This is part 4 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my workflow for collecting and acting upon story ideas, turning premises into polished prose. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
Where do I put my ideas?
You know how it goes. You have a “story ideas” journal, or you’re like me and you write everything down in the same Leuchtturm 1917 notebook, but all that seems to be good for is accumulating things you may not ever come back to. I don’t have a good portion of my day to “sit down and come up with ideas,” I just write them down whenever I have them and hope for the best.
Digital note-taking tools promised to help with this, but I ended up just dumping everything into an “story ideas” file that would grow increasingly larger, such that every time I looked at it, I was bored by the same first entries that appeared every time I opened it, and eventually became overwhelmed by the number of ideas I had to tackle. I needed a system that would allow me to seamless drop my ideas into it, trusting that they would resurface later when they felt exciting and fresh again.
Then, once I had an idea that I wanted to develop into a full-blown story, either a short story or a novel,I wanted it to be frictionless to apply some of my favorite story construction frameworks to them. As nice as it would be to have “Write the story” be a single action-item that I could put on my to-do list and then cross out, there’s actually quite a lot more to it than that, and I needed to be able to break the project down into its constituent tasks that I could then schedule out into the future to ensure I actually wrote the damned thing.
Fortunately, all of this is totally manageable within Obsidian, and it doesn’t even take a lot of plug-ins to make it work.
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