering a published article
Matuschak is known for having created an intriguing online instance of his notes, which he modestly calls ‘Andy’s working notes’. The article about learning is constructed from a sequence of these individual notes which he has been working on for several years.
His article evolved over time from his individual evergreen notes, which he eventually coalesced into an ‘outline note’ called Enabling Environments, games, and the Primer.
If you’re wondering how to create finished written work out of your individual notes, you’ll find it worthwhile to check out these different stages of Andy’s thinking and writing process. It’s worth exploring how he takes nearly 60 individual notes, combines them into the outline of a coherent argument, then takes that outline and re-writes it as a complete publishable essay.
You can see how the thinking process revolves around a few key ideas which themselves have been fleshed out with numerous notes. Key ideas here include:
These notes are similar to what Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing calls ‘high-level views’. Notice that the process of aggregation is modular, cumulative and iterative. The note ‘Taking knowledge work seriously’ is itself an outline note. And you can see there how Andy aggregates a series of individual notes to produce an outline for a presentation.
There are also sections in the outline which are underdeveloped, and flagged as such. For example, at one point there is the warning:
“==TODO this section quite under-defined in general; some important ideas aren’t yet captured here, but we also have big holes in our theories here==”
Elsewhere, he modestly comments:
“==I have to know more than this to publish, I think==”
On his Patreon page, Andy has reflected on his note-making experiences in a post for supporters only (there’s a short audio preview though). ‘Five years of evergreen notes’.
It’s a repeatable process
So we can see that before the article ever comes into existence there’s a whole set of notes that may or may not end up contributing to the finished piece.And then at some point an organising principle comes into view. In this case it was “Taking knowledge work seriously” and “Enacted experience” and “Enabling environments” and so on. Then these began to coalesce into a bigger, more focused idea, which was ‘Enabling environments, games, and the Primer’. Eventually, from all these atomic ideas, molecules formed, and they were refined until they became the final article, ‘Exorcising us of the Primer’.
That’s all very well, but how am I supposed to do this myself?
Make ‘buckets’ for your ideas
Well, you can take the bucket approach. Let’s say you have a vague idea for a piece of writing of some kind. It’s an idea that niggles at you, that begs to be explored, that you have a hunch might eventually become something you’d like to share with others.Now turn that idea into a bucket that you can gradually fill with content.
James Somers says:
“When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.” More people should write
The problem with a bucket is that it really doesn’t care what you put in it. And this extreme flexibility might not always be so helpful.
Dumping all your quotes and bookmarks into an app like Sublime or Arena or Evernote or OneNote is great and all, but when the time comes to write the article, all you’ll have to go on is a massive pile of other people’s words. You thought you were working but all you were really doing is saving the real work for later.
I used to do this as an undergraduate student. I’d spend ages marshalling all the ‘evidence’ (AKA quotes), thinking I was on the right track, then the evening before the deadline I’d be faced with the mammoth task of somehow turning all this raw material into an essay. It was painful. You can’t get away with just stitching together quotes from other people. And you can’t just mash together a set of notes and expect it to make an instant essay. You have to write it yourself.
There has to be a better way - and there is.
The great thing about the Zettelkasten approach is that it helps you write your own ideas as you go along. You don’t only copy-paste hot takes like I did just now with James Somers’s post about the mental buckets. Instead, you write your own stuff, one idea at a time, on separate notes that you can combine in multiple ways.
Notice that Andy Matuschak worked this way. If you read any one of the 60 or so notes that informed his final article you can see that each one stands up on its own as a solid nugget of original creative work. And because he put the effort in early in the process it must have taken less effort to finish the piece at the end. Of course it’s hardly no effort to write a solid article. But by doing it this way you can focus your late energy on quality writing rather than still having to grapple with a mass of quotes and snippets with no rhyme or reason, and no clear direction.
So the ‘bucket’ starts life as a single note with an idea on it. You gradually expand this idea, by adding new notes which link to it, or by linking to existing notes. and some of these notes might be structure notes - they might aggregate other combinations of notes, to give you a high-level view of where you’re going.
How I did it
If you squint, you can see that this very article was made by using the bucket metaphor.
The Zettelkasten approach doesn’t do the writing work for you, but it’s a helpful way of building up your ideas, note by note, until they become something you find worth sharing, like the post you’ve just finished reading, and which I hope you’ve found at least a little useful.
