As those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook will know, at the end of last week an exciting package arrived at my house. It contained two pristine copies of the hardback of my next book, The Poisoned Island.

Here’s the beautiful front cover:

 

I’ll write more about it in the coming weeks. In fact, I’ll write so much about it you’ll be forced to silence me on whatever platforms you currently read this gush on. But for now, here’s some salient facts:

• it’s out in the UK on February 28th – no dates for other territories, including the U.S., just yet, but I’ll let you know when I get them
• it’s a sequel to The English Monster
• it’s set a year later, and features a mysterious ship, the island of Tahiti, the botanical gardens at Kew, and a tree which is not all it appears to be. It also features Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown, as well as the main characters from The English Monster
• the cover is beautiful

That’s all for now. Other than to point out that the cover is beautiful.

 

Below is the text of the talk I delivered yesterday at the Design of Understanding conference in London. It’s a somewhat meandering thing on the subject of research, note-taking, creativity and technology. It did start off with a set of clips from The English Patient as illustration, which I’ve decided not to add here for obvious copyright reasons. I’ve replaced it with a set of stills. If you’re interested in seeing the actual clips, rent the movie and find the best match for the screencaps here!

I’d like to talk to you today about the way we make sense of things through research. Specifically, I’m going to be talking about the way we take notes, or at least the way I take notes, and how note-taking has been changed by technology. This seems an appropriate subject to be discussing in a library called St Bride’s, the church of scribblers, journalists and Grub Street hacks, all of them carrying the most fearsome hand-held weapon of all: the notebook.

To start: some clips from the movie The English Patient. For those of you who don’t know the film, it’s about a torrid affair between the wife of an English spy and an archaeologist who is Hungarian but is mistaken for an Englishman. Much of the film hinges on identity – on who we are, what makes us who we are, and what happens when we forget. Here’s the clip.

 

It should be pretty obvious why I’ve picked those scenes. It’s because of that thing Kristin Scott Thomas has got hold of there. Look at it. LOOK at it.

It’s a notebook. But it’s so much MORE than a notebook. Above all it’s an emblem of its owner. It says: ‘This man is intelligent. This man is knowledgeable. He is careful and diligent and artistic and concerned with the world.’ More than anything, this notebook seems to say “this is what my owner’s BRAIN looks like, and it is MAGNIFICENT.” The notebook is who this character is because he has created it.

I think this act of creation through note-taking is a crucial matter. And when I’m talking about notes and notebooks, what I’m really talking about is how we make sense of this amazing stuff around us.

Why does this matter to me now? Because I’ve changed careers recently. I’ve had two already. I was a journalist for a long while, then I was a digital product manager for a bunch of different companies.

But these days, I write books. More than that, and through an unexpected sequence of events, I appear to have written historical books. My first two – The English Monster and The Poisoned Island

- take real historical events, and mess with them in ways which I hope are interesting and revealing.

Of course, the trouble with historical novels is they require research, and a very great deal of it. For example, to write The Poisoned Island, I had to learn about botanical science, a subject about which I knew nothing whatsoever. That’s hard enough. But then I had to make sense of the state of botanical science in 1812. This is why they tell you to ‘write what you know.’

Here’s what I’ve learned in the process of writing these books.

First: taking notes has become easier while, at the same time, choosing what notes to take has become vastly more complicated.

Second: turning notes into knowledge – into understanding – has, I believe, become harder. In other words, when it comes to Understanding, the Design of Taking Notes needs thought and it needs work.

Taking notes used to be a simple but laborious exercise. The tools were certainly simple: a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil. Perhaps a pair of scissors and some glue. For the advanced user, an audio recorder of some kind, and a visual recording device, or ‘camera’, as we used to call them.

Today we’ve still got notebooks and paper. But instead of scissors and glue, we’ve got screengrabs and scanners. We can clip webpages and save images. We can turn ourselves into recording devices that are almost never turned off. My latest toy is a scanning wand, no bigger than a small umbrella.

At the same time, the capturing process has become omnipresent and omniscient, always-on, always-aware. We have all become Data Sentinels, detecting information and recording it. We take photos at concerts and then find them on our computers, FaceScanned and indexed. We review books on our Kindles and influence recommendation algorithms on mighty servers in far-off countries. We absorb information like we absorb oxygen. Note-taking used to be like eating; now it’s like photosynthesis. The smartphone, in particular, has turned us all into walking, breathing scanners, each with our own little tricorder, noticing and capturing and recording all the long day.

