I find that I feel writing a non-fiction subject oriented book is nonsense for non-academics. I feel a strong aversion to the idea of writing a non-fiction book, as people have suggested to me occasionally since university.
Different elements are part of that aversion:
- There’s a plethora of non-fiction books that to me seem 300 to 400 pages of anecdotal padding around a core idea that would fit on the backflap. Many such books lack tables of content and indexes, seemingly to better hide that one or few core ideas, so you need to go through all pages to find them.
- The motivation for non-fiction writers to write a book I often find suspect. Aimed at marketing and PR, in support of selling themselves as consultant for instance. Written not to serve an audience, or even find one, but as a branding prop. That makes the actual content often even thinner. Such as taking something anecdotal like “I had this great project I enormously enjoyed doing” and anointing it as the new truth, “Organise all your projects like this, it’s a universal method!”
- I equally find my own favourite topics suspect as material for writing a book. I don’t think any of the topics I work on, and have been working on, are deep enough or have enough solid foundation to stand on their own as a book. It could only become a range of anecdotes around ideas that themselves fit in a sentence or two. In my activities context and environment are key in working out how an idea can be made to work for a client, and that’s the work. That’s a good source of anecdotes, but not more. See the first bullet. A book about it would be a collection of opinions, and in my eyes would take a rather large amount of work to give those ideas a more solid footing.
In a conversation with E about this a few months ago, she said that’s a very arrogant stance towards authors (they have nothing to say), as well as belittling myself (I have nothing to say). I think those are both the same things, that most people, including me, don’t have enough to say to fill a book, to spend tens of thousands of words on. Many have enough to say on enough moments to at that time fill a great blogpost, article, a pamphlet (like the one about birthday unconferences shown in the right hand column), or an essay. But not a book, an artefact that seems such a heavyweight creation and production process in comparison. There are those who write a book by collating material that was previously written as blogposts, or as internal notes, and then somewhat rearranged. I see that as case in point more than counter argument.
As stated at the top, I make exceptions for academic books, explaining or introducing a field or actual research and their popular science counterparts, and for non-subject non-fiction, that e.g. describes a journey (geographically, or through life for instance, ‘true stories’, the history of a topic and how we ended up in the current situation, that sort of thing).
I also don’t mean fiction. Fiction’s role is very different, and any story that makes you read the next sentence and the next and the next is not what I mean here.
In that sense I very much appreciate the work of Cory Doctorow, who writes articles, essays, columns and blogposts about the topics he cares about, and writes fiction books to explore those same topics along different and novel routes.
Yet, our house holds many non-fiction books. A stack of books that keeps ever growing. So, why is that? Is it that there is more value in the whole, the collection of books read, and those unread, as opposed to the lack of value I perceive in any singular book in itself? Or maybe I don’t understand what writing a non-fiction book is, and what it is for. There are people reading my blog who have written non-fiction books. What were your motivations and aims? Why a book?
@ton > There’s a plethora of non-fiction books that to me seem 300 to 400 pages of anecdotal padding around a core idea that would fit on the backflap.I’ve thought the same thing many times. Of course it doesn’t apply to books about history, or textbooks, but there’s certainly a large subsection of non-fiction that is guilty of this crime.
CC @ybaumy @bertrandterrier Mögliche Unterscheidung eines fiktionalen / nicht-fiktionalen Bezugs der Inhalte von Zetteln in einem kollaborativen #Zettelkasten. Vielleicht denkt man sich besser eine Geschichte, aus als zu versuchen, Wahrheit festzuhalten und zu verbreiten.
zettelkasten
Wat bedoel je precies met nonsense, en heb je dan ook voorbeelden van dingen die niet-nonsense? Wat is een boek in jouw optiek? En is het schrijven op zichzelf van waarde?
heb je de blogpost gelezen?
This is a reply to Ton Zijlstra’s Writing A Book Is Nonesense. I felt compelled to ask for a clarification from Ton’s “I find that I feel writing a non-fiction subject oriented book is nonsense for non-academics.”. I’m sorry Ton, but I have to agree with your spouse here: it is indeed a very arrogant stance towards authors.
Why should you read a non-fiction book? Sure, many books are, as you nicely put it, “anecdotal padding around a core idea that would fit on the backflap”. But that doesn’t have to mean that (1) those books, even with their 90% of meaningless content, are useless by themselves. Spreading the core message by means of a book is still a powerful way to reach many people compared to an obscure blog or short but fast disappearing news article, and (2), that all books are suffering from this disease.
