Never start writing from scratch again

The blank page is a liar.

It whispers that you’re starting from nothing, that you need to conjure ideas from thin air, that writing begins when you open a new document. This lie keeps more people from creating than any other obstacle I know.

Here’s the truth: if you’re staring at a blank page, you’ve already made a mistake. You started too late.

The prolific writers I know never face blank pages. Not because they’re more talented or disciplined, but because they’ve built systems that make blank pages impossible.

Think about it this way. You wouldn’t start cooking without ingredients in your kitchen. Yet we expect ourselves to write something meaningful starting from absolute zero, with nothing but raw willpower and a blinking cursor.

As Sönke Ahrens puts it in How to Take Smart Notes, “They struggle because they believe, as they are made to believe, that writing starts with a blank page.”

It doesn’t. Writing starts long before you sit down to write.

Blank page as symptom

When you face a blank page, you’re not experiencing a writing problem—you’re experiencing a note-taking problem.

The blank page is just the symptom. The disease is that you haven’t been capturing, developing, and connecting your thoughts along the way. This is exactly what I wrote about in my previous article—most note-taking systems are graveyards of good intentions rather than gardens that produce new ideas.

I learned this the hard way. Years ago, I’d spend hours researching a topic, reading extensively, feeling like I was learning a lot. Then I’d sit down to write and… nothing. Or rather, a vague sense of “I know I read something about this” followed by desperate scrolling through highlights and bookmarks, grasping at the thoughts I’d had weeks ago, yet unable to reconstruct them.

The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t read enough. The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t thought enough while reading. The words I read spark a myriad of thoughts—bits and pieces that vanish when the next line teased out more fleeting musings. The problem was I hadn’t captured my thinking in a way that I could build on later.

Building your reservoir

Here’s what changed everything for me: I stopped thinking of note-taking as storage and started thinking of it as construction.

I’m not filing away information for later retrieval. I’m building a reservoir of developed thoughts that I can tap into whenever I need to write.

This reservoir is filled with three types of notes, each serving a different purpose. Ahrens describes this brilliantly in his book, based on Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten system.

Fleeting notes

These are quick captures—whatever comes to mind as you’re reading, watching, listening, or just thinking. I jot these down in rapid-fire bullet points in Bear, my note-taking app of choice. They’re messy, contextual, and meant to be temporary.

The key word is temporary. Fleeting notes are like your inbox—a holding space, not a permanent home. I process them within a day or two, either developing them into something more substantial or discarding them Marie Kondo-style, except instead of asking if they spark joy, I look for ideas.

Most people make the mistake of treating all their notes as fleeting notes. Everything goes into the inbox, nothing gets processed, and the whole system becomes a junk drawer like your Gmail inbox. Useful things are in there somewhere, but you’ll never find them when you need them.

Literature notes

When I read something—a book, an article, a research paper—I write down my understanding of the key ideas. Not quotes. Not highlights. My own explanation of what I’m reading.

This is crucial. As philosopher John Searle said, “If you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.” Literature notes force me to test my understanding in real-time.

I keep these with bibliographic details so I can cite them later if needed. But the real value isn’t in the citation—it’s in the act of translating someone else’s thinking into my own framework.

Here’s what a literature note looks like for me: I’ll read about, say, the zettelkasten method. Instead of highlighting passages about how it works, I write: “Luhmann’s system worked because notes were atomic (one idea each) and connected (explicit links between related ideas). This is different from topic-based filing because it mimics how ideas actually relate to each other, not how we think they should be organised. Reminds me of how neural networks form connections—not hierarchical but associative.”

See what happened there? I explained the concept, made a distinction, and connected it to something else I know. That’s a literature note that I can actually use.

Permanent notes

This is where the magic happens. At least once a day, I go through my fleeting and literature notes and ask: “How does this relate to what I’m working on? What does this connect to? What questions does this raise?”

Then I write permanent notes—fully formed thoughts, written for my future self who won’t remember the context. These aren’t just summaries. They’re arguments, observations, questions, and connections.

I find the greatest value in applying new ideas and concepts on tasks and topics at hand. I can test them or build mental connections between two seemingly different or even opposing ideas. Invaluable to helping me grasp the new things I learn.

Ahrens emphasises this: “We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts.”

My permanent notes are this pool. Each one is:

Standalone - Makes sense without referring back to the source
Connected - Explicitly linked to related notes
Developed - Not just “this is interesting” but “this is interesting because…”
Actionable - Written in a way that sparks further thinking

I write them as if I’m explaining something to another person, since becoming a father this person I picture is my daughter. Sometimes I even start with “The key insight here is…” or “This challenges my thinking about…” to force myself to be clear about why this note matters.

Bottom-up thinking

Here’s where this system gets really powerful. Instead of deciding what to write about and then doing research, I let topics emerge from my notes.

This is what Ahrens calls the bottom-up approach, and it’s completely backwards from how most of us were taught to write.