But this kind of frictionless capturing is only one part of note-taking. As I’ve discovered, taking notes is mainly about choosing sources. And that has become both a wonderful and a maddeningly complicated aspect of my life. Gone are the days when almost all notes were taken out of books and newspapers. A standard networked computer today gives access to a million Libraries of Alexandria within seconds. And more than this – every bit of knowledge is now connected to every other bit of knowledge via the gloriously simple wonder of the hyperlink.

Today, I can fall into deliciously interesting historical rabbit holes at any moment, from any piece of knowledge. Research used to be like going into a room where one person told you something and you noted it down. Now it’s like walking into a room where hundreds of people are talking; you have to choose who to listen to.

Choosing who to listen to is easier if you know what you need to find out. Some people know what they’re going to write before they start writing it. I’m not one of those people. When I start out, I have an idea, often quite a vague one. I don’t know the ending, the middle, or even the second chapter. Since I started out writing fiction, I’ve discovered that quite a few fiction writers go about things the same way. You inch your way forwards, working things out a bit at a time. There’s a nice quote by EL Doctorow: “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

At the beginning of a new writing project, I read widely and indiscriminately, and a great deal of that work is wasted – at least in terms of getting the book written. And because of this vast cybertrove of information, the wasted work is potentially, well, infinite. I read dozens of books, and look at hundreds of websites. I take notes in such microscopic detail that I might as well just transcribe the Internet. Because I don’t know what I need, do I? And I might miss something.

I write in the morning, and do research in the afternoon. As I say, the afternoon research is typically wasteful, but it’s also serendipitous. More often than not, I find a fact or an anecdote or a character during research that bleeds back into the story. For quite a few weeks, this is how I go: meandering through research, blindly working my way through story, lit up by the occasional illumination from my reading to move the story on.

And then, at some point down the line, I get the story. I know why it is I’m writing what I’m writing. I might not know the ending yet, but, to quote another man who had no idea what he was doing, I do now know what I don’t know. From here on in, the research becomes tighter and less wasteful. I go looking for answers to questions, rather than randomly coming across answers to questions I didn’t even know I was going to ask. I write my way into doing better research.

It seems to be a fact to me that making sense of all these notes is a creative process. It’s the story I am trying to tell which makes sense of the notes I am trying to take. It’s a personal, self-generated, aesthetic process. It’s only by writing the story I’m researching – by discovering what that story is as I go along – that the research itself begins to gain focus and momentum. It’s a two-way street. And it confirms me in my belief that we need stories or pictures or other creative artefacts to make sense of knowledge.

And this is where I come to my second point: about how the Design of Understanding of note-taking is faulty. Because, as I hope I’ve shown, the taking and sourcing of notes has been transformed by technology and network culture. Now, here’s the thing: has that made research any easier? Because it should have done. That enormous availability of knowledge is one of the great achievements of digital culture – if pushed, I’d say Wikipedia was the greatest achievement of digitial culture. But I feel that something is missing. I’ve got the same itchy sense I have when I look at my iTunes Library.

2,220 albums, I say to myself. How on earth do I make sense of all that?

I’m going to argue that our tools for understanding this plenitude are currently poorly designed. And I’m going to pick, unfairly, on the note-taking tool I use every single day – Evernote.

I’ve flirted with quite a few note-taking platforms, but I’ve always come back to Evernote. It has an excellent suite of capture tools, and it plays very nicely across desktop, laptop, tablet and phone.

At least, its capturing tools play nicely. But this is the Design of Understanding conference. The Design of Capturing conference is at the Excel Centre later in the year, and features more arms dealers.

So, how easy does Evernote make it to understand what you’ve captured?

Not so much, I find. Even its Search is a bit disappointing, with none of that almost-magical sense of precognition and omniscience that I get from a Google search. Evernote’s search feels flat, disconnected. And at the end of the day, what does all that beautifully frictionless capture give me? A lot of stuff, certainly. But how much understanding?

Remember when Moleskine notebooks started appearing in offices? For me, it was in the early Noughties, just about the same time serious note-taking software began to appear on computers. Were people looking for a more pleasing, aesthetic, old-fashioned way of taking notes? Did they feel that technology wasn’t supplying something they valued? What did these rather self-consciously old-fashioned notebooks offer?

Was that something creativity? Art? The very personal feeling of making something yourself, making sense of something yourself, and bringing it to life? A few years ago I was in a Channel 4 News workshop with Matt Jones, who’s a designer and creative technologist. I watched him taking notes that day. He was writing thoughts and ideas and notes down with a thick marker pen, and because he’s a designer these notes were a combination of doodles and typefaces which, to me, looked fantastic. And they were his. He’d made something come into being out of the stuff we were taking notes from. He was creating and thinking while he was taking notes.

