Stephen Donahue
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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/.
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title, date, layout, tags, permalink
| title | date | layout | tags | permalink | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How To Write | 2026-04-06 | column.njk |
|
/columns/2026/how-to-write/ |
Prompt
- The kernel of an idea
- It's generally recommended to plant a seed first
- something you can return to over time
- reference other ideas you come across
- develop and refine
Questions
- Questions give structure to your work
- Even implicit ones - the unsaid queries that motivate the composition of the piece
- what's included, and when?
- as important: what's left out?
- make everything a deliberate choice
- Why write, if not to test an idea against your own specific qualities? To see if there's a reaction, some expansiveness or contraction.
- They provide the substrate to thought, and the nourishment, encouraging the frontier to expand
Rough Notes
- The heap
- The outlet for stream of consciousness thinking
- See what associations bubble up to the surface
- See what resonates, what clusters, the affinities that form
- The warmup
Quotes
- 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.
- Other than stating something factually: at such a time, such a thing was said
- Refernce it, so motivated readers can connect with more writing that may expand on the idea.
- 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.