(2020-12-15) Tasting Notes With Robin Sloan

Dan Shipper and Kieran O’Hare: Tasting Notes with Robin Sloan.

I describe myself as a ‘media inventor’, which I know sounds like a strange label. To me, it means that a lot of my work – not really my novels, but almost everything else – involves inventing a format or container at the same time that I’m writing or imagining what goes into 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.

For more than a decade, I’ve been very committed to taking notes by hand, usually in a little notebook that I keep in my pocket

As for what I take notes about, maybe because I’m a fiction writer at heart, a lot of the things I notice have to do with language.

made up of things – either from the outside world or from the meanderings of my own brain – that have a certain ineffable taste to them.

Sometimes I simply search through them by keyword or topic to find items that may be useful for whatever I’m working on at that moment. One nice thing about nvALT – the main attraction for me – is that it makes it very easy and fast to search

It's also a pretty regular occurrence for me to just browse through my notes in a completely random fashion – it’s something I'll do over a cup of coffee. Sometimes I do it just for fun, but usually it’s because I’m working on something and I want to have some raw materials rolling around in my brain.

I find that random searching like this has a lot of power to create unexpected connections in my brain; it can almost be like consulting the I Ching.

The third way I interact with my notes is a mechanism I’ve engineered whereby they are slowly presented to me randomly, and on a steady drip, every day. I’ve created a system so random notes appear every time I open a browser tab

There’s no hierarchy in any of my organizational schemes (and there’s a reason for that)

A pretty good master analogy is that it’s an attempt to make a big stew pot out of my brain – there is tremendous value in allowing all of these notes and ideas and observations to stew and ferment in there.

For me, the real power comes when ideas intermingle and I’m able to discover connections that I truly could never have dreamed of under normal conditions

If you were to look at a graph of my productivity on both of them in terms of words on the page over time, my output wouldn’t be thin but steady, nor would it ever go down to zero. But you would see these huge leaps in productivity which seem to happen over a week or ten days.

Based on that lived, visceral experience, I’ve tried to pay more attention to the feeling of momentum when I get it, and really lean into it.