That kind of personalised, aesthetic thinking aloud is the essence of understanding what we take from our sources, I think – be they books or meetings or websites. And I think technology is singularly bad at this.

Here’s the thing about tech: it forces me to organise my thoughts and my assets in ways which the tech provides. A record collection in random disorder, inside a piece of furniture in a cluttered bedroom, with coffee rings on some album covers and a smear of hash on the odd gatefold sleeve, has been morphed into the antiseptic iTunes Library. Photos in boxes, in albums, gathering dust at the top of shelves and discovered by chance within the pages of books, become the prescriptive Face-matched archive in iPhoto. And notes – in books, files, scattered across Moleskines and scribbled in the margins of texts – become the uniform, well-organised, regimented interface of Evernote.

Sure, they’re easier to find, these catalogued Notes. They’re certainly easier to create. But are they easier to understand?

I am of course asking for the impossible. I want the note-taking power I’ve been gifted by technology. I want my notes backed-up, indexed, searchable, downloadable, sharable.

But I also want these notes to be beautiful. I want them to express my own journey towards understanding the knowledge they contain. And perhaps most of all – I want this collection of notes to somehow express something about me as well as about the work I’m doing.

I do think this is a wider issue for technology, and it goes further than what we used to describe of as ‘personalisation.’ Technology has allowed, of course, enormous self-expression and creativity when it comes to the making of new stuff – words, pictures, songs. But when it comes to our tools for making those things and for using them, the picture is pretty homogenous. My desktop looks like your desktop. My notes look like your notes.

Evernote, for one, are clearly aware of this disjunction between the physical world and the digital. They’ve recently announced a deal with Moleskine – who else? – to provide “Evernote-enabled” notebooks. For now, this means using a smartphone to snap pictures of your physical notes, which can also be tagged – virtually and physically – using stickers. It’s a laborious process, I think, but it’s an interesting step.

A step towards what, though? Well, perhaps towards one aspect of the Internet of Things. Here’s an early definition of the problem which the concept of the Internet of Things seeks to address, from Kevin Ashton:

We’re physical, and so is our environment. Our economy, society and survival aren’t based on ideas or information—they’re based on things. You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things.

Which is precisely what I’ve been talking about. Notes aren’t just ideas. They’re things. They have a physical resonance to us. So does an Internet of Things provide a means of us understanding our notes better? Can an asset I create with my own hand, pen, eye and brain be somehow mutated into a digital artefact – indexable, searchable, archivable – which is both mine and everyone’s?

Back to where I came in: the remarkable notebook in The English Patient. Why is the notebook so central to the film? Because it’s the Patient’s life, and he forgets his life and has to find it again. He finds it in the pages of his notebook. And what is this notebook? It’s a copy of Histories by Herodotus. It’s a book of stories, into which the Patient adds drawings, letters, clippings, postcards and mementoes. He draws his life onto the pages of Herodotus. His notes become who he is.

Thank you.

Kevin Ashton, That ‘Internet of Things’, RFID Journal http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/4986

FOOTNOTE: In a rather glorious and entirely unplanned demonstration of what I was talking about above, two people took beautiful notes yesterday. Here they are on Flickr (thanks jaremfan and evalottchen):

I’m coming towards the end of the first draft of my third book, and I’ve noticed a dangerous tendency – I’m so embedded in it, most of the time, that pretty much anything I see, hear or read becomes possible material.

This is dangerous.

It’s not helped by what I find myself listening to and reading at the moment. In my ears I’ve got In Our Time, RadioLab and This American Life. Thankfully, IoT is taking a summer break, but not before it’s chucked in all sorts of interesting stuff which could, if I smashed it around a bit, fit into the book.

Even more deadly has been my new fave podcast, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, which starts with the Pre Socratics and then covers a different philosopher, or school, every week in only 20 minutes. I’m up to Democritus, and every time I listen there’s a new idea to get in.

The trouble is, you don’t just have to smash the idea about to get it in, you have to smash the draft about, too. On this book I’ve tried writing an outline before starting, something I haven’t done before, and if the outline is a map then it’s one I departed from a long time ago and I’m now, frequently, lost. I’m the kind of motorist who says “oooh, look, shiny!” and heads off down a back lane and then can’t find his way back.

A lot of this meandering will be fixed in the redrafting (I hope). Because I’m still pretty new to all this, I find myself asking if this is just how I do things, or whether I should try and change. It seems to me I’ve picked up some cool stuff while acting like a magpie. But I’ve picked up some rubbish too. And I’ll never know how the book would have read if I’d ignored all that other stuff.

