Category: Prose Night

Prose Night at The Writing Life, 12 January 2025: Part book review, part reflection

Ironically, it all began with a Facebook post.

There’s more than a few of my writing friends I connect with online, either over email or social media. It was one of them who posted a link for a book by Scott Scheper, an author from San Diego who had written a book about a misunderstood note-taking system. I misunderstood it because I’d never heard of it until then. However, I’m always looking for ways to be creative and to be helpful with my writing.

So it was on this slender premise I ordered Antinet Zettelkasten by Scheper, and I’ve spent a couple of months pouring through its pages. Is it a well-written book? Yes. Is it a challenging book to read? Absolutely yes. Is it a book and subject of interest for most people? If you are not a writer or researcher, absolutely not, but maybe if you are. Even if I don’t try to experiment with a Antinet in real life (and it looks like I might), it still got me thinking about how both I and others learn and process information.

A Summary (Zettelkasten-WHAT?)

In the book, Scheper traces the creation of this Zettelkasten (German for “Notebox”) by various writers and academics and its refinement into its current form by the German sociologist and writer Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). Luhmann, who was a social science philosopher and developer of systems theory, ended up producing around 600 academic papers and seventy books during his life.

He was almost more known for building up a zettelkasten of more than 90,000 cards filled with information gleamed from his readings and research. These included index, bibliographic, and data cards, all tucked away into noteboxes until he needed to review them for a spark of insight or obscure information. Luhmann laid out a simple numeric-alpha system of organization allowing for branching off into new and unknown territories.

Scheper has a tall task ahead of him with the book’s subject. Not only does he have to give the needed background to understand the history of the system, he has to explain how the system works with enough detail for his readers to replicate it for themselves, as well as get into the science and reasoning for why writers and researchers might want to use the Zettelkasten, which he terms an Antinet in reference to the analog nature of the system and its nature as a network of ideas. To his credit, I believe Scheper realizes this and tries to prepare his readers for the experience.

The Book

For one of the first times in my reading experience, I read an author admitting in print his book would not be to everyone’s interest. If you have no interest in writing and research, he said not to waste your time. If you are someone thinking the Antinet system will be an easy way to produce a lot of writing, Scheper disabuses you of this thought. Antinet is not for the faint of heart. And that’s just in Chapter Two.

I think the book (which Scheper warns is not an easy read way back in the preface) accomplishes what the author’s goals were for the book.

  • He gives an interesting overview of Luhmann’s life and how he came to develop and refine the Zettelkasten system over time, and also explained why Luhmann’s work isn’t as well known as it is in Europe (his books are really dense reads, he kind of wanted to be obscure, he has something of a trolling personality, he was German).
  • He lays out the ins and outs of the Antinet, which covers not only the structure of the system, but how it promotes thought and reasoning.
  • He spends a considerable amount of time discussing other systems that claim to be a Zettlekasten system, but misunderstand or misinterpret what the system truly was. Some of these misunderstandings involve the Antinet’s nature as an analog system, or the way it is organized (with alpha-numeric designations rather than, say, keywords and tags. Digitization makes things easy to do but hard to memorize.
  • He does a very good job of explaining how to set up an Antinet yourself, including how to take the notes, organize them, and make use of index and bibliographical cards as well.

The Antinet System

It would take me at least two whole other blogs to totally explain the Antinet system more than what I have here. However, I’ll review some of the vital elements of this system according to Scheper.

  • It has to be an analog system – that is, a system based on paper and pen/pencil, not electric impulses and programs. Using physical items, things we can see and feel, are important to retaining and expanding knowledge.
  • It uses an numeric-alpha system of organizing and identifying information. It allows for linking ideas.
  • It has a tree-like structure where ideas branch off into other ideas in a way that’s not dynamic or fluid, but not one of order, either. It’s kind of like a tree, and like life, as well.
  • It has an index that serves as a map guiding you to where all the information you have can be found.

Analog, Numeric, Tree, Index – Anti. And since it’s a learning network, you add the “net” on the end, get it?

Thoughts on Analog Thought

Throughout the book, Scheper discusses the importance of the physical process of writing things like notes is on the ability to learn, retain, and process information. He cites many different studies attesting to the scientific basis and support for this belief.

I would second this notion. Over the past forty years, I have been very willing to adopt to the latest technology. I was all in favor of the desktop and then the laptop computer taking over for the typewriter, the hard drive taking over for the notebook and filing cabinet, and Internet sources such as Wikipedia taking the place of the encyclopedias that used to line my parents’ basement bookcases.

