The Fieldstone Method via Evernote
By: Andy Dent
Tags: Writers On Writing, Seeing2020, Knowledge, Evernote, Writers Block

I grew up in Australia but remember much of my early childhood rambling years in the North of England. I can feel the damp, the earthy crumble of lichen, the weight of the walls spidering across hills. What Americans call fieldstone walls, we called drystone walls.

Drystone walls are held together by fit. A crucial builder’s art is finding pieces of varying sizes to interlock and make something which stands up to the weather, solid for centuries. That’s a lot of different rocks — when and where do you find them?

In Weinberg on Writing, the celebrated technical and fiction author explains his Fieldstone Method. He charmingly quotes stone construction authors:

Stonescaping without mortar is surprisingly easy. All you need to start are rocks, gravel, a few basic tools, and this book¹

Weinberg’s Fieldstone Method (WFM) is a simple analogy for how you build a wall by collecting stuff before you need it. As a writer, collect snippets, ideas, phrases and other material whenever you stub your mental toe. Don’t wait until you need that wedge-shaped reddish corner piece. Put it aside when you find it.

Evernote is responsible for Chrome still being my main browser, despite Apple’s best efforts to woo me with Safari.

I now have over 40,000 notes in Evernote partly because of applying his approach. (I also hate losing stuff as links expire, so would rather have a clipped copy.)

Evernote is responsible for Chrome still being my main browser, despite Apple’s best efforts to woo me with Safari. I just can’t web without the Evernote Chrome Clipper which does a superb job of quickly grabbing the salient content of a page. It copies the URL and calculates which of my many notebooks and tags are likely to be best applied. It’s not perfect, but does a pretty good job provided I’m relatively consistent with how I file things. It will usually trim the side-content and adverts. I can also often request a simplified version which is little more than formatted text and images.

Talk to yourself, memorably

Clippings are useful material but my best source of stones are ideas prompted by life and podcasts. I’ve been a believer in capturing audio notes since the days of tape, working my way through mini-digital dedicated recorders and a series of feature phones. I don’t capture directly into Evernote as their sound recording in the iOS app is a bit limiting.

Nowadays, I prefer Just Press Record which has big buttons and a vital pause feature. Like most sound recording apps, its Share panel includes sharing to Evernote. Recording outside or in the car with AirPods is unfortunately too low a quality for their inbuilt transcription service so I end up doing manual transcription. I tend to prefer that anyway — transcribing rough audio notes is a good way to revisit your thinking, skipping waffling repeats and umms and adding a few clarifying sentences.

Sharing recordings into Evernote, even after transcribing, lets me go back and get my tone, if I ever need to. It also means I can be a bit forgiving on accuracy of transcription. Evernote has an easy way to link to notes so my transcriptions can link back to the source material.

Breaking writer’s block by sorting

Writer’s block, which sometimes bedevils us all (or at least we unhappy many), is a major concern of the book. WFM goes through this in detail and one tactic is the Goldilocks approach to ideas — too few, too many or just enough?

When you have the wrong number of ideas you chase your distractions, get diverted and eventually spiral back to your writing, feeling worse.

If you have too few ideas, your collection of stones is a starting place to add more. Evernote’s Context feature shows you related notes in your collection at the bottom of each note. Those clickable thumbnails take you on to the related notes, each of which has its own Context panel of related notes. It’s like browsing through a smarter, personal Google of things you found interesting. The biggest danger is being distracted by forgotten gems.

As I publish articles on Medium or elsewhere, even relatively small comments, I often clip a copy into Evernote. This is not just a vanity or anti-imposter-syndrome thing. Going back and looking at these articles shows Evernote’s generated Context of related notes. That’s another source of inspiration or a reminder of what you’ve been writing repeatedly.

Evernote Context for a recent article on Touchgram

Finding useful pieces you’ve clipped is one thing, but you then need to keep track of them and assemble them. If you have too many ideas, you really need a way to manage a few of them.

Weaving a Storied Web

Using Evernote’s internal links you can have daisy-chains of notes referring to each other. One of the most useful techniques is to create relatively fleeting Table of Content notes, containing mostly links to others. Evernote has two commands to make this easy from a selection of notes, either Create Table of Contents Note to get a new note, or just Copy Note Links to have a list of links you can paste elsewhere.

Weinberg encourages us to shuffle and re-order or discard stones. Notes can be tagged or put into notebooks to make it easy to have collections, even temporary ones. However, having a list of notes lets you build any order you like. The list can be indented so serves as an outline for your writing, but with every link clickable to zoom in to read detail.

Another way of organising your notes is search. I could, and probably will, write an entire article on the power of Evernote search. As well as searching the text of notes or constraining by tags, it has some very useful additional filters. One of my saved search definitions lets me find only the stuff that I have written, amongst that morass of clipped notes and audio recordings:

The search is -resource:audio/* -sourceurl:*

Note the leading hyphens, which means do a negative match. Those two clauses match notes which have:

No attached audio resources (ie: not my recordings)

No source URL (nothing that’s been clipped from the web).

Of my current 41,255 notes only 7,297 match that filter as content I’ve written in the last 10 years.