Learning to rubber duck my life with Piranesi

Today I want to write a blog post about my recent experiences with journaling. There are two reasons: 1) is that I feel like it has helped me with writer’s block so I want to share it, and two is that it is interesting and kind of funny that I got help from the novel Piranesi. I want to do it in a bit of a meta style, where I showcase what it is I’m doing by doing it, what I’m doing right now in other words. The reader will probably be confused when reading this, but I hope the reader understands the demonstration that is this paragraph when I’ve explained it down in the main text. This isn’t just because it is funny (although it is), but also because I think it’s hard to explain so having an example helps. First I want to introduce the book, because it seems like a good introduction and it’s a good way to ease into the topic. Then I want to do a brief chronological summary of how my current system came to be. The indexing from Piranesi became relevant when I wrote my thesis, because I realized I wouldn’t be able to keep track of the plans I was making for the thesis. It was great to be able to write down plans that were frozen in time, but I thought it would be hard to keep track of all the plans, so I needed to have a system for organizing them. Indexing turned out to be a great fit because it is a system that is applied from the outside and doesn’t disturb the benefits of journaling.

Now I have to make this understandable for the reader.

Piranesi is a lovely book, with a fantastical world that feels unreal in just the way I love. The feeling of things not lining up properly produces this exciting feeling in me that is hard to describe but keeps me intrigued. Today however, I want to write about one of the more mundane things about the book: how the main character uses journaling. It is a habit he seems to have sustained for a long time and acts as an excellent way of keeping track of information and his own thoughts. Whenever he found something interesting he would write about it in his journal, and periodically he would update an index so that he could easily find the information again. When I read the book I thought it was really interesting, especially the way he would use the index, but I filed it away as an odd curiosity.

It wasn’t until a couple of months later that I started doing something that I realized is similar. I had been using a paper notebook for a while as a way to do some light task management and as a place to write down thoughts and ideas, but I never used it as a place to store information more long term. Last week, as part of trying to blog more regularly, I set up a simple journaling system on my computer. Each day when I turn on my computer I am greeted with a new file for the day, where I thought I’d start writing for the day’s blog post. That file quickly turned into a scratch file where I would write down stuff when I needed a temporary place to write something. One reason to write things down for me has become to clarify thoughts on issues I don’t know how to deal with, similar to how programmers talk to their rubber duckies when they don’t know how to solve a hard problem. The act of explaining the issue helps bring new light on it.

When I started working on my thesis again I realized another use of this type of diary writing. I had trouble with writer’s block for my introduction, and knew only vaguely what to put there but not at all how I wanted to write it. The way I’m working through it now is through journaling. What I’ve been doing is whenever I feel like I don’t know what to do or write, I start writing down stuff about it stream-of-consciousness style. Especially when it comes to writing, I focus on writing down what I want to write about instead of what I want to have on the page. For my thesis this helped me realize that one of the goals I thought I had with it was actually irrelevant, and trying to force it in was one of the reasons for my writer’s block.

So I started to write more and more in my journal, but I also realized that keeping track of all this useful information was going to be hard. At first I just kept a list of in which days’ notes I had put plans for the thesis, but there was information in the diary that wasn’t just about the thesis. That was when I remembered the writing practices of Piranesi. The only thing I was missing at this point from what he was doing was some form of indexing practice, which is what I began doing. I created a list in a file and began to write keywords with links towards the notes that were about those keywords. Days where I wrote about journaling would go under “journaling” but also “writing”, and for my thesis I have entries like “introduction” or “discussion”, for finding what I’ve written about the different sections.

I really like working with a diary like this. The thing that really makes it work for me is that whatever I’m writing is tied to a date. Keeping notes like this in a planning document would mean that I have to do work to make sure that nothing is outdated, which would discourage me from writing. When the entire document I’m writing in is tied to a date it means that everything will automatically be outdated, which lifts the burden of trying to be consistent. Each day I get a new blank slate to work with, so I don’t have to worry about messing up the document. There are other ways of organizing information, but I think the only way I know of that preserves this property of the diary is indexing. Indexing lets me be scatter brained when I’m writing but allows me to still group notes by topic for when I want to read them.

Since I’m doing this on my computer maybe I could get away with some form of search or other automation tool, but I think there is value in doing the indexing manually. It becomes a way to review my thoughts from previous days, and automating that would be to miss the point. So far I’ve indexed things as I go along, but from now on I’m going to try doing the indexing a day or two after writing. This is something that Piranesi does because the distance gives him more clarity.

Something that still confuses me is my diary’s relationship to my (atomic/evergreen) notes/zettelkasten system. They feel similar since they both allow me to write without planning for a larger project, but it feels wrong to me to put this diary in my other note system. In the diary I write things that are often very undeveloped, whereas in my note system I try to keep each note to be about a specific and atomic concept. I guess what I write in my diary and in my notes system are in different stages of completion.

An example of a topic that fits well in the diary but wouldn’t fit in my notes system is my website. It has begun to grow too complex for my liking, both because it makes some things hard to work with now, but also because that complexity makes it harder to maintain were I to lose interest in writing for it. I’d like to make it less complex, but I don’t know how; what parts I’m willing to throw away. In my diary, then, I’ve written down my thoughts on this — thoughts about what I want my website to be, what things are hard requirements for me, my options etc. Because I don’t have to organize this by topic as I’m writing I can let my thoughts flow freely, and I don’t have to focus on trying to make my current thoughts make sense together with previous thoughts. Working on complex and hard-to-navigate problems where I don’t even know what I want is what the diary has been very good for, especially when it comes to planning. I suppose once I’ve been able to boil down my thoughts into enough clarity I can start putting them into my note system proper.

P.S.

Maybe this is all things that the sterotypical diary writing schoolgirl already knows, but this has been useful for me and it feels strange to have the diary be so intensely gendered and age-ed (or whatever the equivalent word for age is). I guess when cool people do it they call it a journal, but it really is the same thing as a diary. Sometime during the writing of this blog post I decided I wasn’t too cool to call it a diary, can you spot where?