> On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback.
And how do you avoid having to start with a blank page. I have been reading "How to take smart notes", which delves into Zettelkasten, and the point of writing and linking notes is, indeed to refine your thoughts, and to be able to collect them into a larger essay/article/what have you.
As a self-taught person with an incredible idea-making brain and terrible note-taking skills, it's taken me almost 4 decades to learn that writing is a crucial component of understanding complex systems, and it doesn't start by the essay, which, as you say, only needs one or two simple passes. The essay is the tip of the iceberg, the important stuff is all the research and writing that leads to a topic or theory.
I think people are overthinking starting. Just write down first two words and then next couple. Don’t even make it a sentence just bag of words on paper then make sentence out of that.
It doesn’t have to be perfect from the first paragraph. You will share fixed up version later.
Consider the book Refuse to Choose by the late Barbara Sher. This book helped me fill notebooks where before I would start a notebook and throw it aside after a handful of pages.
Just out of curiosity, having looked at the blurb, I'm left wondering, what do you fill notebooks with?
Planning projects and what you want to do?
From the description, I'd personally think I could be labelled a scanner, but I'm trying to work out if this is a read now or read later book/
At present I'm interested in unpacking more of what's going on in my head and putting it down on paper, and I'm curious to know what reading the book gave you and if it will be useful in pulling out interesting stuff from my thoughts =)...
The book gives you permission to lean into your scanner personality type. It explains that exploring our ideas is often enough and you can do so in a notebook. Interestingly, I eventually complete many of the projects I write about in my Scanners Daybook. It could be that writing them down somehow solidifies the idea and focuses your mind. Still, writing it down is enough in many cases too and I’m perfectly happy to move on, having explored the idea as deeply as I wanted right now.
And how do you avoid having to start with a blank page. I have been reading "How to take smart notes", which delves into Zettelkasten, and the point of writing and linking notes is, indeed to refine your thoughts, and to be able to collect them into a larger essay/article/what have you.
As a self-taught person with an incredible idea-making brain and terrible note-taking skills, it's taken me almost 4 decades to learn that writing is a crucial component of understanding complex systems, and it doesn't start by the essay, which, as you say, only needs one or two simple passes. The essay is the tip of the iceberg, the important stuff is all the research and writing that leads to a topic or theory.