However, in recent times, I’ve begun to become a bit distrustful of online platforms that change their terms of service at a whim or whose owners seem to not be good people. Every time I seem to open up my online messages, I get spammed with people who either want to sell me something, be my friend, or want to be my friend and sell me something. Authors are always getting hit up by people wanting to promote their books or do other things for them. At this point, I’m about to make a hard and fast rule not to trust any vendor without getting a recommendation from an IRL friend. There’s no sense in wasting my money on ridiculousness.

From my own experiences in note-taking and other things, the idea of analog thinking and hard work sounds like a good idea. However, I know it’s not for everyone.

For the past several years, I have been a special education teacher. I know it would benefit these students if they were able to take great notes and work hard at getting it done, but I know it’s not as easy as just saying it. Many of these students have difficulty processing information and writing it down at the same time. Many past students, frankly, have an aversion to reading a large amount of written material, or writing. Why should it be a surprise to anyone? If you find something to be incredibly difficult, how motivated would you to be doing it just for the heck of it and not for a grade? They require additional accommodations, and much of the existing technology is a big help for them. Of course, being able to write notes on their own would be a massive benefit, but that’s not where these students are.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach special education for several reasons, but one of them is this experience has returned my love of reading and writing to a pure place. When I first started teaching students in language arts fifteen years ago, I had hoped I could pass along my love of reading and writing to them. I came to realize what I loved was not the same as what most children loved growing up. (Thank goodness with my own children I never forced my own hobbies on to them and accepted their interests for what they were. I’m glad I did.)

When I became a special education teacher, I saw firsthand the struggles many students had with the activities I always did just for fun. I realized I would have to meet them at their level, and do what I could to assist them and help them on their learning journey. That has been incredibly rewarding, and as a result my passion for writing has become more my own, something more personal. If a student loves to write, fantastic, and I’ve encouraged many such students. But every individual is different, and I appreciate those differences so much more through my experiences.

So, is working analog a good idea? It might be for me. As for others… they need to do what they need to do for themselves.

Final Verdict:

If you are a writer and/or researcher who’s not afraid of a long and hard mental process and want to try it out in real life, this is definitely worth a read. If that doesn’t apply to you, Scheper admits you shouldn’t waste your time with his book. I would agree, and I will also need to read through Antinet Zettelkasten more than a few times to get my head around all the concepts it lays out. Who knows, I might be filling out some three by five cards soon.

Obligatory Panhandling (lol)

Go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile to check out some of my other links. For example, in those places, you can find out about my first book, the journalism thriller The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, as well as the first book in my The Yank Striker series, The Yank Striker: a Footballer’s Beginning. Oh, and did I mention I put out my first book of poetry? It’s called The Flow and the Journey, and it’s centered around themes of life on the river and traveling. You can find out more about it here (and where to find it for purchase).

The Flow and the Journey

The Flow and the Journey

The first collection of poetry from author Jason Liegois.

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A Writer’s Biography, Volume 2, Part 10: The Ghosts of Writing Projects Past

Prose Night at the Writing Life, 9 November 2024

[These are a lot of headlines lol]

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: For new visitors or subscribers to this Substack, this Prose Night entry is another in a continuing series I have been writing ever since beginning to blog on WordPress several years previously, which I’ve called A Writer’s Biography. These essays have been looks back at my life through the lens of writing and my experiences of writing. My original intent is to try and provide some advice or inspiration to writers in similar situations to myself, although I realize this project has turned into something resembling a memoir (which I haven’t started to tackle as an actual serious project).

I’ve separated these into three “volumes:” Volume I, detailing my early childhood and first experiences with reading and writing; Volume II, detailing my experiences with writing as a young man and during the “quiet times” of my writing, and Volume III, where I discuss how things are in middle age and resuming my life as a writer. Since this story covers some projects and times when I was not an active of a writer, or at least a lot more inconsistent, I decided to make this a Volume II story. All you paid subscribers can check out all the Writer’s Biography posts in my archives.]

And if you can’t spare cash for a subscription, you might give this a shot if you want to support my site on an at-will basis.

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I wonder what Stephen King’s morgue looks like.

This probably requires a bit of explanation, since I think just made up a term1. ut in the very perfunctory research I did on a small portion of the interwebs, my instinct is I’ve repurposed an old one.

The common word for what I’m thinking of is what are called trunk stories. As in, you stash them in a trunk, not likely ever to be looked at again2. However, I decided to use a term from my previous life as a journalist.

Of course, everyone has heard the term morgue used before to describe a place to store bodies. But in the old time newspaper business, a morgue is the place where a newspaper kept news clippings from old stories, usually from its own publication but sometimes from others, especially for important stories of nationwide, statewide, and especially local importance. These were usually organized in microfilm storage if a newspaper was very sophisticated, or it might have simply been a group of filing cabinets holding manila folders of cut-out newsprint stories, photocopies of the same, or some combination of the time. Some of them were organized according to their publication date, or more often by subject matter.

