Some people claim seeing your old notes and annotations when you return to a favourite book enhances the experience. I beg to differ.
Writing tagged: ‘note-making’
Keeping sources and ideas separate
In which I am astonished by a reminder of how I used to work.
My makeshift desks
In which I unwittingly mimic my hero with the aid of an old chopping board.
Charles Darwin’s note-making system
An exploration of how Darwin kept track of his various notes, enabling him to produce a huge body of work.
My notes ‘tagsonomy’
An overly nerdish description of the taxonomy I use to classify my various notes.
My unplanned archives
Collections of informally documented stuff have become my archives of sorts.
Converting my notes into a chapter
How I used my note-making system to research and write a chapter of my Darwin book.
Limitations of the blog format
For some time now, I’ve been growing increasingly conscious of the limitations of the blog format in catering for the provisional nature of factual writing.
No going back
How was I ever able to organise my thoughts without ‘atomising’ them—breaking them down into smaller and smaller discrete notes—and then linking them together?
Everything I needed was already in my notes!
I’ve known it from the start, but this new way of making notes is perfect for the way I tend to work. It’s what I’ve been looking for all these years.
When notes begin talking to each other
Out of nowhere, I suddenly found myself with an interesting new idea…
Making notes about my own book
In which going through a lot of faff yields benefits.