Commonplace book writing

Today I want to write about writing, specifically writing practices with a common place book. The links for today are pretty similar so you can read one or the other, or both — they are still different to each other.

The core of Cory Doctorow’s writing method (the “Memex method”) is to write a blog post every day. This of course becomes really good practice for writing, as expressing what you want becomes easier and easier the more you write. He claims this has helped him a lot in his novel writing, which is remarkable to me as it is a completely different genre of writing. In order to have things to write about every day he goes through the websites and articles he’s recently read, and his own blog posts from the same day 1, 5, 10, and 15 years ago. From that he writes the day’s blog post.

Because he is constantly looking back at what he’s written before he can build on his previous work. A typical blog post consists of context and previous analysis from previous posts with some new stuff added from the articles he’s read that day. By constantly writing and building on what he’s written before, interesting topics can grow organically. Instead of picking a topic and doing research in order to write about it, he is writing and letting the research grow from that.

This is similar to Andy Matuschak’s writing process: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zCknixwETdFm1MWdWPwMcXs

Matuschak is also writing daily in public, but avoids writing complete posts. Instead he writes “Evergreen notes”, notes that last forever. The audience is his future self, but he also lets people on the internet see. They should be written as fairly complete texts so that you understand them years from now. They should be atomic, about a single thing that can’t really be broken down into smaller units. Notes that are related to each other should be linked to each other.

Doctorow says that writing for an audience keeps him honest. It forces him to not be lazy with his notes and properly explain what you mean to a person that isn’t in your head. Matuschak also works in the public, but writes for himself because writing for an audience forces him to do annoying things like explain context that is boring to him in the moment, and causes unnecessary friction for the work he is interested in.

Another point of similarity is the focus of doing research before deciding a topic. Matuschak does this with “speculative outlines”: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z79rMNNuLrUj6R8q1CXSpDm Notes are written for himself, but each note is also linked to from an outline note. This outline isn’t done with the intention of being turned into a finished product, but is instead a way to progressively flesh out clusters of interesting topics. Over time these outlines will become more and more mature, and when they feel ripe they can be turned into a finished writing project fairly easily since the meat and structure is already there.

These methods are remarkably similar. I’d say that the only major difference is that Doctorow writes blog posts for an audience and Matuschak writes for himself. Otherwise they both research before deciding a topic, and instead write densely interlinked texts that grow into interesting larger pieces over time. I’ve tried modelling my own writing on Matuschak’s method, but I have had a hard time turning that into a daily writing practice. With this link blog I want to try approaching Doctorow’s method of writing by sharing interesting things.