A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer

Capture someone else’s interpretation.

Keep an eye out for character behaviors and traits, narrative arcs, scenes, and settings, all of which can be mined for insights. Even an author’s use of grammar (or lack thereof) and story-telling techniques (such as nonlinearity and disjunction), can be read as comments on social issues.

Folgezettel only shows that there is a relationship. It doesn’t show the nature of that relationship.

This can be done more or less in the same fashion as above: Copy and paste the idea into a new note. Consider its relation to other notes already stored in your zettelkasten. Link it. Give it an alphanumeric ID. Title it. Store it among your main notes. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to treat your own work the same as you would another writer’s work

A title acts as a condensed thesis summing up the content of the idea stored in the note.32 It should be a declarative statement rather than a descriptor.33 “Not all apples are edible” is a better title than “Apples and edibility.”

Any label you apply to a section must be done after ideas have been added, and shouldn’t be used to help decide where a new idea should land. This would divert your attention away from the level of ideas and redirect it upward toward classification, which is a killer of all things bottom-up and emergent. Section labels are only used to help locate

In other words, folgezettel is not an outline.

I recommend bringing these captures

Whether you have five or five thousand notes, establishing relationships is the same: interrogate the content of your ideas. Read the subtext. Stretch their relevancy. Flip them over and turn them inside out.