Usually, this area was used by reporters to gather background information on their stories. It was a fast way of finding this information, especially in the pre-Internet era when not every newspaper archive was digitized and itemized.

In some cases, there was such a thing as a digital morgue, a location where past stories could be indexed and referred to in new reporting. Sometimes, a morgue could also refer to a place where you put stories intended for future use. One important circumstance was when you composed a story to be run in the event someone famous dies, such as big time political leaders or entertainers.

From my perspective, I like the idea of an old morgue of half-started stories and ideas from my past experiences. For me, I have both a physical and digital morgue, or perhaps a hybrid one.

Most of the physical representations of my work are tucked into not a trunk or trunks but (appropriate for the 21st century) some plastic totes in my storage building. I haven’t had the chance to look at those yet. Those include some of my writing from even my high school years, stuff I haven’t seen in a decade or so.

My electronic morgue, however, has some writing of a somewhat more recent nature. This included several pieces of writing which I started and stopped over the course of at least one or two decades.

Those were the fallow years, when I plied my trade as first a journalist and then as a teacher but I went years without even sitting in front of a desktop or laptop on my own volition without being paid, without having anything to do with telling a community what happened at its latest city council meeting or teaching a kid how to write with some semblance of skill. Sure, I called myself a writer. But I went years in those days without writing a word.

However, over the course of several years, I’ve had the chance to write more nonfiction essays online and fiction. I got serious about my writing in 2010 or so when I started realizing I wasn’t getting any younger and I wasn’t interested in wasting more time on personal activities (gaming, distractions, etc.) that weren’t adding anything to my existence. Now, this was a long process, but within a few years I felt like I wasn’t fooling myself when I called myself a writer3.

This process was helped by finally having a book I had been contemplating for nearly a decade published around 2019 and then moving on to the first book in a series in 2023. But in the years in between thinking about being a writer and actually kicking myself in the tail to write… there was a lot of false starts and stillborn projects.

This week, with the recent unpleasantness, I was tempted to look back on some of my past work. Back years ago, I was of the opinion politics was a fun form of entertainment, and some (but not all) of my fiction experiments took place in the political world. By 2016, however, politics ceased being fun for me and merely became a duty whenever the elections came around.

Oh brothers, sisters, and all the good people in between, you would not believe the fairy tales I started and abandoned in the 20 years since I’m writing this blog today.

There was a novel about a third party candidate for president in the years before I realized our current presidential election process never let third party candidates win, just due to the structure of the American election system.

There was a story about a double agent for the Chinese government I wouldn’t even know what to do with.

There were two full novels I wrote in my twenties – one I tried to sell unsuccessfully and wouldn’t try to sell again (or would I say just screw it and publish it online for the heck of it?) and the other I wrote for National Novel Writers Month back in the days it was a reputable organization but I’m not sure there is a salvageable novel there.

Then there was a novel based… sort of based in the home of my youth, something of a murder mystery (a half-baked one) based around the idea of gradual regional environmental collapse. I have often joked about me not being much of an Iowa writer other than my poetry, but this story was set right in the heart of what was my home. I took a look at the synopsis I’d written and the dozen pages I’d put together… and it’s not horrific? It might be salvageable, whenever I get around to picking over what is there? Why not – I think the environmental theme might be especially prescient given the current status of my home state.

There are at least two or three attempts at a novel coming from my observations of the American political scene in recent years and re imagining a reaction to this scene from a very dark place from my subconsciousness. All this got abandoned over the past several years, in starts and stops, in some cases well before the recent unpleasantness. And I know I don’t want to tackle the issue in exactly the same way.

So, I took a look at those scraps of writings… and I thought of another novel, one I had read in college, Parable of the Sower, which made me a lifelong fan of Octavia Butler (one of the titans of 20th century sci-fi writers, right along with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and Herbert – and I’ll jump up on a table and argue it to anyone who doesn’t recognize her).

I thought of how one idea might change everything in society, and how it seemed unrealistic and relevant all at once, and it might be something true to how my mother Suzanne raised me to believe in humanity. And now I’m staring at the screen and looking at the name of a totally new project with a brand new title, and the ideas are starting to bubble up.

The moral of the story, people, is never throw away art. You never know what it will lead to.

On that note, I would love to take a look through Stephen King’s writing morgue. I bet he has a lot of great ideas I could use (crediting him, of course. He’s still the King, as always).