I suppose that like other things – a craving for cake, an unquenchable taste for heavy metal, a preference for dogs over cats – I yam what I yam.

It does sometimes feel like a bloody inefficient way of working, though. And the maddest thing of all is worrying that I’ve forgotten something really cool I heard when I wasn’t listening or saw when I wasn’t looking.

PS: Classic case. In finding links for this post, I just discovered the History of Philosophy website, which has a page for each episode with comments at the bottom which are almost as revealing and interesting as the podcasts themselves. Turn it off! Turn it all off!

There’s a nice little essay by Ben Dolnick over on the NY Times site about his attitude to semicolons; how he tried for years to stop using them because Kurt Vonnegut told him to (Vonnegut described semicolons as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”), and then started using them again because another literary hero, William James, exploited them extensively. Semicolons are, to Dolnick, beautifully expressive of thinking:

It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. Their textbook function — to separate parts of a sentence “that need a more distinct break than a comma can signal, but that are too closely connected to be made into separate sentences” — has come to seem like a dryly beautiful little piece of psychological insight. No other piece of punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle.

via Semicolons: A Love Story – NYTimes.com.

I have a little syntactical obsession of my own – parentheses. My first drafts are littered with them, and I have to do a fair bit of weeding (and I do mean weeding) on subsequent drafts to get rid of them. I don’t quite know why. I think they might be a symptom of an inability to concentrate, a tendency to wonder away from the main thread. I know I do this during conversations a lot, skipping away on some tangentially related thing while my interlocutor frustratedly tried to get me back on topic.

But my fear is (like Vonnegut’s was about semicolons) that I’m using them to “show I’ve been to college.” That they’re an affectation designed to make me look clever and well-rounded. So I weed them out, and still they return (though without the anthropomorphic intent which I assign to them).

 

Yesterday, I knocked off a from-the-heart blogpost complaining that Europeans (in particular) have a tendency to patronise Americans when said Americans are struggling with really big issues like health care. To summarise, I said that Europeans often failed to understand American politics and American history, in particular the very different between individuals, states and the federal government.

It is fair to say I did not really know what I was talking about.

This is not to say I was wrong (although some people said I was), nor that I shouldn’t have said anything. It is just to point out that here, on my blog, under my domain, I do rather reserve the right to sound off on subjects of my own choosing and my own interest.

As it happens, I’d just finished reading James M McPherson’s magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom, a history of the American Civil War. What had struck me in that volume in particular was the astounding literacy of the letters sent by soldiers back to their families. What had also struck me was the passion and intelligence with which all the participants – politicians, soldiers, newspaper editors, writers and wives – had engaged in a debate about the relationship between the individual and the state.

Thus, when people started satirising those Americans who held a different view on them about Obamacare, I simply pointed out that their assumption that Americans were somehow stupid about this stuff was very wrong.

In other words, a little reading is a dangerous thing.

My point in writing this, though, is to ask: when does one have permission to write about something, particularly in a blog? How much knowledge is assumed and/or necessary to fire off a from-the-hip remark about space travel, nuclear fusion, Japanese pop music and all the other stuff we talk endlessly about in pubs and at dinner parties? Is a blogpost somewhere between a hand-wavy assertion over drinks and a newspaper column? Where, exactly, is it in that continuum? Is it OK to fly kites, or should one only land facts? Should I pretend to be more sure than I am? Or should I constantly reassert my lack of knowledge about anything and everything?

Should I just, at the end of the day, shut the hell up?

Possibly. Probably. But this space, it seems to me, is primarily for my enjoyment. And the enjoyment stems from me saying something, and other people arguing with me – better-informed people, for the most part (like, for instance, on yesterday’s post about Americans, people who are actually, you know, American). So I’ll keep on being wrong, and other people will correct me, and thus we shall advance the sum of human knowledge and move forward together into a glorious future.

And with that, on to nuclear fusion, about which I have some very strong thoughts.

I’ve decided that the worst thing about having a book out is this:

When you know people have started reading it, and when they don’t say anything about it.

Being by nature a moody and surly and unattractive person, I am of course strangely drawn to the “worst” of things. The truth is, as I keep reminding myself, that having a book out is a thing of wonder. It’s the fulfilment of a dream. It’s the kind of thing others wish for.

But then someone you know says “I’m reading your book,” and then don’t say anything else.

It’s awful.

Note, of course, that I don’t say it’s awful when people say they don’t like your book. Actually, I don’t have much of a problem with that at all. A bad review is OK if it’s fair. An unfair review is worse. But worst of all is…. silence.

