Which cover concept would you want to see developed further?
Or I could just go with one of these two:
Anyways...back to the manuscript...
Creativity is Non-Linear
As I was working on Chapter 14, it informed my work on Chapter 13, which changed how I wrote Chapter 6.
Chapters 13-16 are Part 4 of the book, the Quick Start Your Ideaverse section. It's really the fourth wave of concepts and ideas. Each part of the book is a wave.
Part one is the introductory wave.
Part two is the main wave.
Part three is the archetype wave.
Part four is the quick-start wave.
I love how each part of the book builds upon the previous parts. That's the joy and the challenge of this type of book. This type of book is not a novel. Novels generally follow a linear chronological order. But this is a book about ideas and thinking.
Thinking is non-linear. Ideas are non-linear. And yet, to communicate them, we have to put them into linear structures like sentences and chapters. This constraint is a great gift because it forces us to distill and encapsulate the non-linear into the linear, sharpening and honing the ideas being expressed. (This idea of "translational ideation" is expressed more practically in chapter eight, by the way.)
Chapter 14 is the chapter I'm reserving to talk about in more depth about folders. One of the folders I recommend is called Calendar. It's the perfect folder to hold all your daily notes.
But when and how am I introducing the daily note? I'm covering different uses of the daily note throughout Part Three for the different archetypes. But where am I introducing? It really has to be in Chapter 6, which is the "How to Make Notes" chapter, but it's not there right now. But I don't want to go in depth about the daily note there; it would slow down the pacing of making notes by using the Spark Method and by Freewriting. Aha! I can lightly introduce the Daily Note in context to where a person can do their free writing in a frictionless way.
And that's how the downstream affects the upstream.
That's one example of countless fast-moving, fluid examples of how downstream chapters affect upstream chapters and how upstream chapters affect the downstream chapters.
Think of the work that you do. How does some aspect that comes later in the process affect aspects that come earlier?
Hit reply if you have any insights into your upstream/downstream process that you'd like to share with me. I'd love to hear!
Summer Reads, continued
Here are two more books I'm holding in hardcover. The first goes to great lengths to explain big ideas in little pictures, whereas the second goes to great lengths to explain big ideas in nuanced explorations.
In Personal Knowledge Management as and for Postqualitative Inquiry, Caitlin R. Kight gives us an overview of this strange field that we call "PKM." It's at once both a compelling and visual read, along with a highly researched and cited one. It's a bit more, since it's an academic book, but if you are into PKM, it's worth checking out!
Caitlin is also part of the LYT community, and we are enriched with her thoughtful presence.
In Big Ideas, Little Pictures, Jono Hey visually explains complex concepts through simple sketches. I remember stumbling across Jono's website, Sketchplanations, in the early days of the pandemic and being so impressed with all the concepts that he put together into sketch form.
I looked at Tiago Forte's Obsidian Vault...
Recently, I got together with Tiago to look at how he was using Obsidian to write his next book. A lot of it covers ways to consider using AI, but it stays at a higher, conceptual level.
Even if you're not into AI, I think it's still informative about the thinking around knowledge management in an Obsidian vault. Check it out!