Read more:
A minimal approach to making notes
From fragments you can build a greater whole
How to decide what to include in your notes
Photo from Unsplash
Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes
I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.
Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?
If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.
It’s hardly magic.
You can create these notes with any basic text editor, but I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them. So if you’re looking for a few bells and whistles, here are four note-making apps that seem to offer just enough features and not too many. Oh, and they’re open source and free to use, so you know, use them. Go make your notes!
“Hey, check these out!"
Zettlr
“Zettlr offers first-class support for any style of curating your own Zettelkasten. Zettlr supports note IDs, internal Wiki-style links, related files, seamless navigation, and even a graph view.”
There’s a fairly good summary of how to use Zettlr for the Zettelkasten approach to making notes.
Who’s it for?
Academics and others who want to write and publish their research with Markdown and who aren’t totally scared of Pandoc and LaTeX but could do with a little support in that area.
Who’s it not for?
Anyone averse to Pandoc or LaTeX (although you can just ignore these and still use Zettlr).
NB
“a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application with plain text data storage, … Initializing a folder as an nb local notebook is a very easy way to add structured git versioning to any folder of documents and other files.”
There’s a very brief nb-for-Zettelkasten summary.
Who’s it for?
Anyone who prefers command line tools, likes the idea of syncing their notes using Git, and wants maximum format flexibility.
Who’s it not for?
Windows users who never worked out how to run Linux-native apps and who aren’t about to start now. Ditto for command-line refuseniks.
Foam
“a note-taking tool that lives within VS Code… Foam is open source, and allows you to create a local first, markdown based, personal knowledge base. You can also use it to publish your notes.”
Who’s it for?
Anyone who already uses VSCode (it’s Microsoft’s flagship code editor) but wants some note management goodness, and anyone who might otherwise use the paid notemaking app that Foam rhymes with.
Who’s it not for?
Timid souls who might be put off by apps that are ‘still in preview’.
LogSeq
“Logseq is a knowledge management and collaboration platform. It focuses on privacy, longevity, and user control. Logseq offers a range of powerful tools for knowledge management, collaboration, PDF annotation, and task management with support for multiple file formats”.
Who’s it for?
They say “Logseq is a networked outliner”, so if you love outliners it might well be for you.
Who’s it not for?
People who don’t love outliners, I suppose. Oh, and they’re planning to make LogSeq Pro a paid app, so it might not be for freeloaders (eventually).
Well, that’s the end of this little roundup. Please let me know what fantastic app you find most suits you - and why.
And for the record, I couldn’t find a note-making app I really liked so I made one myself (sort-of).
Image:
No it’s not a bunch of hyped-up influencers salivating over the latest batch of AI-enabled notemaking apps. It’s actually a Marshall University “arena registration” utilizing IBM punched cards, in 1968.
Source:
Dickinson, Jack L., and Arnold R. Miller. In the Beginning…A Legacy of Computing at Marshall University : A brief history of the early computing technology at Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va., in the forty years: 1959-1999. Huntington, Marshall University Libraries, 2018. PDF
Now read: A minimal approach to writing notes
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.
It was tricky to get started, though, because you have to sync up the encryption between micro.blog and the Strata app.
Manton, the creator of micro.blog, admits as much. In the original announcement he said:
“We’ve tried to keep it simple, but honestly it can be confusing, and we expect a few bumps along the road. We will continue to make it as seamless as possible. There are options to download a copy of the “secret key” used in Micro.blog, as well as saving a copy to iCloud. I recommend both.”
When I first opened the iPad Strata app, after installing it, it asked for a secret key, but I had no idea where to find this.
It turned out to be quite hidden - appropriate, I guess, for a secret key, but not very intuitive.
Here’s how I found the key I needed to get Strata up and running.
There was also an option to download the secret key instead, but I found I didn’t need this. Nor did I use the option to add the secret key to the iCloud. I think that means every time I log out and back in, I’ll have to reload the secret key - but I don’t expect to be doing this too often.
I also expect I’ll be sharing notes with others. I imagine this as an easy way of sharing private (but not secret) information among a few people. It might be a good way of sharing draft blog posts before they’re published. When you click ‘‘share" on a note, a private weblink is created, and anyone with the link will then be able to see the note. You can unshare notes too, of course.
