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The creative process
As a poet and writer, I am curious about where ideas and inspiration come from. I decided to start to build a way to be more systematic about capturing my ideas as and when they arrive. In practice this is very hard to do. If you pay attention to the chaos of your brain for any time at all, you understand it’s constantly firing off random thoughts, feelings and responses.
They come and then they go.
So I’m not going to catch them all — would I even want to?
Maybe just the better ones then.
When I first started to jot down some notes, I wasn’t sure where they would lead. I still don’t really. I think they are just me groping around trying to figure some things out. I test some ways of working, I come to conclusions and then I change my mind.
Gradually though, some things do begin to get more sticky.
Andy Matushak uses the term ‘Evergreen Notes’ to describe his non-transient notes.
Andy says his Evergreen Notes are designed to:
Evolve.
Contribute to deepening his understanding.
Accumulate his knowledge and awareness over time.
Exist and work across different domains: he might link a note to more than one other idea.
I make my own notes in a way roughly following Andy’s ideas. Each note I make has a title which summarises the idea. Overtime, other ideas form new connections with this idea.
Principles of Evergreen Notes
According to Andy Matuschak each Evergreen Note should be:
Atomic
Concept Oriented
Densely Linked
Use Associative Ontologies rather than hierarchical taxonomies — they should grow organically, rather than to some pre-prescribed organisational structure.
I’m adopting something of Andy’s approach in this Digital Garden.