Notes

types of notes

According to @rachel-jepsen

• hasSource https://practiceprocesscraft.substack.com/p/take-note

  • Notes of Attention are observational notes that comes through the senses. They’re fragments or sketches of things you spot or overhear or wonder that are interesting or surprising but you don’t know why or what for yet!

    1. These kinds of notes—what you might keep in a pocket note-book or your notes app—can be surprisingly revealing. What do you find yourself interested in repeatedly in your environment? When you travel? What you overhear people say, what people wear or how they move, something in the natural world, something inside? Seeing over time where your interest tends to be drawn will tell you a lot about yourself and your style. Most of my note-taking life has been non-directed notes of interest that become like the nails of the house of my work.

  • Notes of Support have a specific purpose for an essay, story, or book you’re working on, or to something else you’re building, like a course or company, or to an idea you’re developing.

    1. May include notes on descriptions of a problem, solutions to a problem, directions an idea might go, stories you can use to explain the idea, and questions related to the idea. Any of these pop into your head day and night!
    2. Observational notes (using the senses) can help you come up with great metaphors and other ways to explain or translate your ideas.
    3. Discovery notes are a kind of note-of-support taken during reading, research, or work, to help you record key findings, questions that come up, things you don’t want to forget or want to look up or revisit later. (Discovery notes might appear in your margins, but you may want a specific Discovery note-book.)

  • Notes of Intention are used when you want to observe something specific to get a better understanding of it—“I’m choosing to pay attention to my feelings today and will sketch a note every time I can feel a new feeling.” Or when there’s a phenomenon you want to get a fuller picture of, maybe for a scene you’re writing—eg. notes on weather, notes on food.

  • Questions, whether recorded in a single Questions Book or just as a kind of note-taking, can be an incredible resource for you! Record your questions as they occur to you, from the mundane (who was that in that movie?) to the profound (what are my values?).

  • Delights or gratitudes can be recorded in a note-book designated for this purpose. Keep track of things that make you smile, no matter how small (and the smaller the better)!

    1. “Delight” is a word I use a lot. Part of my mission is to help people experience more delight in their lives through writing—writing helps us identify, pay attention to, focus on, and richly describe what makes us happy and brings us joy, giving those things more importance and meaning in our lives.
    2. You can learn so much about yourself by tracking delights through simple note-taking, and become grateful for what you’re surprised to find! Keeping a ‘grateful for’ note-book might be another way to go—all on its own, a designated space.
    3. Ross Gay wrote a whole book this way.

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