This kind of functionality is already baked into many web apps and I’m happy it’s now included in micro.blog
There are a few interesting possibilities for the future here. One that excites me is to connect the notes feature with the fantastic bookshelf feature. Let’s say I’m currently reading a particular book which appears on my micro.blog bookshelf. I’d also like to take notes within micro.blog specifically associated with that book. Soon, I’m hoping, that might be possible.
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 TiddlyWiki1. That’s fine too.
I wanted a notemaking environment that would let me:
Here’s how I made my personalised notemaking app.
I see TiddlyWiki as a rhizomatic tool - one of several. A rhizomatic tool, the way I see it, is one that foregrounds the network and its many connections, while pushing to the background the hierarchy, whether it be temporal, semantic, thematic or any other structure. Such a tool helps users to create “mobile, stable and combinable inscriptions” that enable “action at a distance” (Latour, 1987).
Since about 2020 a fad has been growing online of note-making apps that include rhizomatic affordances. That’s a fancy way of saying lotsalinks. These internal-link-friendly apps include Roam Research, Obsidian, LogSeq, Workflowy, and more venerably, TiddlyWiki. Much discussion has flowed about the nature of the Zettelkasten as a means to construct a networked system of notes. Little of this discussion has referred directly to Rhizome theory, but there are clear affinities.
I wanted a rhizomatic tool for writing, and since I couldn’t find one I really liked, I adapted one for my own purposes. You might not need to invent your own tools, but each of us gathers uniquely the unique contents of our own toolbox.
This post is a contribution to the ongoing Indieweb Carnival, July 2024 edition. Why not check out the other posts, on tools, and contribute yourself to August’s theme, which is rituals.
Some links to relevant material:
Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree
Inspired destruction: How a Zettelkasten explodes thoughts so you can have newish ones
Zettelkasten, Rhizomes, and You
A great summary of TiddlyWiki
The rise of networked notetaking
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome PDF. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.
Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
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?
This question matters to Kat Moody. She writes about learning to live with a nonexistent working memory (Archived version).
Presumably she doesn’t really have absolutely no short-term memory, but she does have ADHD, or as she likes to call it, CRSS (Can’t Remember Sh*t Syndrome).
That really resonated with me. And the horrible feeling of forgetting everything might seem familiar to you as well, even if you’re not diagnosed with either of these.
Inspired by author Ryan Holiday’s notecard system Kat Moody uses an app, readwise.io to make notes while she reads.
Bob Doto, author of the excellent new note-making manual A System for Writing, also does this. He says:
“I tend to read articles on a tablet or phone, using a read-later app with note-taking capabilities to capture my thoughts. When I’m done, I bring these thought-captures into my writing platform, usually as main notes.” (Bob Doto, A System for Writing, p.50)
There’s an informative Hacker News discussion, which extends to memory hacks more generally. One commenter laments that school rewards memorization more than understanding. That can be hard for people whose memory isn’t their strong point.
Perhaps ironically, I see note making as a useful means of forgetting, not just remembering. I don’t want to forget everything, but then I certainly wouldn’t like to remember everything either.
It’s a double act. My brain, when combined with my notes, helps me find the right balance between remembering and forgetting.
I have more to say about this subject, so please stay tuned1. Update: Notemaking helps you remember - and forget.
Some other salient pieces about making notes:
On Keeping an Everyday Notebook (Instead of a Bullet Journal) archived version
Audio transcription workflow: How to Take Perfect Notes with Your Voice Using ChatGPT and Notion
Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people (includes tips such as ‘Write everything down’ and ‘Ditch the to-do list for a ‘first things’ list’.
How to actually use what you read with Readwise
Ryan Holiday’s notecard system
Image credit: Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash
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:
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.
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“[^1]. 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?
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?
A forest of evergreen notes
Jon M Sterling, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, has created his own ‘mathematical Zettelkasten’, which he also calls ‘a forest of evergreen notes’.
He maintains a very interesting website, built using a tool he created, named, appropriately enough, Forester.
The implementation of his ideas raises all sorts of ideas and questions for me, almost all enthusiastic. Here are a few in no order at all:
Make your notes a creative working environment
“Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?”
This is a question Manuel Moreale regularly asks his guests on the People and Blogs newsletter. The answers are always fascinating and well worth a read.
This got me thinking about my own working environment and maybe I overthought it. It looks like I’ve totally ignored Barry Hess’s reminder that you’re a blogger not an essayist.[^1] Anyway, here goes.
