How Capacities and PKM makes me a better writer
I have been telling stories my entire life. So have you. Language and storytelling are two of the fundamental pillars that make up our human existence. When your mum picked you up from school and you told her about the girl who bit you down to the bone because you wouldn’t get off the see-saw (you can talk to the small bite shaped scar on my shoulder if this seems far fetched), you were telling a story. When you call your best friend to tell her about what went down at your office Christmas party, you’re also telling a story. We all tell stories all the time, usually based on or around things we have experienced in real life.
We’re always collecting snippets of information, things we want to share with others and tucking them away in our brains for later. This is nice, but arguably the worst way to go about things. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but our brains are not built for storing ideas, they’re meant for coming up with new ones.
This is when external systems come into play. Imagine you had a place you saved everything; your ideas, funny one-liners you overhear, fun facts, bad jokes, quotes, your thoughts on books and movies, articles you have read, places you have been to, song lyrics, history and philosophy. A place where all these things go, where you know you’ll find them again. A place where you can play with them to make connections, expand on them and come up with new ideas. Can you see where this is going? Can you tell why this might make you a better writer (and a generally more interesting, more knowledgeable person)?
When you’re a writer, saving inspiration and coming up with new ideas is even more important. It’s the first step of the writing process. Having this space to play with inspiration and to let your curiosity lead you down unknown paths is invaluable.
Capacities: my ultimate PKM app
At this point, Capacities is no longer an app; it’s a lifestyle. I will forever rave about this app, and I can’t imagine life without it. My life before Capacities feels a shade darker, and definitely a lot less fun.
I have written about Capacities before, including all the ways I use it. It’s the heart of my PKM system, where my ideas and notes come together.
Capacities works in the same way your brain does — by letting you interact with objects. Objects can be anything; books, films, articles, countries, topics, years, media. So when I talk about a system where you can bring all of these things together as you interact with them in real life, make connections between them and draw inspiration from them, this is what I mean. Capacities is my space to do that. I cannot express how much of a gift this is.
Collecting sparks
Coming up with ideas for novels and stories is hard. Everyone’s ideation process is different, but my ideas always come from something, and usually something frustratingly small and without context. Last year, I saw a random plaque at the British Museum that lead me to write (and then abandon, oops) an entire novel. A line in a film, or an interesting word could spark an idea. I never know what might ignite the ever-elusive ‘muse’ that leads me to a story worth telling.
This is why I have started collecting these sparks, in an aptly named ‘Sparks’ object in Capacities. It’s a very new object, because most of my idea collecting is done in mymind. But sometimes, while I am working away on something in Capacities, I’ll come across something that strikes a chord with me, and my little writer brain with do a double take make me stop in my tracks. This is when I know I need to file this idea away, and this is when Sparks come in.
My Sparks object is very simple. All I need to be able to do is quickly jot down ideas, and if I feel so inclined I can connect the spark to any relevant media.
Because my Sparks can be anything I come across, not just writing related, I have created a ‘writing spark’ tag that I can use to tag any Sparks, or anything else within my database that has ever ‘sparked’ or inspired me in any way.
I keep my Writing space (called Flow) in Capacities separate from my main PKM space, because I don’t want these two workspaces to mix, but I kept coming across things in my main space that inspired my writing. My new ‘writing spark tag’ has solved this problem, and anything truly important can be copied into my separate writing space.
If you’d like to know more about why and how I separate my writing workspace from my PKM space, I touched on this in a previous article.
(Good) ideas don’t exist in a vacuum
Everything is connected. History, philosophy, art and literature all have links running between them. A historical event will influence a philosophical movement, which influences literature, which influences art and culture. Everything is connected. I recently read an article in the New York Times about Calvin Klein underwear ads, that touched on fascism and World War II propaganda. The fact that there is some sort of link (however small) between those two things just boggles my mind, and makes me excited to stumble on more elusive connections.
In my experience, some of the most interesting stories come from two ideas that shouldn’t really go together being meshed together anyways. Finding links, and building on connections is one of the more sure-fire methods I have in my writerly tool belt to come up with good ideas, and to become a better, more varied writer. Capacities helps me do this.
Interacting with media & literature notes
Writers spend a lot of time reading. It comes with the territory. But when you read as a writer, you often read with your writer cap on. Beautiful prose, a well-executed idea, and an intricate plot all inspire me. Reading good books for the enjoyment is important, but it’s only surface level. Reading good books for enjoyment and to learn more about craft, to get inspired and come up with new ideas is at the heart of my PKM practice when it comes to writing. Being able to interact with great literature, and draw knowledge and inspiration from it to further my own writing craft is a vital part of my writing practice. Actively engaging with literature makes me a better writer. Capacities gives me the space and tools to do this.
I have written up an entire article about how I take literature notes in Capacities, so you can read more about that specific use-case if you’re interested.
Down the rabbit hole: following my curiosity
I think all writers are curious creatures. We have to be. As I said, ideas are these nebulous, elusive moments of wonder. When you get a good one, you have to hold on to it. Being curious, asking questions and venturing into lands unknown are a pre-requisite for coming up with good ideas. This is also why everything I interact with in my Capacities space, while not directly related to my writing projects, makes me a better writer. Learning about the world makes me a better writer, because I always have more resources and experiences to pull from. I’m not saying that my current interest in Charlemagne will lead me to write a book about him, but there is a story that can be told about his many wives and concubines.
Capacities lets me fall down rabbit holes, and wander along paths that interest me. I have devised a very simple way of instantly dropping back into rabbit holes in Capacities. I created a list of ‘things that interest me’, with a tag next to the thing that is related to it. Anything related to the topic of interest gets tagged, and so I often look at my list and click on one of the tags to see an entire collection of random objects about the topic.
This is not an exhaustive list, and I don’t think I’ve updated it since I started using Capacities almost a year ago now. I don’t feel the need to add more to it just yet, even though my interests have grown and changed, because there is still so much to be explored in the list I have right now.
Once inside the tag I can click into people, books, countries, and my little rabbit hole expands from there. Because everything in Capacities is connected, I am creating my own little wikipedia. I can drop into one of my topic tags, and click away through the various related objects until I find myself in a completely different place.
I think the long and short of it is that Capacities helps me engage with the world, and engaging with the world around me is what makes me a better writer. You don’t necessarily need to use Capacities for this purpose, but it’s the app that has worked the best for me and my use case.
Having this practice means that whenever I sit down to write something, I’m no longer met by the dreaded expanse of a blank page. I have an infinite amount of interesting ideas, inspiration and connections on hand to guide me.