Lots of the time, people don’t tell you they liked your book when they loved it. I can think of half-a-dozen friends who’ve read The English Monster and only said weeks or months later that they loved it, usually when they’re talking about something else entirely. So why didn’t they say so at the time? Don’t they know how upsetting they’re being?

So, if you’ve read a book and you liked it, say so. And if you’ve read a book and not liked it, try to think of why, and let the writer know. Even if you started a book and didn’t finish it, consider saying “tried it, not my thing, sorry.” Other writers may disagree, but I’d rather know.

And if I’ve said I started your book, and I’ve said nothing about it, I’m very sorry. I’m not going to do that anymore.

If you’ve got this far, you’ve just read my first ever “it sucks being a writer” post. This type of thing is disgusting and not to be recommended: see also “it sucks being rich” and “it sucks being beautiful.” People who write this type of shit should be told to shut up and go away.

One of the great conundrums (conundra?) of the debut novelist is this: how on earth do you sell yourself to a non-existent fanbase? The first-timer is struggling to get noticed. You put on your best suit, get your hair cut, think of something interesting to talk about, but you’re still standing in the corner of the room while everyone in the party ignores you.

Sometimes, though, attention adheres. A good review might be the spark, or a prize nomination, or a particularly interesting and musing blogpost (as if). And if all goes to plan, you get your first fan. You start experiencing fandom. And fans generate other fans because what fans do is advocate, and then you’re up and you’re running. You’re a writer with fans. Your next book has a guaranteed headstart. You’ve pushed the rock up the hill and now it’s rolling down the other side.

Any writer who doesn’t want fans is clearly mad. But how does the relation between fans and writer evolve? And how does a writer respond to popularity, if it comes? Most importantly, how does the writer maintain a sense of himself and his own voice when there are significant communities of people demanding more of what made them fans in the first place?

Damien Walter wrote a thing for the Guardian Books site yesterday about fandom, and he had this to say (among other things):

Any writer working today who can’t answer the question, “What fandom am I writing for?” may as well pack up their pens and paper and settle into that call centre job.

Now Walter makes great play about being muscular and no-nonsense and in-your-face, but even for him this was a bit strong. It’s one thing to desire fans for the work you’ve done or plan to do. But isn’t it quite another to be writing “for” fans? How is that different to writing “for” a focus group? To what extent should any writer be thinking of the potential audience for what she is writing, when she is writing it? This isn’t so much putting the cart before the horse, as asking the horse to design and build the cart.

Of course, one should be part of the same community as the fans, as Walter says. One should talk to them and listen to them and participate with them and enjoy them. Digital media makes all that very possible and very important. But should one write things according to the demands of one’s fanbase? If, of course, one is lucky enough to have such a thing.

To some extent, all writers are thinking of their audience. Those  who write “genre” fiction have essentially signed up to write for a preselected community: horror fans, SF fans, chicklit fans, even literary fiction fans. But is this really a conscious decision? How many writers start out and say “I know, a lot of people out there like horror stories, I’ll write a horror story”? Or, should I say, how many good writers? Glen Duncan obviously took a conscious decision to jump from literate thrillers and “literary” fiction into genre horror, but did he do that just to sell books, or because he was interested in trying something new? Can somebody really write 120,000 words or more of the quality of The Last Werewolf entirely as a hack job? I think not.

The title for this piece is taken from an interview with Noel Gallagher in which he talks about focus groups and online fandom in regard to music. His point is basically that great art and culture never comes from the pre-packaged demands of fans. It comes from individual passion and talent and creativity.

Does Damien Walter really think Neal Stephenson’s fans wanted The Baroque Trilogy? Or that Stephen King’s fans wanted Misery? Some of the best things I’ve read in the past 12 months have been startlingly original, non-genre titles: things like Girl, Reading or The Raw Shark Texts or Angelmaker. None of these spoke to a packaged group of fans. All of them were products of the author’s individual imagination working within their own interests and creativity. All those authors now have “fans” (lucky devils) and must now wrestle with staying true to themselves and keeping those fans on their side.

So, no, I don’t think any writer working today needs to know “what fandom” they are writing for. The fans will either come if the work deserves it, or they won’t. Books written on demand for an existing fanbase will be formulaic, hackneyed and dull. Fans have the potential to change an author’s career twice: once when they discover they work, and once when they enforce a straitjacket on the author by demanding the same thing, over and over again.

PS: I was on the point of illustrating this piece with a queue of Star Wars fans at a convention. But as the aim of writing it was to stress the need for originality….. So the lovely picture of the fan is courtesy of db0yd13 on Flickr, who reserves some rights.