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  1. Or maybe I created a term and someone has already used it. If this is the case, feel free to tell me in the comments. ↩︎
  2. Do the younger people among you have an idea of what a trunk is other than the space in the back of a car you use to store stuff? The definition I was looking for came from Oxford Dictionaries: a large box with a hinged lid for storing or transporting clothes and other articles. ↩︎
  3. Man, these essays are becoming really self-referential lol. ↩︎

Prose Night on the Writing Life, 15 September 2024: A sneak peek at The Yank Striker 2

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 10 August 2024: On data and writing

For a good portion of my writing life, I was flailing around without having much of a clue as to how well or how efficiently I was writing. In my head, it’s probably one of the reasons why I spent several years not writing anything and wondering why I didn’t feel like I was much of a writer even though I spent well over a decade writing as a journalist and taught writing, on and off, for nearly as much time1. Eventually, as all of the self-help books and advice would lay out, I began to think setting some manner of goals would help me be productive as a writer.

My intent in sharing my experience with writing and data is not to give you, the reader, a foolproof system of being a prolific writer. If any writing teacher or coach should tell you, a lifetime is not enough time to learn everything there is to know about writing. Goodness knows there is plenty I don’t know, especially about promotion and reaching an audience. However, there are some things that have worked for me, so I decided to share them for this edition of Prose Night.

Starting Out

Years back, far earlier in time than I want to recount here, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), well before the current unpleasantness regarding inappropriate behavior between (I’m trying to recall) volunteers for the organization and underage participants.

Regardless, even though I only completed the monthly novel writing challenge once, it was a great influence on my thinking. Part of it was a matter of math. I knew if an author managed to write 1,667 words per day, they would be able to create a 50,000 page manuscript by the end of the 30-day period of November when NaNoWriMo took place.

After a while, I began to wonder if there was a more sustainable pace I could maintain over time. 1,667 words a day is a bit of a haul, especially when you’re someone like me who has a day job and maybe even kids to help look after. Eventually, I decided to set a quota of 500 words a day. It was less than a third of the pace of NaNoWriMo, but it was a pace I thought I could possibly sustain day in and day out. That’s where it began.

Refining the System

Refining the System

Over the course of a couple years, I began to refine how I kept track of what I wrote. I started out just writing down how many words I wrote down every day. I started to put those notes in one place.

Eventually, I got the idea that I had to count the amount of time I spent revising my work and planning what I was going to write, because that was writing as well even though it didn’t necessarily produce large quantities of words. After some consultations with fellow writers in the writing groups I frequented, I came to the conclusion that 30 minutes of revising and planning would be worth as much as 500 words in a day. Those became my minimum quotas for work every day, around about 2017, and I’ve stuck to them ever since.

By late 2017, I was starting to keep track of the numbers on a week to week and month to month basis. I recorded how much work I did each day, week, month, and eventually year. Eventually, you tend to start recognizing patterns, highs and lulls in your productivity, things you can work on. If you’ve had three weeks in a row where you haven’t written much of anything, that’s about the time to pick things up again.

By 2021, I had gathered enough data on what I’d written over the past few years to confidently predict I could write 200,000 words based on my past productivity. So the next year, I shot for 200,000 words and not only made it, but set new yearly records in 2022 and 2023. Nowadays, 200,000 words is the minimum amount of words I am expecting to write. Hopefully, it will be a lot more.

Summing Up

Again, I do not seek to say I’ve solved writing by any means. However, I have learned keeping track of these statistics can be an effective way to measure what I do and show what I might be capable of.

My advice is simple:

  1. Set clear, measurable goals for what you plan to write. These can be any level or amount of writing you feel best fits your capabilities and work habits. However, they have to be things you can put a number and a time limit to.
  2. Keep a record of what you write and when you write it. I also recommend you keep track of how often you meet the goals you set. If you are having trouble meeting those goals, it’s likely something will need to be adjusted.
  3. Review the data you record. Are you having trouble getting writing done on the weekends, or during a certain time of the year? After your review, think about it and see if you need to make changes to things like when or where you write, or whether you need to alter your working habits.
  4. Finally, if the data is showing you’re doing something well and productive, keep doing it.

Happy writing.

While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

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  1. Since I’ve converted to special education teaching, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a writing teacher, even though I do technically help students with their writing as part of their individual education plans (IEPs). What I do there is more specialized and aimed at basic skills rather than the type of teaching you might get in a composition course or writers’ workshop. ↩︎

Prose Night at the Writing Life: 13 July 2024: Revising insights

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 8 June 2024: Writing rough drafts

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 11 May 2024: Odds and Ends

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 14 April 2024: Adjusting to poetry writing

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 9 March 2024: About Writing on the Road

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Prose Night at the Writing Life, 10 February 2024

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