Writing and Note-Taking as Thinking

The highlights that treat writing, note-taking, and blogging not as records of finished thought but as the machinery of thinking, learning, and building a body of work.

Across these highlights runs one stubborn idea: you do not think first and then write it down — the writing is the thinking. Note-taking, blogging, and journaling show up here as tools for learning and clarity rather than as archives, and the messiest first draft is treated as a feature, not an embarrassment. The through-line is that a body of work is built the same way a runner builds a body: by showing up, translating what you read into your own words, and letting small daily deposits compound.

Writing is the thinking, not a record of it

The clearest statement of the whole page comes from Richard Feynman, quoted in How to Take Smart Notes. A historian admired his notebooks as a record of his thinking; Feynman objected: "No, no! They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper."¹ Sönke Ahrens draws the general rule from Luhmann — it is not possible to think systematically without writing — and notes that most people wrongly believe "the only function of the pen is to put finished thoughts on paper."¹ The corollary is that "no written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind"; complex ideas simply cannot be turned into linear text in the head alone, so we have to get thoughts onto paper "and improve them there, where we can look at them."¹

Two novelists say the same thing from inside the craft. Murakami: "I'm writing, in other words, to put my thoughts in some kind of order."² And Robert Caro's mentor put it as a rebuke: "You're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers" — the fingers being exactly where his thinking happened.³ Ahrens even offers a productivity metric that follows directly: "You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written."¹

The two-slip-box loop: reading, notes, and connection

Ahrens's account of Luhmann's Zettelkasten is the page's central method. Luhmann kept two slip-boxes — a bibliographic one for references, and a main one where he "collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read."¹ The crucial move is translation, not transcription: he "did not just copy ideas or quotes... but made a transition from one context to another," "very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning."¹ Copying quotes is the beginner mistake, because "the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context."¹

The payoff is that the system compounds. "Its usability grows with its size, not just linearly but exponentially" — because a topic-based archive gets messier as it grows, while a connection-based box "becomes more and more valuable the more it grows."¹ Ahrens frames the mental shift as archivist-versus-writer: the archivist asks which keyword is most fitting?; the writer asks "In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it?"¹ The slip-box, in the end, is "the medium we think in, not something we think about" — an idea generator that "develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development."¹

flowchart LR
    R["Read<br/>(with a pen in hand)"] --> N["Note<br/>(translate into<br/>your own words)"]
    N --> C["Connect<br/>(bottom-up links,<br/>not top-down topics)"]
    C --> W["Write<br/>(rearrange notes<br/>into linear text)"]
    W -.->|"reveals what<br/>you still need to read"| R
    C -.->|"surprising<br/>juxtapositions"| I["Insight"]
    I --> W

Writing to learn, and learning in public

If writing is thinking, then writing is also how you learn. Eugene Yan rewrote his own practice around this: instead of just writing, it became "reading (consume) -> note-taking (collect) -> writing (create)," with note-taking as the connective tissue.⁴ His rules: "Read with the intent to write"; "Reading — on its own — for learning, is incomplete" without notes; and "Writing begins before you write" — never start from only a blank page.⁴ The three form "a (virtuous) cycle. As you write, you discover more you need to read and learn."⁴ Ahrens grounds this in the research on elaboration — "really thinking about the meaning of what we read" — and warns that "we have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter," since underlining and hoping to remember is "the real waste of time."¹

Publishing sharpens the loop further. Yan advises writing for the rung just below you on the ladder of expertise: "even if you've just started learning about something, write about what you've learned, because other beginners can learn from you," and the act of explaining "helps reinforce your understanding."⁵ Dan Koe makes the compounding explicit: "Writing is compressed thinking. It forces logic because weak arguments collapse on the page. It forces research because you can't fake depth," and it "builds an asset (audience, reputation, proof of work) that compounds."⁶ In his telling, each technological wave has pushed people up a level — "the scribe became the editor... the typesetter became the designer" — so the durable edge is "some combination of your taste, your judgment, your way of seeing problems," found only by experimenting "at the edge of what you know."⁶

