A man walks into a library...
2026-08-29 14:56
I went to the library, and just browsed. No aim. Path of least resistance. I hadn't been to this library before. Found myself browsing a shelf that seemed to have no order. Fiction, non-fiction. Then I saw the receipts. This was the pickup section. Duh.
Left. Children books and young-adult. Nah. Reverse, back into the main room. Past the catalogue computer. Not today. Fiction, graphic novels. Not today. Non-fiction. Sports, war, biographies, cooking, gardening, politics, music, health, philosophy. Getting warmer.
I found myself at 808.02. Something to do with writing. Bingo. I didn't realise that's whats interesting me at the moment, but it grabbed me. "Always Take Notes", "Awaken the Writer Within", "Why Write", "The Writer's Hustle". Oooh meta here we come. Flick through table of contents of "Always Take Notes". Chapter 4 - Research. Lets go.
The way I report every story, which is a secret asset of people trying to do this kind of journalism, [involves] going to the library. It's all in the library. Everyone else is too rushed and ripping shit off the internet. Whatever story I'm doing, I go to the library. I was writing about dressage - go to the library. You want to talk about snooker? Go to the library and read books about snooker, because some other person has done a lot of work on this already. If you have read up on something - actually read up on it - you're able to have much more interesting conversations with people.
Sam Knight, journalist and author, quoted in Always Take Notes by Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd
So here I am doing exactly that. I just didn't realise it. My new site I'm building is a personal wiki. My notes public. On the main page is a section about "Why" I've created the site. It's hard to put into words, because there are so many "why's". So I pick up Why Write by Mark Edmundson. The table of contents alone explains my dilemma:
Why Write?
Getting Started
To Catch a Dream
To Do It Every Day
The New Writer
To Have Written
To Get the Girl / To Get the Guy
To Make Some Money
To Get Even
To Strengthen the Mind
To Grow
To Fail
To Change the World
Hitting Your Stride:
Perils and Pleasures / Pleasures and Perils
Perils and Pleasures
To Drink
To Get Reviewed
To Learn to Be Alone To Read as a Writer To Do Something
To Hold Your Peace
Pleasures and Perils
To Learn Something
To Stay Sane
To See What Happens Next
To Find Your Medium
To Skip Writing the Great American Novel
To Find Beauty and Truth
The Writer's Wisdom
To Mine a Fresh Experience
To Beat the Clock (A Little)
To Stop Revising
To Remember
To Get Better as You Get Older
To Draw a Constellation
To Have the Last Word"To grow" is what comes to mind with my wiki. I jumped to that chapter.
It's the spirit that's in you that matters the most. [...] It may take longer to express itself if the medium you choose is one you aren't naturally fluent in.
That's me, I'm certainly not fluent in writing or taking notes, but there's an underlying "spirit" that I'm trying to express or understand.
The Writer's Hustle by Joey Franklin had a good section titled "Read across Boundaries of Genre and Culture" where he quoted Stephen King, then a bit on writing habits - take notes, write all the time.
The Organised Writer by Antony Johnston chapter titles seemed a bit bland, but I dived, found it was actually pretty good, and a random quote stuck:
If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create you will die waiting.
So here I am. It was a good way to spend an hour or so unexpectedly "researching" about note taking and writing, reading about writers who write about why writers write, while I contemplate why I write.