The rest is still unwriten

Hello! It's been…a while! This past year has been a tumultuous one, between two family deaths, a couple pup-related health scares, and a move across the coast to help take care of a sick family member. Things are still shaky, but I've dearly missed writing this newsletter, and I'd like to return to some form of consistency.

Few people can crush our egos like an ex. A couple years ago during a post-breakup debrief on where things went wrong, an ex-girlfriend and I spent a fair amount of time focusing on my shortcomings in the relationship. The criticisms were warranted, but my shaky ego would’ve preferred to get the feedback in Duolingo-sized microdoses.

Toward the end of the conversation she made a playful jab that hit a little too close to home. To ease the tension, she graciously offered to let me poke at her a bit. I could’ve gotten straight to the point, but instead cracked one last joke—just for old times’ sake—by asking for a moment to dig through my Notes app. Predictably, the joke didn’t land, and made it abundantly clear that I still had a lot of work to do on letting go of my petty reputation.

More importantly, it showed me that Notes had become far too much of my brand. Sure, notes are a helpful way to compensate for my typical forgetfulness, but the hours I’ve spent trying nearly every note taking app on the App Store and tinkering with ways to organize my endless thoughts doesn’t feel justified. 

In fact, I think I’ve been using Notes to avoid my fear of being an inadequate writer. Whenever I feel guilty about not writing, I find myself opening whatever note taking app I’m using—Obsidian these days—in hopes of finding some overlooked, tossed off idea. Instead, I end up messing with the settings within the app, toggling between themes, fiddling with plugins, even flirting with the idea of exporting all the notes to a new app for a redo.

These endeavors are rarely fruitful, but they also don’t elicit the same insecurities as smashing the delete key every time I produce a shoddy sentence. After all, if I’m not writing at all, I’m not writing poorly!

Had I not done things like spend a day tweaking my phone to remove all distractions and delete every note taking app I’ve tried and am not currently using from my devices, this newsletter would probably remain dormant for another year. I also wouldn’t be close to finishing my first fictional project. I would have another thousand word’s worth of thoughts about this year’s hottest note taking app, but I've said plenty on the matter. 

After that assessment, I started treating those stretches of aimless staring at a blank text document as part of the writing process. I’ve learned to sit in discomfort. I've definitely written more bad sentences (and whole pieces that will never see the light of day) than I have good ones, but each of them have led to me writing stories I'm genuinely proud of. 

The process of letting go of Note nirvana has helped me remember that good writing comes not from the tools you use but from thoughtful editing and rewriting. What’s also helped is the knowledge that many writers I admire write everything in Google Docs—my personal hell—and others daringly draft straight into their company's CMS. 

I still use note taking apps as the landing place for all my ideas: my workflow consists of the apps Drafts, Scrivener, Obsidian, and Day One. It's what works for storing all my thoughts, ideas, and things I've learned from books and articles. But that system took ten years to develop and refine, not ten days. I would have wasted so much less time by just committing to one Note app early. If I was starting over today, I would just choose a free option (Apple Notes and Google Keep are both quite good), and try to do everything I could to make it work for me for a month or two. Because I am me, I would probably make a note with my thoughts on what might make the app better. If I was getting to the point where I really needed those features, I would then and only then seek a new app that had them. 

Seriously, though, don't think about this too much yet. Just open Apple Notes and start jotting those thoughts down.

Plug-ins

The Teenage Engineering OB-4 has been one of my favorite Bluetooth speakers for a few years, but it’s recently found a new place on my desk. It’s my favorite piece of home office decor. I recently finished Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and it’s been instrumental in bringing back my creative spark. Speaking of reading, the Boox Palma is my favorite e-reader; I tell everyone about it. And I’ve been loving the service Bookfusion to sync my ebooks between my Palma and my phone so I’m never without my books. This piece by Caitlin Dewey has some great advice for staying informed on current events without drowning in it all. You should also read this delightful profile of Walton Goggins; also, watch Justified. I’m currently testing backpacks for an update to the Strategist’s guide to laptop backpacks, and I’m obsessed with this one from Stubble & Co. Timeline apps are a great way to merge all your feeds — social, RSS, YouTube — in one app. I’m loving Tapestry, but Reeder is great too. If you’re on Android, try Openvibe; I’m using this one on my Palma.

My thanks to Daniel Varghese for editing this issue