The Journey to Lake Written
Which "clay" do you want to use? (plus a Mary Oliver walk-on)
The mystery of this writing thing done by each and every one of us here on Substack haunts me. That we do it at all is a conundrum. Few of us gain status in our human communities; fewer still find golden treasure to warm our bones. From my perspective sitting in a friendly persimmon tree, we seem to be bound to this calling, perhaps a benign form of bondage.
We spend our lives gliding down a path toward that deep, inviting pool of “written” as if our very lives depended on it. And yet, the path is “full of fallen branches and stones”* stealing away so many of our words and thoughts before they reach that beckoning, life-necessary water.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m late. I shoulda done this a long time ago. My long years of school shoulda taught me more. But I didn’t and it didn’t. So, here I am now, looking out over Written Lake with a bag full of wishes, grieving all the orphan thoughts lost along the way; those that never had even a chance to feel that refreshing water.
Not that all of them were strong enough to make the journey, but I didn’t give them a chance. And while it’s already “late enough, and a wild night,”* and with Mary Oliver’s whispers echoing about the room, I finally knew what I had to do and began.
And you’ve done what, pray tell?
Thanks for asking. I’ve joined the quest for a sustaining and sustainable Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system that will help me harvest information and transform it into a writing workflow to create content worthy of Lake Written.
I’ve enrolled in a Visual Thinking Workshop with Zsolt Vicsián which requires the use of PKM elements such as Obsidian and an incredible plug-in developed by Zsolt himself: Excalidraw (“plug-in” sounds like just a little add-on … this one reminds me of my first contact with Photoshop.)
Zsolt describes this system as “4D PKM.” (Maybe I should have started with one-D pkm?)
The immediate result? I’m drowning.
My current tools have become old hat so I’ve forgotten what it’s like to run into a wall of unknown software. To make matters worse, the community platform uses Discord, probably one of the most appropriately named community spaces I’ve come across. Apparently developed by a wide-ranging horde of gamers, I feel like I’ve been transported into the third generation of Mad Max survivors.
Thirty minutes of watching a nine-minute You Tube video on how to use Discord, and I’m still a bit shell shocked but now see a glimmer of sun peeking through clouds. This morning I was so pathetic the developer offered a personal zoom session even though it was after hours for him in Hungary. It’s amazing what a few minutes of kind hand holding through a melt down will do. Thank you, Zsolt!
When I think about it, this search for a writing workflow system spans decades in bits and starts … my beloved IBM Selectric, mindmapping, my first hand-built-by-a-friend desktop, Word, some unremembered brand of luggable, Scrivener, Evernote, finally coming home to my first of many sleek Macbooks, several blogs, a too-short workshop with Edward Tufte and probably too many other excursions into learning and thinking, especially visual thinking.
Something changed when I joined Substack some 367 posts ago. The goal of a twice-weekly post called for a more disciplined approach to my writing and the process of catching ideas and thoughts as they floated by. It also brought up, over and over again, the question of “Why?” and what I was trying to do with all these words. (I swear by now I should qualify for the million-word club.)
I knew I needed a better system but knew not what until I heard the term “Personal Knowledge Management system (PKM).” The click was instantaneous and it set me off on a rippling series of explorations … Notion, Zotero, Obsidian, Milanote, Chat-GPT, Perplexity, Readwise … anything to help me create a more supportive writing workflow and replace Evernote which seemed to fit me more poorly with every tech update.
Stumbling along the PKM trail
A significant failure played it’s part. During the past decade, I’ve made several determined attempts to become conversational in Spanish. I truly enjoy learning such a lovely language; however, I am a practical learner which always leads me back to “why am I learning this?” and “am I doing it effectively? My “why?” was never big enough to sustain the effort required to be conversational, and curiosity about learning always derailed me.
At some point, it became clear that the real call was from my curiosity about learning methods, which far outweighed the fantasy of having long, heart-to-heart conversations with the people of Mexico (many of whom speak indigenous languages anyway). Book choices began to change. New possibilities presented themselves. At some point, one thought started waving its hands:
writing begins long before words reach the page …
everything (!) is writing …
even the stuff that doesn’t get “written.”
I had been paying attention to the “page” (book, post, poem, article, play, song, etc.) and the words on it without thinking much about the process happening long before that final word-focused act.
In the process of thinking and researching this new way of thinking, I came across a Reddit message (another one of those age-old technologies I had managed to avoid until it refused to go away) from a French woman and loved her metaphor of sculpting clay:
‘Writing is a creative process. Think of it like sculpting something. The first draft is you digging clay out of a riverbed. It's wet, it's slimy, and it doesn't look very appealing at all. But you can't sculpt anything until you've dredged all the clay you need out of the river.
Likewise, you can't craft a beautifully well-written story until you've dredged all the words and ideas out of your brain.’
The real purpose of note-making
If there’s no “clay” in your brain, you have nothing to sculpt write with. Fortunately, we live in a world where “clay” is everywhere and in everything. You actually can’t avoid it … however, you can choose which clay you pay attention to. When you make a note, you’re basically saying, “I like that clay tidbit of information and might want to use it some day.”
So, that’s the way my year has begun.
How about you? What’s new with you? Intentions? Tools? Processes?
*Mary Oliver’s advice comes back about this time every year.
From: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/5249/the-journey/
January: An Abundance of Attention month
Every day during this transition month, I will share a small bit of inspiration focused on ATTENTION. Rather than overload your email, they will be posted to Substack Notes … and gathered into a digital word-and-image book for paid subscribers.
Twice weekly posts are always free and will never be paywalled. The only tangible benefits of becoming a paid subscriber is immediate access to the digital books I make along the way. Last year there were 15 of these digital explorations; who knows how many will come your way this year.
Also, there seems to be long-form essays bubbling away on the back burner. Those will be for paid subscribers also.
The muse and I have an agreement … I follow her lead and she continues to bring new things that fascinate me enough to keep putting together things to float on Lake Written.
If you would like to receive these books and essays, simply enter your email in the box below and the system will lead you forward.
The best takeaway from this? You just gave me a reason to write an article about something I thought would be boring--How I Survived the PKM Jungle and Came Out on the Other Side.
I agree. Writing is a kind of calling inspired by everything we do or see, but most of all by those things that "enthrall" us, as your quote notes. Like you, I am late in making my calling (writing) my priority in life, but giving it my all now, ready to publish the novels I've been writing over the past decade or so. Your new writing adventure sounds exciting. Wishing you joy in the endeavor.