Note: This post is part of the Indieweb Carnival on creative environments.
Is the Web reconfiguring itself again?
Is the web falling apart?, Eric Gregorich wonders.
Meanwhile Manuel Moreale is confident that the web is not dying.
I agree with both of them. These views aren’t contradictory. Falling apart is what the Web does best. It’s been falling apart since it started, and reconfiguring itself too.
Google search used to control and shape the web. Because everyone just Googled their searches, websites all used Search Engine Optimization in a vicious circle of conformity. But that’s finally changing.
Search gets degraded by advertising greed on one side and AI tools are generating drivel on the other. Both are examples of what Ed Zitron calls the rot economy.
So how can good material rise to the surface?
In part it’s a return to the old ways. Blogrolls and webrings and RSS are having a mini-revival and it’s not entirely mere nostalgia. One-person search engines like Marginalia are having a moment, as are metasearch engines and other ‘folk’ search strategies. I like little experiments like A Website Is A Room.
Here’s my tip: to find interesting books, great quotes, and intriguing podcasts, more people should know about micro.blog Discover!
Photo by Valeria Hutter on Unsplash
How to set your own agenda
Harrison Owen, who died in March 2024, invented one of the most hopeful approaches to group facilitation I’ve ever come across. He called it ‘Open Space Technology’ (OST), but it was far from hi-tech. In fact, the main ‘technology’ was simply in how people in a group setting can interact fruitfully with one another, even when they really don’t agree.
“Peace of the sort that brings wholeness, harmony, and health to our lives only happens when chaos, confusion, and conflict are included and transcended.”
I first came across Open Space as a means of organising workshops in highly contested political spaces.
In the UK during the 1980s and early 1990s progressive social activity was constantly undermined by Trotskyites (or whatever they were) striving to co-opt social movements for their own ends. There was always a risk that as soon as you set up a committee of any kind, they’d get themselves voted onto it and turn it into a front for the true workers revolutionary communist workers party, or some such combination of those terms.
But what were the alternatives? The Labour Party had been hammered with this problem, and had settled on a full-blown witch hunt against anyone affiliated with the Militant Tendency, which like a monstrous baby cuckoo had nearly pushed them out of their own nest. We’d witnessed how the so-called cure was nearly as bad as the disease.
I think it was about 1992 when we organised our own small Open Space event. Of course, the entryists turned up, but the Law of Two Feet really stumped them. When they realised anyone could set the agenda they were delighted. This must have seemed much easier than having to take over by stealth! But when the discussions began they were confounded by the fact that, equally, anyone could just walk away and find something more important to them. To everyone except the entryists, the experience was delightful.
Image by Chris Kinkel from Pixabay
Of course, OST didn’t change the whole world, and it’s not useful for every meeting. But it was formative for me personally, because I could see how people could come together to identify, commit to and begin to solve their own problems, without waiting for someone else to do it for them.
Open Space Technology has also left a strong mark on facilitation generally. Unconferences, World Café, Bar Camp, the Art of Hosting, design sprints, and many other approaches owe a great deal to Harrison Owen’s pioneering determination to trust people to pursue their own agendas.
Vale Harrison Owen.
More:
Working in Open Space: A Guided Tour
Don't make a Zitatsalat out of your writing
Zitatsalat? What does that even mean?
Yes, Zitatsalat. I found this lovely but rarely used German term in the title of a book by the journalist Stephan Maus. The book’s name is Zitatsalat von Hinz & Kunz.[^1]
I love the rhyming rhythm of this compound term, but what does Zitatsalat actually mean?
Well, Zitatsalat translates as Quote Salad. It’s not a compliment.
Zitatsalat, by Stephan Maus (2002).
But what’s wrong with quoting other writers?
How to make Mastodon even more fun!
Here are a couple of fun websites that will make Mastodon (and possibly the whole fediverse) even more fun. I know, it hardly seems possible. And if you know of others, please let me know about them too.
Just my toots
Do you sometimes wish you could see all your posts on Mastodon in a long list with no distractions? Of course you do! Every day! That’s why justmytoots.com is here to help. And yes, it shows you just your toots.
For the record, I hate the word ‘toots’.
At least where I live no one thinks of flatulence when they hear it, but still, it somehow manages to sound even more stupid than ‘tweets’, which takes some doing.
