Your First Brain Sucks 🧠 Get a Second One!
Plus: New offerings for writers!
Your first brain sucks…
BUT BEFORE I GET TO THAT: I'm excited to share a little teaser about something new I have in the works. As many of you know, I love teaching workshops that blend my passion for project management and writing. Over the last year, I’ve taught for organizations like the HWA and Willamette Writers. I've received feedback from many of you expressing a desire to partner more closely on your goals and roadmaps. I've been listening, and I'm excited to announce that soon, you'll have the opportunity to work with me one-on-one. This new offering will allow us to dive deeper into your individual needs, ensuring you can focus on what truly matters without the constant fear of missing out.
Stay tuned for more details—I can't wait to connect with you all and help you achieve your goals!
Now, where was I? Ah. Right.
I remember my first writing conference like it was yesterday, mostly because of how awkward I was. Like a newborn deer, I wandered around the hotel, drifting from room to room, afraid to speak with anyone that looked even the least bit authorly.
Looking back, there was one panel in particular that stands out. I remember sitting in the back of the room (again, I was awkward), waiting for things to get started, when a woman sat down next to me with the biggest fu*king binder I had ever seen 😳. It looked like an archive of every thought she’d ever had, and it was all jammed into one physical space. I could practically hear it begging for mercy, its little binder voice choking on decades of paper. Take-out menus and sticky notes fanned out between its pages as if to suggest the woman was too busy writing things down to care if it was tidy. Throughout the panel, I watched as she opened the binder and scribbled down anything she found interesting.
Later, when I was brave enough to ask, she explained that this Italian grinder of information contained everything she needed to be a writer: her musings, her novel ideas, her notes on craft. When she traveled, she documented the entire experience so that she could later recall the details while writing. I was impressed, really I was. But I was also a child of technology, and the idea of carrying around something that could crush a man’s skull seemed as inconvenient as it was dangerous. Years later, when I was thinking back on the interaction, I gave it a Google, and as it turns out, this is actually a thing. People have been collecting information in books like this since the Renaissance, and they’re called Commonplace Books 📚
According to Wikipedia:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages , maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
So Are Commonplace Books a Good Idea?
I actually think they’re brilliant, just not in physical form. Commonplace books are the great, great, great grandmother of the second brain, a modern methodology for capturing your thoughts, ideas, etc. in a digital space. The digital space here is key because it allows a user to access their information at any moment in time, whether they’re sitting in front of a computer, out on a hike, or taking notes at a writing conference. While I admire the woman with the binder, she was the literary equivalent of a dinosaur. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But, old school methods come with old school challenges—challenges that the iPhone has long since solved for.
Here’s the thing I teach in all of my workshops: if you’re working to become a better writer, then you’re a student. And if you’re a student, you absolutely need a second brain, because the older we get, the worse our first brain—the one inside our heads—becomes. And if you’re learning new things, you have to capture them in a meaningful way. Otherwise, you’ll only retain a fraction of the things you want.
So, Which Second Brains are Best? 🧠🧠
That depends on the type of person you are. Everyone is unique, and there’s a ton of different apps out there. Two that I recommend are Notion and Obsidian. You can google each to learn more about how they work, but each helps users externalize information, thoughts, and ideas, storing them in an organized manner outside your brain. This makes information easy to retrieve and manage—like that amazing tip from your favorite author that was going to change your writing forever! Until you lost the journal you wrote it in.
I’ll leave you with this: a list of categories you can use to kickstart your very first second brain, because unless you’ve got a photographic memory (or Neuralink), your first brain could probably use some help remembering all this crap.
Idea Repository: Collect and store various writing ideas, prompts, and inspirations.
Character Profiles: Detailed descriptions and developments of characters in your stories.
Plot Outlines: Structured outlines of your stories, including major plot points and story arcs.
Research Notes: Information gathered during research for your writing, including historical details, scientific facts, or cultural insights.
Writing Exercises: Exercises and prompts you've tried, along with reflections on their effectiveness.
Feedback and Critiques: Notes on feedback received from readers, editors, or writing groups.
Reading Lists: Books and articles to read, both for pleasure and for studying writing techniques.
Writing Goals and Deadlines: Track progress towards your writing goals and upcoming deadlines.
Drafts Archive: Different versions of your drafts, to track changes and improvements over time.
Style and Grammar Notes: Tips and rules for style and grammar specific to your writing or genre.
Quotes and Dialogues: Collection of inspiring or useful quotes, dialogues, and literary passages.
Writing Resources: Links to online resources, tutorials, courses, and writing tools.
I use Bear app. Another great second brain. But now I will be calling it my commonplace.☺️