A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-And-Six

In the past several days, I have been thinking about the challenges I have when it comes to organizing information through notes and such.  It is an ability I have lacked since school.  I was often chided for not keeping written notes in lectures, but I developed a capacity to remember a great deal of the information, and relied upon that instead.  In writing essays and such, I would research, finding quotes in the text and remembering where they were located, for example, and this worked well, for the most part.  I could always dive into the text to seek out an appropriate quote, if I needed, and I generally had a good grasp on the material. 

When I wrote my first novel, I did attempt to take some notes, but I found that they did not function for me in the usual capacity.  It was not that I would ever refer back to them in a physical sense, but instead that they served as a vehicle for thinking things through.  I had a strong sense of the book, but not in a format that anyone else could perceive or interact with; the notes and the sense of plot and all of that existed as a concept in my head, and not as a thing that I could have extracted meaningfully in any format but the book itself.

Now, as I am working on this Dracula essay, I am often finding it difficult.  I do a lot of small writing, at the moment, bits and pieces on this or that which I am hoping I can weave together, or which might serve as catalysts for deeper thought.  As well, I am reading and researching, watching movies and videos related to the subject, and considering it all.  In the end, I need to be able to bring it together, to point at the various sources, so I am attempting to keep some track of this, but I don't have a reliable method, or even the capacity to use one.  It is a challenge, but I also recall how it felt writing that novel.  I was daunted, and kept hoping to work out the right system for keeping things straight, but it turned out that wasn't what I needed, and the result is work that never could have been accomplished, at least not be me, using more traditional methods.  I trust that this nonfiction piece will come together in a similar way, perhaps when I least expect I am ready for it.

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