From Steven Johnson's boingboing.net post, "How to Write a Book":
The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text ... with no organization other than a citation of where it came from...
And so in the last stage before I actually start writing ... I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered ... and as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful ...
I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.
Yes, yes, yes. My own creative process -- whether writing books or piecing together multimedia presentations -- involves three steps:
1) snag everything even remotely interesting
2) go through the big pile, sorting stuff that feels related into smaller piles
3) wait for a pattern to emerge.
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