The shitty first draft: freedom from judgment

Every writer here insists that good work starts badly. Anne Lamott's law is that "almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts" — the down draft (you get it down), the up draft (you fix it up), and the dental draft (you check every tooth).⁷ She quotes Vonnegut — "When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth" — and concludes that "perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend."⁷ Robin Rendle found the same permission structurally: using Obsidian's graph view to draft fiction, "I feel like I'm free now to write absolute junk. And this is vital for any creative thing! You have to feel like your mistakes won't be judged."⁸

Ahrens supplies the psychology of why the draft flows once you stop forcing it: the difference between an exergonic reaction (you must keep adding energy) and an endergonic one that, "once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy."¹ The trick is not willpower but environment — "self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves" — so you design workflows that "avoid resistance in the first place" and lean on the Zeigarnik effect: write a nagging task down and the brain stops holding it, freeing attention for the work at hand.¹ Susan Sontag adds the aim to reach for once the junk is on the page: "What is interesting? Mostly, what has not previously been thought beautiful (or good)."⁹

Craft: hooks, discipline, and editing tricks

Once the mess exists, craft shapes it. Gwern's rule for openings is "First, make me care" — hook the reader with curiosity or a surprising fact, not dry background; a marshy lagoon-city that "come[s] to control all these colonies for so long, with the small crude ships they had" makes a reader want the history.¹⁰ Arvind Narayanan passes on a self-editing trick from his PhD advisor: "Edit back to front, paragraph by paragraph. I still use it and it still surprises me how well it works."¹¹ Caro's discipline is even more elemental — his first editor's charge was "Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page" — while his own motive was simply "figuring things out and trying to explain them."³

And yet the rules are provisional. Eugene Yan, after years of writing, concludes there "are many rules and also no rules at all."¹² Jason Fried reframes even a stale format into something generative — "Tired: FAQ. Wired: YesAQ" — questions you actually say yes to.¹³ Murakami's own method is the least rule-bound of all: "When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come," paired with an iron routine — up at 4 a.m., five or six hours of work, then a run.¹⁴ His job, he says, "is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them."¹⁴

Writing as a body: discipline, endurance, solitude

Murakami's memoir makes the analogy that writing is trained like running. "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional," he writes, and "no matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act."¹⁵ The point of the daily practice is self-competition: "the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be."¹⁵ He runs "in order to acquire a void," and prizes solitude — "I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone."¹⁵ Rendle names the same texture of environment for prose: "Early mornings. Coffee in hand. Sitting in a roomful of strangers with the rain outside. That is the perfect writing environment."¹⁶

Blogging and owning your body of work

The public side of writing is treated here as ownership. Rendle started blogging because "the web wouldn't let me go" and learned the designer's creed to "own your website! Don't use a third party blogging platform because it could all be taken down."¹⁶ Rahul Gonsalves acts on exactly that, self-hosting Ghost on PikaPods for about "$20 – a year" to focus on "his own online presence," crediting a friend's how-to.¹⁷ The wiki you are reading follows this ethos in miniature: Craig Mod keeps "a LoveHate relationship with obsidian," using it "mainly just with the readwise plug-in... because it's just such a great Archive of highlights and notes" from his Kindle and long-form reading.¹⁸ A simpler system appears too — the "Soliloquy" method of a pocket notebook, pen, and watch: "a method of writing your thoughts down to have a mental clarity," where even unrealistic goals, once on paper, pull you toward them.¹⁹

The emotional stakes of putting yourself on the page

Underneath the method sits the self. Montaigne's library was "a refuge for the soul," and his book and he were "consubstantial" — reading and writing as identity itself.²⁰ Lamott catches the primal thrill: seeing yourself in print is "some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist," and "the act of writing turns out to be its own reward."⁷ The shadow side is fear. Rebecca Kuang's narrator confesses that writerly jealousy "feels more like fear" — "panicking that I'm not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough."²¹ The compression of a whole worldview into a single sentence is the reward that answers the fear — as when Jeff Felten remembers the most memorable marketing email he ever got was "8 words,"²² or when Ruskin Bond earns a line worth flagging on its own: "when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful."²³

Related

• Reading, Analog, and the Physical World
• Creativity, Craft, and Deliberate Practice
• Clear Thinking and Mental Models
• Productivity and Focus Systems
• Robin Rendle
• Derek Sivers
• Craig Mod
• Haruki Murakami
• Obsidian
• Overview