Note Organization Quotes

When I was a postdoc, I jotted every fresh thought on a three-by-five card and kept them in a card catalogue.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

For notes related to books I'm writing, I've wondered whether I should organize my notes better, but I do find that the action or scrolling through them and seeing odd juxtapositions of ideas helps to stimulate my own ideas and creativity. I worry that if I kept the notes in a highly-structured way, I might lose some of these benefits.

When I'm back at my computer, and/or have more time to deal with the project than when I made the initial notes, I transcribe them into a Scrivener document. I create a new Scrivener file for every project, right at the start, and make a folder for these transcribed notes; when entering them, I title each note document according to date.

I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can't read it afterwards.

I keep a journal and just kind of take notes. I don't really so much sit down and write songs - I just take a lot of notes, and sometimes I sit down and put them all together.

I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.

I only make notes, I don't write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.

I use a note-taking system I learned in history class in eleventh grade.

On Saturdays, I get up early, spread out my notes from the week on the kitchen table, and create stories from them.