Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn't fit in his Zettelschrank: writingslowly.com
@writingslowly People in this pkm / zk scene, for some reason, have a really *really* hard time accepting that chaos, friction, non-output, and all the rest of the non-optimized world of thinking and writing is not only "OK," but is often simply a part of (maybe even an integral part of) the creative process. That "not publishing a lot" doesn't equal not being an awesome person who contributed intellectually to their surroundings.
@bobdoto the title of your book alone made me realize i had to separate the creative messy nonlinear writing environment from the projects, tasks and life admin stuff. @writingslowly
@writingslowly Recently reading Roland Allen’s chapter on da Vinci in The Notebook (2023), I was struck again with the sheer amount that he wrote and didn’t publish. Even worse for civilization was that it took centuries for us to realize what was hiding in his notebooks that might have been useful if it had been published contemporaneously.
@chrisaldrich exactly so - that’s why both Leibniz and Leonardo feature on my highly presumptuous list of writers with ADHD. My take on Leonardo is inspired by Hector Haarkötter’s book on note-making.
@chrisaldrich my dissertation was on the roughly 100,000 unpublished manuscript pages Charles Sanders Peirce left behind. Polymath whose work ranged across the sciences and humanities. When Harvard inherited his papers they used them as scrap paper in the library.
@chrisaldrich your comment reminded me that I’ve also written about the difficulties Jane Austen had with publishing, and then posthumously, with staying in print. Feel the importance of every day. A lot of people might wish she had written and published more, but she didn’t.
@writingslowly thankfully they quickly corrected their error and much of his work was saved. There are a handful of biographies about Peirce that mention this.
@davoh My notes on Peirce are woefully less adequate than yours surely, but I’m interested in his note taking method. I’m presuming the papers they used as scrap were in note card/index card form or were they full pages? Thank you for the tangential pointer to your scholarship on the matter. Does his nachlass there include his notes? I can only imagine institutions using the notebooks of Thoreau or da Vinci as scrap paper…