Summary: Robin Sloan, bestselling fiction writer and media inventor, discusses his approach to note-taking and how it sparks his novels. He takes notes by hand in a pocket-sized notebook and transcribes them into a digital note-taking program called nvALT. Sloan’s notes capture language, evocative sentences, and ideas that have a certain taste or ineffable quality. He interacts with his notes by searching through them, browsing them randomly, and using a system he created to present random notes to him every time he opens a browser tab. Sloan believes in allowing his notes and ideas to stew and ferment in his brain, finding value in the connections that arise. When he gets momentum with his work, he clears his schedule and dives in, staying up late to be as productive as possible.
I learned from using those Macs early on that form is always malleable. This became even more apparent when the web came into the picture. Think about it: there’s no way to make a web page or a blog that is not an act of playing with its form at the same time as you’re creating its content. So it just seemed natural: the world was always telling me that you worked on those two things – the container and its contents – together. (View Highlight)
