Inaugural WRITING TECHNIQUE thread: NONFICTION branch

let's do it to it imo

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary

this is a brilliant article by the guy who wrote 'religion and the decline of magic', one of the major history books of the post-war era

apropos how to make notes

evidently he does not have a macbook pro

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

Crikey. I'm with him up to the end of the first sentence, but once we get to anything more than recording onto a single document for a single piece of work I get hopelessly lost. No point in keeping things in envelopes etc, I'm never going to open them again.

I found my mother's old card-indexes the other day, while tidying, and they're a fantastic object - the clunky boxes, the slighlty age-yellowed cards, author, title, sometimes a quote, sometimes a summary, neatly handwritten and alphabetised away. Since then I've been wondering whether it was still the better system, or whether adopting it would just be a kind of tedious hipster-pda affectation. I still prefer to take notes by hand (i think i remember more that way), and my notes system currently consists of pages torn from silvine notebooks, bibliographical details at the top, all in pencil, and... it's not exactly efficient unless you're working on one small thing.

But thinking about using research/writing tools on the computer just bring out the fear of over-organising like this history phd student (...i think?) here:

hundreds of note files in OmniOutliner, all my tasks and snippets of ideas stored in OmniFocus, mind maps for my writing ideas in NovaMind, serial numbers, short reference files, and screenshots of webpages stored in Yojimbo, a diary written in MacJournal, thousands of pictures, PDFs, and documents tagged and organized with Leap, various personal data tracked in a Bento database, and flashcards for the various languages I have studied daily reviewed in Anki. And so on.

I still prefer to take notes by hand (i think i remember more that way), and my notes system currently consists of pages torn from silvine notebooks, bibliographical details at the top, all in pencil, and... it's not exactly efficient unless you're working on one small thing.

i've done a lot on my laptop, which tbh is just the easiest way, searchability-wise. but i also have a mess of notebooks. couldn't take the computer everywhere. had to number the pages then do a spreadsheet saying what was where.

Always done everything on paper at first: for notes, I trust my transcriptions to paper more than my typing, find it easier to mark accidentals, sics and the like, and simpler to add notes, random thoughts on the side - 'lying?', 'poss in Burton CHK?!'.

I like composing in longhand too. It's mostly habit (undergrad 92-5, so the dying days of the hand-written tutorial essay), but I feel like I can write a bit more freely that way - try things out, scribble around stuff. It all gets copied up, so that's a built-in extra draft too.

For my d.phil, I used notebooks + loose-leaf a4 in categorised binders; I'm not certain what I'd use now for a full-length project, but probably the Mac from the off, especially if I needed to be punctilious about a large bibliography. However, I don't write anything too long now (non-fic wise), so I just use a rolling notebook for both composing and research. Marginal and top-of-page notes tell me what's where. There's some structural sketching, then the fragments get sewn together on the computer, then come rewrites & fiddling.

After it's polished, I drop in the odd iirc & imo, remove some caps, c&p & hit submit post.

lol

haha

That's a great article.

I tend to make notes long-hand and write up on the computer. I have in the past thought about making a card-index for quotes on various subjects - if I had the time I think it would be an invaluable resource, but it's just getting it started. I suppose a computer database would do the same job, but with my very basic database-making skills it would be uglier and more ungainly.

i've tried to build collating-my-research databases before and always fidn myself falling into the gap between what i want my database to do (which is what i sort of intuitively 'know' databases should be able to do) and my absolute inability to make a database do anything i want it to.

Oh yeah the article was amazing - found the section on databases and the obsolescence of his techniques really moving. It's one of those things I was seeing happening in its lit-crit form - used to look at the great card-index critics and just be amazed at the connections they could make jumping around single words & their recurrence in verses; now, you just hit Chadwyck-Healey Lion or Google Books and can accumulate mad info about every use of eg 'refulgence' in the canon & beyond in no time at all (I got the sense Paul Muldoon's End of the Poem lectures were written playing with Lion, poss while stoned).

that makes me want to read them a lot actually

Thanks history mayne, I enjoyed that!