Writing from notes is a bootstrapping problem. Anything you can do to get started, overcome static friction, and “defeat” the first blank canvas is the best thing you can do.
I started with journaling. Don’t worry about the quality or quantity — yet. Just write. Start with recollections of your day(s) and branch out from there.
There is a trough of despair, at some point. It may feel like you’re just writing into a void. Don’t reach for a “crushing your notes” course on YouTube. You’re writing now, it’s not unusual for it to take a moment (days, even weeks) to click.
Next, I started reading actively and taking highlights. Tools don’t matter here. The outcomes you’re looking for are 1) getting more out of the reading than if you didn’t mark the passages that grab you, 2) coming back to the good stuff later. It’s nice that highlighting, even on mouse-and-keyboard computers, gets your hands moving and involved in the reading process.
Once I crested about a hundred notes/journals/highlights/etc., the next level was resurfacing past notes and revisiting/rewriting/reworking. I use random resurfacing of notes1, “on-this-day” resurfacing of journals2, and spaced repetition of highlights via Readwise. These generate insight, nostalgia, and (sometimes) the spark to connect the dots of enough ideas that a new draft comes into existence. That’s a big win! Honestly, even writing up a new note connecting some older notes or highlights feels like the system is working _for _me.
On a great day, the combination of resurfacing mechanisms and a bit of luck leads “a perfect post”. That is, one that connects old insights to new ideas, a quote that backs up the new insight, and a recently generated idea that ties it all together delightfully3.
Now I had a compounding loop of making new stuff (journals) and revisiting old stuff (highlights). Time to look for connections between them, and notice how the quality of the more recent stuff is improving over the older stuff. The temptation, particularly in a world of influencer media on note-taking4, is to get a Big System to Lead You Right To The Big Connections in Your Thoughts. You don’t need that, you’ve got one sizzling away in your noggin, right now.
The revisiting and revising and rewriting is how you end up making the connections. The last generic tool I’ll recommend here is a good-old blog. For me, the insights and connections first came to me in short form, link posts and asides5 if you will. Over time, my insights grew into a ton of notes, journals, and some short-to-medium length6 writing on this blog.
In other words, what you require is not just a blog, but a blogging habit. Not just a journal, but a journaling habit. Not just the desire to connect the dots, see your ideas compound, and point proudly at a volume of work, but the habit to make all those things happen.
Possible next levels in my process, use the blog:
- as an iterative series of first drafts (see 15 rules for blogging) and
- as a way to figure out _what I think_by writing my way through it.
- worrying less about writing down what I already know7
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Via an Obsidian plugin ↩︎
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This is surprisingly unique to DayOne and the reason I have several thousand entries over multiple decades ↩︎
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In case you hadn’t noticed, this format is basically my blogging “show bible”. ↩︎
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What an improbable sentence to write in 2024. In 2004 it would have been appropriate to question the meaning of every word in this utterance. ↩︎
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The idea of different kinds of posts, that not everything had to be an essay or story or article, was one of my favorite ideas, possibly still the best one, from the original Tumblr. ↩︎
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I wish I was a long-form, novel-length writer. Up to this point, I am not. ↩︎
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rhymes with content marketing, oddly enough ↩︎