For example, Getting Things Done, which would perfectly match your remark “I had this great project I enormously enjoyed doing” and anointing it as the new truth, “Organise all your projects like this, it’s a universal method!”. Countless of online GTD summaries do a better job at explaining the system than the book itself. Does that mean it’s useless? Not really. Without it, wouldn’t the summaries never come to existence? Many business-like books (Management 3.0, various boring agile works) can be skimmed and mined for interesting findings (who says you have to read everything?), that are there, albeit indeed perhaps sometimes deeply hidden.
Why would authors having “not much to say” bother going through the very painful and slow process of writing a few drafts, deleting and reworking things, working with an editor, promoting the work, etc? Sure, if we take a quick glance at the entirety of books available, many of them are junk. The same is true in any other publishing platform. Just open an online game store to find out. Some of those forgettable entries are diamonds in the rough.
You ask: “why should you read anecdotal non-fiction”? I reply: why shouldn’t you read it? Findings and evidence based on research is interesting, but often boring. I read to be inspired. I read to be in awe, to feel respect for a craft, for the effort people put in. I read to escape the real world, to fantasize about a journey. I read to feel and figure out how to live. I also read to learn new things, but in hindsight, that’s everything but the foremost reason. You seem to be only focused on the last reason, which sounds like you misunderstand the reason why books are there in the first place.
Every single person has something interesting to say. Let me ask you this. Why do you publish on your blog? Did you forget that, in the margin of your blog, it states Read my book! (How To Unconference Your Birthday)? Whoops.
Another grave mistake. As an academic myself, I can safely say that most books written by academics are lovingly erudite (read: dry!) and long-winded. They have as much or as little to say as anyone else. I get that as soon as the author’s bio contains “professor” on the backflap, it somehow magically becomes believable. What then, about Jiro Ono’s life he spent perfecting sushi for more than sixty years? I love reading cooking adventures. They’re devoid of hard evidence and sentences such as “research claims that”. So what? Or what about practical engineering guides/manuals?
I wrote my own bread baking adventure. Sure, it contains a part on the science of baking. But that’s because of my own personal interest, not because I think it was needed in such a book. I honestly think the first part, my personal fumblings and failures, is more interesting. I’m not a huge authority in the land of bread baking, I’ve never even owned my own bakery, so what gives me the right to speak/write? Because I personally felt I had something interesting to say. I wanted to write a book I’d love to read myself—not because of commercial interest. Other people seem to like it.
Just because Martin Heiddeger was a philosophy professor doesn’t mean we should take his ramblings for granted and ignore Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations that were written in the trenches. Just because Vladimir Nabokov was a literary professor doesn’t mean we should ignore Stephen King’s On Writing advice and put Nabokov’s on a pedestal. That’s where critical thinking should come in.
If you read Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus (don’t worry, it’s an academic!), you’ll learn that books did not (only) originate as a way to preserve knowledge. Sometimes, knowledge is boring. And we’re not even talking about fiction yet.
There’s a lot of crap out there. That statement is true beyond the context of books. Sifting and decision-making while buying is up to you. To ignore everything but academic authors when it comes to non-fiction is just ridiculous.
tags icon
book
writing
publishing
Herkenbaar, ik schreef uiteindelijk mijn boek over het nieuwe voice kanaal niet 50% voor mezelf maar 90 of meer. En mijn persoonlijke ervaring met andere non fictie/business boeken is dat het inderdaad veel korter kan. Mijn strategie nu is wanneer ik een interessant idee uitgewerkt vind in zo’n boek is om de video’s van de auteur te vinden. Dan wel de podcast met lange interviews. Soms koop ik dan ook het boek, meer als totem volgens mij. Jij hebt al een boek geschreven. Dat zijn alle blogposts en artikelen die je her en der achtergelaten. 🙂 wat wellicht interessant is voor jou om te overwegen is om een biografie te schrijven. Dus waar kom je vandaan, wat heb je gedaan, waarom en hoe. Toen ik je blogpost las had ik het idee dat jij wel wat te vertellen had, wellicht dat die form wel helpt.
In reply to Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output by Chris Aldrich
Even while on hiatus I obviously cannot ignore Chris Aldrich’s call for examples of output creation systems and the actual output created with Zettelkasten style note card systems. For two reasons. One is that I fully agree with him that having such examples publicly visible is important. The other is that I recognise his observations about the singular focus on system design and tweaking often being a timesink precluding outputs (with the loudest voices often being utterly silent on output).
Here’s a first list of outputs from my system, without the receipts though as I’m writing this away from home with limited tools. After the list I’ll make a few general observations as well.
