FIrst approach to zettelkasten and doubts

pablo24

Hello everyone,
I'm approaching to zettelkasten as a fiction and non-fiction writer. I like the concept of linking and permanent information storing, but I would like to know if the method I'm going to implement zettelkasten is a working one.

I usually take a ton of notes from narrative non-fiction books I read: story ideas, research etc... Those should be considered "literature notes" in the context of zettelkasten. I find it confusing having these notes in a single file, so I split them by topic or anecdote. But I don't like to have my computer crammed with tons of files. When I read a new book on the same topic, rather than creating new notes and linking them, I tend to group the notes I already have with new notes who adds info to the same topic or details to the same anecdote. Still, I keep a reference to the original source (in the form of citation).

To better explain what I do:

• I read a book about a writer and I take a note on an episode of his life (which we'll call NOTE 1).
• Another episode of his life goes to a different note (NOTE 2) in the same folder.
• I read another book and I find some detail on the same episode as NOTE 1. I don't create a new note but I add it to NOTE 1 and eventually add a citation for the new source.
• I read a book about a chemist and I take a note about one of his discoveries in the specific folder of that book/project. It isn't directly related to the episode of NOTE 1, but I think linking them can bring to a new perspective. I create NOTE 3 and link NOTE 1 and NOTE 3.

Is that a good practice, or is it better to have a single file for the notes coming from a book, then different super short notes for concepts I want to keep from each book?

MartinBB

It might be a good idea to read some of the blog posts that describe the Zettelkasten method. There is a ton of information there which will help you clarify your ideas. I just posted the link to the first blog in another thread: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/

ctietze

@pablo24 said:
I find it confusing having these notes in a single file, so I split them by topic or anecdote. But I don't like to have my computer crammed with tons of files.

To have one file per "idea" seems to be easier to grok.

Having many files on your computer is not a technical problem for any semi-modern computer (meaning anything built within the last 30 years; there are files-per-folder limits on old DOS drives that could be reached, but the hard limits are irrelevant for any disk that was created in the past decades). So I wonder: where does your dislike stem from?

Theoretically, you could have 1 file for everything and then just scroll up/down or use the search function to navigate between parts of that single, long file. But that's not very practical, either.

pablo24

Thanks. I've read the posts suggested by MartinBB and read Ahrens' Book and I realized I'm implementing zettelkasten properly. Anyway, I've discovered that what I believed to be literature notes are just permanent notes in my implementation.