Now, above the cacophony of all the tooting I can almost hear you ask, “What’s the alternative?” ‘Posts’, that’s the alternative, and that’s what I’m sticking with. Why not join me, world?
Until then, you can see just my toots at https://justmytoots.com/@writingslowly@aus.social
RSS is dead LOL
Now this one really is cool.
You know how everyone at the Internet always says ‘RSS is dead’, right? It’s so annoying!
But anyway, just type in a fediverse username into rss-is-dead.lol and up pops a list of RSS feeds for that user and every account that account follows.
Its amazing! Nearly everyone I follow has an RSS feed! Wow!
Pretty much proves RSS still ain’t dead. Take that, haters!
Bonus fact: it turns out you can use RSS to ‘boost your productivity’. I don’t know what that phrase means, but it sounds great!
Meanwhile, check out my graph, or whatever you call it, at rss-is-dead.lol.
How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive.
Yes, we can be heroes, but does that mean we should be?
Yes really, we can be heroes. Thanks very much David Bowie! But if this sounds attractive, perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.
Do you want to be the hero of your own story? Perhaps you already are
According to reporting in Scientific American, imagining yourself as the hero of your own life gives you an increased sense of meaning.
“Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that people who frame their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning in it”.
But it’s not always great to be a hero
Meanwhile, from a quite different research perspective, comes a warning: Stanley and Kay (2023) caution that making people out to be heroic can inadvertently single them out for poor treatment from their peers.
“our studies show that heroization ultimately promotes worse treatment of the very groups that it is meant to venerate.”
Reading this I immediately thought of all those ‘heroic’ health workers who helped their communities through the COVID crisis at great personal cost and with very little long-term recognition (McAllister et al. 2020). In far too many cases, calling doctors, nurses and hospital workers heroes and even super-heroes ended up as quite tokenistic, little more than a way of justifying the exploitation of their labour. First they make you a hero, then they make you burn out.
Banksy’s artwork of a child playing with a nurse ‘superhero’ doll raised more than 16m for charity… but nurses' pay and conditions didn’t take off
Sometimes heroism isn’t what it seems
And here’s yet another, quite different warning: sometimes the person who sets themselves up as a classic hero is revealed to be anything but that. The case of Australian SAS fighter Ben Roberts-Smith is an extraordinary example of the moral jeopardy of a whole society desperate to believe in heroism. It seems this decorated and celebrated ‘war hero’ was really quite the opposite. The cover-up shows how much people want to believe in heroes, even when they don’t exist. This real-life tale has echoes of Beowulf to it. In Maria Dahvana Headley’s contemporary version (2021), the final words of that centuries-old tale ring painfully, bleakly, hollow with macho delusion:
”He rode hard! He stayed thirsty! He was the man! He was the man.”
So can we journey beyond the ‘hero’s journey’ already?
The hero’s journey trope has become so ubiquitous that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there’s any other kind of story. But there certainly is.
And author Jane Alison goes even further. In her book Meander, Spiral, Explode she notes that there are far more key patterns in literature than just the arc.
Not every story is a journey
Taking her cue from Joseph Frank’s book The idea of spatial form, and from Peter Stevens’s Patterns in Nature, Alison identifies some alternative or complimentary shapes.
I particularly like her concept of the story that meanders like a river, or ripples in waves and wavelets. These aquatic images remind me of something the former monk and psychotherapist Thomas Moore said about how life itself has a kind of liquidity to it:
“Your story is a kind of water, making fluid the brittle events of your life. A story liquefies you, prepares you for more subtle transformations. The tales that emerge from your dark night deconstruct your existence and put you again in the flowing, clear, and cool river of life.” (Moore, 2004, p. 61)
In his book on spatial form, Joseph Frank examines the structure of Djuna Barnes’s modernist novel, Nightwood. This novel doesn’t have a hero’s journey or a flowing river, but instead has a series of views or glimpses of life. He says:
“The eight chapters of Nightwood are like searchlights, probing the darkness each from a different direction, yet ultimately focusing on and illuminating the same entanglement of the human spirit . . . And these chapters are knit together, not by the progress of any action . . . but by the continual reference and cross-reference of images and symbols which must be referred to each other spatially throughout the time-act of reading.”
