Discerning the value of note-taking

Liked Do I Have Time for This? by Amanda Montei (Mad Woman)

One thing I am never not thinking about, though, is how all nonfiction today feels pushed into providing solutions to inexorable problems—and how our habits as readers, and what we want from nonfiction texts, increasingly reflect that “historically specific… method of valuing work and existence” that Odell explores. We want a book to be productive, a good use of our time.

I’m also thinking this week about scarcity— about how we want a book to do a thing for us, an activity to be productive, because we live with a scarcity mentality around time.

See also:
Discerning the value of note-taking
So Many Books

Via DANIËL VAN DER WINDEN

Anna Havron gives tips on managing your note-taking and calls out:

The magic is in the fact that writing is a transit system, which transports little electrical sparks in your synapses into things that affect shared reality.

Keeping a focus on what purpose a note serves — logistical, inspirational — can help you discard less useful information:

Be picky about what goes into your systems.
I have several paper notebooks I just scribble down ideas in. Each day I look them over for actionable notes, and scoop those out. Otherwise, when they are full, I scan them over, and only a few more notes get entered into my systems.

(My poor digital gathering practices means this article’s been open in my tabs for six+ weeks 🤦‍♀️ The actionable bit is the sticking point for me: I leave tabs open as a reminder because I don’t trust my systems or backlog.)
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Cory Doctorow enumerates his blogging process and how he uses his blog as a digital garden:

Far from competing with my “serious” writing time, blogging has enabled me to write an objectively large quantity of well-regarded, commercially and critically successful prose…

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself.

Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

I love thinking of information as a nucleation site.

In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.

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Matthias Ott elaborating on Doctorow’s piece:

[Rick Rubin’s] approach is to not limit his input at all, meaning that he curiously allows to enter his mind whatever draws his attention, regardless of whether it might seem relevant or “useless” in his current situation. There is no such thing as useless information, because you never know which new ideas will emerge as a synthesis of all the individual fragments of creative input you were exposed to in the past.

(I bailed on The Creative Act because I didn’t like the way he framed his ideas around “Source” but I keep encountering interesting thoughts gathered by others who persevered 😂)

The thing is: This process isn’t a science. The only thing we can do is to be curious, keep a record of the things we deem to be significant, and constantly look for clues pointing to new ideas, for fragments of thought suddenly turning into something bigger.

See also: Foraging for insights
Discerning the value of note-taking

Liked Loose threads by Lisa Olivera (Human Stuff from Lisa Olivera)

I’ve been thinking about how we say we value authenticity, but what we *actually* seem to collectively gobble up is the opposite, or at least the top layer of it: After/Overcoming stories, healing memes, emotionally easy narratives, overly-simplified versions of what is muddy and murky underneath.

How can I avoid turning myself or my life into a lesson, a symbol of anything other than a web of multitudes?

Exercising patience, not thinking we’re done before we’re done, giving ourselves time to pass through an experience and reflect on it rather than bundling it into comfortable, familiar platitudes.

I feel like I’m living this liminal space now — I feel pressure to have found a transformation, a lesson in my departure. When I left my job last year, I felt like I needed a story to explain my choices without revealing personal information, but I didn’t yet know what that story was. Even now, I fumble to find more meaning there than exists, when perhaps it’s as simple as finally prioritizing myself. I put off posting about starting my new work in part because it meant committing, but also in part because I didn’t have a neat parable, because I’m still in the phase of becoming, because failure still is very possible.
See also: Living by a story
Time is part of the growing process
Swimming outside the lanes

how can we tend to ourselves, our stories, our thoughts and questions, while also remembering there is so much beyond us? How can we pay attention to our interior without getting stuck there?

I slow way, way down and feel the way not rushing supports me in taking right action. I turn toward my projects and chores and tasks no one knows about, that no one would find important or newsworthy, and remember they are the things that make up my actual life.

Steeping yourself in reality. Choosing what is tangible rather than abstract, direct rather than signalling, personal rather than performative. Rejecting society’s values in favor of your needs. Embracing smallness, realness, simpleness.
See also: Explore Mode
Discerning the value of note-taking

Liked https://mollywizenberg.substack.com/p/how-bonkers-the-writing-process-is by Molly Wizenberg (I’ve Got a Feeling) I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a novelist — I mean…