Stephen Donahue
c6d7c8c211
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Retract the seven published columns into drafts/ and promote the 24 per-date entries split out of Notes/random.md. Bodies are verbatim; titles, subjects and slugs are new. Make publication a matter of location. Notes/Notes.11tydata.js gives anything under Notes/ permalink: false unless tagged `column`; drafts/drafts.11tydata.js renders drafts at their real permalink under `yarn dev` and excludes them from collections entirely in a build, so no template can surface one. Publishing is now `git mv drafts/<file> columns/`, and moving it back retracts it. Untagged notes were previously rendered into _site/ and deployed — including Notes/random.md, which was live at /Notes/random/.
36 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
36 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: How To Write
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date: 2026-04-06
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layout: column.njk
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tags: [column, writing]
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permalink: /columns/2026/how-to-write/
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---
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## Prompt
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- The kernel of an idea
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- It's generally recommended to plant a seed first
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- something you can return to over time
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- reference other ideas you come across
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- develop and refine
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## Questions
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- Questions give structure to your work
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- Even implicit ones - the unsaid queries that motivate the composition of the piece
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- what's included, and when?
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- as important: what's left out?
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- make everything a deliberate choice
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- Why write, if not to test an idea against your own specific qualities? To see if there's a reaction, some expansiveness or contraction.
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- They provide the substrate to thought, and the nourishment, encouraging the frontier to expand
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## Rough Notes
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- The heap
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- The outlet for stream of consciousness thinking
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- See what associations bubble up to the surface
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- See what resonates, what clusters, the affinities that form
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- The warmup
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## Quotes
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- For the sake of having an opinion, I say it's better to rearticulate someone's idea in your own words, to digest it with your own acuity, than to simply reexpress the idea as a quote.
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- Other than stating something factually: at such a time, such a thing was said
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- Refernce it, so motivated readers can connect with more writing that may expand on the idea.
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- But don't just repeat the statement verbatim. Connect with the idea, exppress it in your own way for your own audience. Make it available. |