I have created 2 or 3 slide decks for client internal and conference presentations from my conceptual notes. First searching for notes on the topic, and the contextual factors of where the slide deck will be used. Then gathering the findings in what I call an ’emergent outline’ (Ahrens calls them speculative outlines). Or perhaps I already have an overview of sorts in the form of an ‘elephant path’ (a map of content, or annotated topical index) which normally help me navigate.
I have written blogposts directly from my notes. This is now easier than before, since earlier this year I created a way of publishing to this site from my internal notes. This allows me to write in a note, linking internally or including, all within the notes environment and then push the result out to the website.
I created some new personal insights from new connections within my notes. Not sure if that counts towards Chris’ definition of outputs. This results in new notes where the edge, i.e. the newly found link between two notions, gets expressed as a note in its own right. The first such connection (between my notions of Maker Households and Networked Agency) happened when I was about 35 notes ‘in’.
For a recent panel at a conference I collated my talking points from my notes
I use my notes a lot in work conversations, pulling up concepts as needed. I used to do this to pull up facts and earlier meeting notes with the same participants. Now I also use this to provide richer input into the conversations themselves, including pointing to sources and references. This emerged during the many video calls in the pandemic lockdowns, where it was easy to pull up additional material on one of my screens. Now that I have more meetings in person again, I find I still do this automatically. Whatever material I mention I also link in my own meeting notes. This has been remarked upon by conversation partners as a valuable thing.
I have some elephant paths I regard as output in their own right. One currently important to me is the Practices elephant path. It gives an overview of things I want to approach as a practice (which I place somewhere on the spectrum between habit/routine on one end and literacy (in the Rheingoldian sense of skill plus community) on the other end. Practices are the sweet spot to me for (groups of) knowledge workers to implement fields of theory in their own daily work
I maintain a client website directly from my notes on EU digital and data legislation. I have conceptual notes for all the regulations involved and maintain summaries alongside them. Those summary notes are automatically synced to GitHub and then published on Github pages as well as the client’s own domain. These same summaries also serve as outline and text for my frequent presentations on this subject, where the slidedeck is kept up to date from the notes that I am certain are always up to date because they are the notes I work with daily.
Some other observations:
What constitutes output? The ‘Luhmann had 90k notes and wrote 70 books’ mantra makes for a rather daunting benchmark to be compared against. I propose we count outputs that have utility to its creator. For me then there are two types of outputs from my notes. A group that is the result of better project tracking, allowing me to pick up where I previously left of, which is a valuable ratcheting effect. Me building my own micropub tools resulted from such ratcheting in 15 minute increments. This group of outputs results from notes, but not the conceptual notes of my ‘Garden of the Forking Paths’ (ie my Zettelkasten style collection). The other group results from re-using and re-arranging the material in my ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ and the example outputs listed above follow from it. In a sense all my work is an output of my notes and my experience, and my tools have always been aiding in my work. Yet there is a qualitative difference.
I have used notes based PKM for over two decades, and in hindsight it was mostly focused on reporting conversations, project stuff, conversations with myself, and many many examples of things I thought relevant. Those I would tag extensively, and I think most of those historic tags would now be their own conceptual notes, expressing the communality of the tagged examples and material, or expressing the link/edge between two or three of the tagged source notes as a notion.
Many of my conceptual notes (now 1000+) and ideas plus non-conceptual atomic notes (another 500 or so) stem from ‘atomising’ my archive of blogposts, and my presentations of the last 10-15 years. Many notes are thus created from earlier outputs themselves.
I recognise what Stephen Downes remarked, that creating the notes is the valuable part towards pattern recognition, and making output needs further gathering of new material. In part this is because adding things to my notes is aiding memory. Once it’s noted it’s no longer novel, and in that sense looses part of the surprisal (informational worth) that led to its creation in the first place. If outputs in my own mind need to be novel, then my notes are limited in value. (This goes back to earlier conversations of the 90% is crap heuristic which I see as feeding impostor syndrom. Outputs imo highly connected to impostor syndrom.
I don’t think I have actual established processes for outputs yet, I’d like to, and I don’t yet feel outputs created suggest as-effective-as-can-be processes yet. Maybe that is because I have not been really tracking such outputs and how I created them. I have become better at starting anything with interrogating my notes first, and putting them together, before starting exploration further afield. Often I find I already have some useful things, which gives a headstart in exploring anything new: there’s something to connect new findings to.
I do not think my current notes could yield something along the lines of a book, other than the nonsense kind of a single idea padded out with anecdotes. I also feel the method of information collection isn’t good enough to base any work on academically. This goes back to the earlier remark as to what qualifies as output of good enough quality.