This searchlight metaphor is illuminating, but story structure can be yet looser, more diffuse than rivers and spotlights. I’m particularly taken with Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction. Remember she said the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story? If so then what is it?
“the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
Le Guin’s insight is itself based on the carrier bag theory of human evolution, as described in Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation (1979).
“The first cultural device was probably a recipient …. Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.” 1
Not everyone needs to be a hero to be a valid person. Mostly it’s better when we’re not. And not every story needs to be a hero’s journey for it to be worth the telling. The idea of the hero can be useful in some circumstances, dangerous in others. But more often it just gets in the way. Sometimes it’s really about “complex skills and compassion”. Sometimes it’s less about hunting and more about gathering.
So now, do you still want to be a hero, you hero you?
Now read:
More than ever, embracing your humanity is the way forward
References
Alison, Jane. 2019. Meander, Spiral, Explode. Design and Pattern in Narrative. New York: Catapult.
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. 1994. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York, NY: Norton.
Barnes, Djuna. 2006/1937. Nightwood, New York: New Directions.
Carriger, Gail. 2020. The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture. Gail Carriger LLC.
Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Frank, Joseph. 1991 The Idea of Spatial Form, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Headley, Maria Dahvana. 2021. Beowulf. A New Translation. Melbourne and London: Scribe.
Kaul, Aashish. 2014. Mapping space in fiction: Joseph Frank and the idea of spatial form. 3am Magazine
LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. 1989. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in Dancing at the Edge of the World. New York: Grove Atlantic Press. Accessed at stillmoving.org/resources…
Margaret McAllister, Donna Lee Brien & Sue Dean (2020) The problem with the superhero narrative during COVID-19, Contemporary Nurse, 56:3, 199-203, DOI: 10.1080/10376178.2020.1827964
Moore, Thomas. 2004. Dark Nights of the Soul. London, UK: Piatkus Books.
Mullins, Anthony. 2021. Beyond the Hero’s Journey: A Screenwriting Guide for When You’ve Got a Different Story to Tell. Sydney, N.S.W: NewSouth Publishing.
Murdock, M. 1990. The Heroine’s Journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.
Rogers, B. A., Chicas, H., Kelly, J. M., Kubin, E., Christian, M. S., Kachanoff, F. J., Berger, J., Puryear, C., McAdams, D. P., & Gray, K. 2023. Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4), 752–778. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000341
Secor, Laura. 2015. War of Words. New Yorker
Stanley, M. L., & Kay, A. C. 2023. The consequences of heroization for exploitation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000365
Stevens, P. 1974. Patterns in Nature, New York: Little, Brown & Co.
Atomic notes - all in one place
From today there’s a new category in the navigation bar of Writing Slowly.
‘Atomic Notes’ now shows all posts about making notes.
How to make effective notes is a long-standing obsession of mine, but this new category was inspired by Bob Doto, who has his own fantastic resource page: All things Zettelkasten.
The Atomic Notes category is now highlighted on the site navigation bar.
And if you’d like to follow along with your favourite feed reader,there’s also a dedicated RSS feed (in addition to the more general whole-site feed).1
But if there’s a particular key-word you’re looking for here at Writing Slowly, you can use the built-in search.
And if you prefer completely random discovery, the site’s lucky dip feature has you covered.
Connect with me on micro.blog or on Mastodon. And on Reddit, I’m - you guessed it - @atomicnotes.
See also:
Assigning posts to a new category with micro.blog
A new post category in micro.blog, filtered to include existing posts
Micro.blog is a really useful and easy way to host a website. Even though it feels more like a cottage industry than a corporation there are way more features (and apps!) than I can probably use. It’s amazing how much Manton Reece, micro.blog’s creator, has achieved.
Under the hood the micro.blog platform is based on the Hugo static site generator, but there are a few differences. One such difference is post categories.
Here’s a new category being created.
It’s very easy to create a new category of posts, then you can use a filter to automatically add all new posts that include a selected key-word (or emoji, or even html element). By default only new posts are affected. But by running the filter you can also add all previous posts that meet the selected criteria. That’s what I wanted to do.
Once you have a new category, you can add a filter. This particular filter assigns to this new category only long posts with a particular word in the text.
When you run the filter, all existing posts that match will be added to the category. And future posts will be added automatically.
Also, each category gets its own RSS feed, which can be very useful.
This process was much easier than I expected!
More info from elsewhere: