blips

I’ve long been quoting Johnson’s Tool for Thought essay on his use of DevonThink as a research database.  I’ve just come across a post he made to BoingBoing updating the approach he outlined earlier.  After collecting all his snippets of text and quotes, he drags relevant ones into chapter folders, creating a first round of organization.  Then:

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that’s how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

via DIY: How to write a book – Boing Boing.