All the examples in this chapter show how a zettelkasten can point toward what to write about. None, however, suggest the zettelkasten should do the writing for you. And, the reason is simple: Your zettelkasten is a terrible writer.

Figure 46. Runaway ideas can be broken up into main notes, as well as become longer forms of writing.

In order to see how your ideas relate semantically—how they might function as a coherent train of thought—they need to be exported to a place where you can unpack them. Structure notes are where this happens.

Hub notes can be stored anywhere in the zettelkasten that feels appropriate.

The notes provided are merely entry points. Hub notes point to where things are happening, not the things themselves.

Creating a hub note is relatively simple. First, choose a section of your zettelkasten where the theme has been taken into a variety of places via different trains of thought. Once you’ve decided on a section to work with, create a new note, and give it a name that identifies the topic you’ll be exploring. Next, identify which notes within the

Hub notes help point toward the various places your thinking has gone, functioning as “access points,”78 or “highways between topics.”

Without high-level views to make sense of your sense-making, thousands of notes may eventually feel like a disorganized mess. To make sense of the contents of the distributed network, note makers create alternative ways to view and engage with what’s most relevant. In doing so, it becomes possible to see how trains of thought have been developing,

[R]ely on relations between notes, i.e. on references that reveal more than what one has in mind when following either a search impulse or thought-fixation