The traditional top-down approach:

Choose a topic
Do research
Outline
Write
Edit

The bottom-up approach:

Read and take notes continuously
Develop permanent notes
Notice clusters of related notes
Recognise topics that have reached critical mass
Structure those notes into an outline
Write by translating notes into prose

The difference? In the top-down approach, you’re generating ideas while trying to write. In the bottom-up approach, you’re just organising ideas you’ve already developed.

Much easier. Much less stressful. Much more likely to actually happen.

I’ve been writing this way for the past year, and it’s transformed my relationship with writing. I used to spend 80% of my time staring at the screen trying to figure out what to say and 20% actually writing. Now it’s reversed. Most of my “writing time” is spent shaping and polishing thoughts I’ve already worked through in my notes.

My collection of notes have become a treasure trove of drafts for my blog.

How topics reveal themselves

When you build up permanent notes over time, something interesting happens. Topics start announcing themselves.

You don’t have to force yourself to write about something. You notice that you’ve written 15 notes about AI-assisted creative work, and they’re all connected, and there’s a clear argument threading through them. So you structure those notes and write the piece.

Or you realise you’ve been circling around a question for months—say, “Why do some knowledge workers resist tools that would make them more efficient?”—and you’ve accumulated enough thinking about it from different angles that you’re ready to explore it publicly.

Ahrens describes this perfectly: “By writing down our thoughts and what we learn, we are able to see the topics we have already worked on. They just need to be polished and structured for publishing.”

This is why I never face blank pages anymore. When I sit down to write, I’m not starting from zero. I’m sitting down with 10, 20, sometimes 30 notes that I’ve already developed. Notes that are connected. Notes that already form the skeleton of an argument—or are even each a standalone article.

The “writing” is just connecting them into a coherent narrative or simply polishing an already established one.

POSSE for ideas

You might recognise this principle if you’ve read my thoughts on digital sovereignty. I’m a big advocate for POSSE—Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

The same principle applies to ideas. Develop them in your own notes first (your “site”), then syndicate them into blog posts, articles, presentations, or conversations.

Your notes are the source of truth. Everything else is a remix.

This has another benefit: your notes compound over time in a way that individual published pieces don’t.

When I publish a blog post, that’s done. Finished. It lives on my site, hopefully helps some readers, maybe generates some discussion.

But the notes that went into that post? They’re still alive in my system. They’re connected to other notes. They’ll surface when I’m working on related topics. They might become part of three other articles over the next year.

One good permanent note can feed multiple pieces of writing. That’s creative leverage.

Practical implementation

Let me get specific about how this actually works in practice.

When I’m reading a book on, say, productivity systems, I have Bear open next to me. As I read, I jot down fleeting notes—quick thoughts, reactions, questions. “This is similar to GTD but for knowledge work.” “Does this work if you’re not in academia?” “Connection to habit stacking?”

At the end of my reading session, I’ll have a messy list of these captures. That’s fine. They’re not meant to be beautiful.

Later that day—or the next day at the latest—I review these fleeting notes. Some I discard immediately. Some I develop into literature notes, explaining the key concepts from the book in my own words. Some I turn into permanent notes if they connect to my existing thinking in interesting ways.

Let’s say I write a permanent note about how knowledge work requires different productivity systems than task-based work. I’ll link this to other notes I have about:

The difference between deep work and shallow work
Why time-blocking often fails for creative professionals
Examples from my translation work where the “system” was understanding, not execution

Now I have a web of connected thinking. When I eventually write about productivity for creative professionals—which I did, and you can find on this blog—I don’t start from scratch. I start from this web of notes.

You already have material

Here’s the thing that most people don’t realise: you’re probably already doing the intellectual work. You’re reading, thinking, having insights, making connections.

You’re just not capturing it in a way that makes it reusable.

When I talk to people about their note-taking, they often say “I don’t have enough notes to work with.” Then I ask them what they’ve been reading, and they rattle off five books, dozens of articles, multiple podcasts. They’ve consumed and thought about a massive amount of material.

It’s all in their head. And most of it will evaporate within days.

The tragedy isn’t that they haven’t done the work. It’s that they haven’t kept the work they’ve done.

Start today. Right now, if you just finished reading this article, don’t just file it away or close the tab. Write down three things:

One idea that challenged your thinking
One connection to something else you know
One question you’re left with

That’s the beginning of your reservoir. Do this consistently, and you’ll never face a blank page again.

As Ahrens reminds us, “The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.” Stop planning to write someday. Start building your reservoir today.

Because creativity isn’t about divine inspiration striking while you stare at a blank page. It’s about having a conversation with yourself, with your past thinking, with the ideas you’ve been developing all along.

And that conversation? It’s already happening in your notes—if you’ve been taking the right kind of notes.

In the next article, we’ll dive deep into the three types of notes: fleeting, literature, and permanent. We’ll explore exactly how to write each one, when to use them, and how to avoid the common mistakes that turn promising note-taking systems into cluttered messes. Read it here: Three types of notes that will transform your thinking.