From a drawer of notes to a finished essay

There is a moment, if you keep notes for long enough, when a drawer starts to feel heavy. You keep filing cards in the same corner. You notice you have said roughly the same thing three times, in three different moods. That weight is a signal. Somewhere in those cards there is an essay, and the work now is to get it out without losing what made the notes interesting in the first place.

This is how we would go about it. It assumes you keep notes as separate slips, one idea to each, as described in Keeping a slip-box: one idea to a card. If your notes live in a single long document, the steps still apply; you will just do more cutting and pasting at the start.

Start from a question, not a topic

A topic is a place: “translation”, “walking”, “the essay”. You can write forever about a place and never arrive anywhere. A question has a direction. “Why do translated novels so often feel calmer than the originals?” is something an essay can answer, or fail to answer in an interesting way.

Before you pull a single card, try to write the question on a fresh slip. It does not have to be elegant. It has to be specific enough that you could tell whether a given note helps answer it. If you cannot write the question yet, you are probably not ready to write the essay, and that is fine. Go back to filing for a while.

Pull the cards and lay them out

Now gather every card that might bear on the question. Be generous. Follow the links from each card to its neighbours and take those too if they look relevant. On paper, this is the pleasant part: clear a table and lay them out. On a screen, copy the notes into a scratch document, one per paragraph, with their numbers.

Then move them around. Put cards that make the same point on top of each other. Put cards that disagree side by side. Push the ones that turn out to be off the subject to the edge of the table. You are not writing yet; you are looking at the shape of what you already think.

Most people find, at this stage, that they have three or four clusters and a few strays. The clusters are likely to become sections. The strays are worth a second look, because an odd note that does not fit is sometimes the most original thing in the pile.

Find the spine

An essay needs a spine: one sentence that says what the piece claims. Write it on a slip and put it at the top of the table. “Translated novels feel calmer because translators smooth out the rough places a native reader would never notice.” You may change it later. You will almost certainly change it later. But you need a working version now, because it tells you which cards stay.

With the spine in place, put the clusters in an order. The usual orders are few: from the familiar to the strange, from the small case to the general claim, from the objection to the answer. Choose the one that suits your question, and write a one-line heading for each cluster. Those headings are your outline, and if you keep them as section headings when you publish, readers here get a table of contents on longer pieces without you doing anything else.

Write the bridges

Lay the clusters out in order and look at the joins between them. This is where you will find the real gaps in your thinking. Your notes are full of points; what they rarely contain is the reasoning that gets a reader from one point to the next.

For each join, ask: why does this section follow that one? Write the answer on a new card. Some answers come easily. Others reveal that you do not actually know, and that is useful too. A missing bridge tells you exactly what to read, or what to think about on a walk, before you go on. It is much better to find that out now, with cards on a table, than halfway through a draft.

Draft quickly, from the cards

When the spine, the order and the bridges are in place, write the first draft in one or two sittings. Keep the cards in front of you and work through them in order, turning each one into a paragraph or part of one. Do not polish. Do not stop to look things up; leave a bracket like [check date] and keep going.

Two things tend to happen. First, the draft comes faster than you expect, because most of the thinking was done when you wrote the cards. Second, the writing is better than it would have been from a blank page, because each paragraph started from a note you had already restated in your own words. That restating is the quiet work a slip-box does for you.

A few cards will refuse to fit. Put them back in the box with a note saying where they nearly went. They may belong to the next piece.

Before it goes on the shelf

Let the draft rest, then revise it; we have set out one way to do that in Revising a draft in three passes. When it is ready, a few small choices help readers find it later:

• File the piece in a drawer that matches how you think about your own work, such as “Essays” or “Working notes”. Readers browse by drawer.
• Give it two or three subject headings that someone else might search for. They gather your piece with others on the same subject across the room.
• Write an excerpt that states the question, not just the topic. It is the line people see before they decide to read.

The features page describes drawers, subject headings and the rest of what a shelf can hold. After that, the cards that made the essay go back in the box, now with one more link each: to the finished piece.