Reda Ameioud — Features

10 Ways to Write Like the 90’s

2025-12-07T00:00:00Z

My dad told me that his step-father, Robert Matsyk, was a news editor at the Winnipeg Free Press decades ago. He’s proud of me for getting into this line of work—for sinking my teeth into literary journalism. For the fact I’m writing good work that people read.

And I can’t help but think of what Bob was doing—what his daily workflow looked like and what journalism really meant to him. The entire field and industry of journalism decades ago intrigues me. It’s a ghost now, isn’t it?

Indulge me for a moment. Let’s get romantic about a problematic time period, fully aware of its systemic flaws and horrors. As a nonfiction writer, I admit I often fantasize about being born a few decades earlier, to a time when journalism was still a stable, impressive industry.

Office of The Cornell Daily Sun, Ithaca, New York via Flickr

Newsroom Symphony

Imagine the cacophony of perhaps ten Teletype printers chattering away, their mechanical fingers tap-tap-tapping out bulletins from distant bureaus. Five bells meant something somewhat important. Ten bells, a flash!, and the entire newsroom would freeze, every head turning toward the machine like sunflowers to sudden light. The sound of manual typewriters clacking in rhythm, each keystroke a percussion. The satisfying ding! of the carriage return bell, the metallic zip! as reporters yanked paper from their machines and tore it against a ruler’s edge.

Chemical smells drifted from darkrooms. Police scanners squawked urgent codes. Phones rang. Actual corded landlines which couldn’t be silenced or ignored. Bells as insistent as alarm clocks. Reporters shouted across desks, booming voices competing with the low rumble that started deep in the basement as the printing presses awakened. The entire building to tremble as deadlines approached.

There was never dead silence in those newsrooms. I’m not the only one romantic about this, The London Times tried piping in typewriter sounds through speakers in 2014, hoping to recapture that lost energy and electric urgency that came from dozens of people simultaneously chasing truth with their fingers.

The Texture of Low-tech, Analogue Work

I love computers, don’t get me wrong. But we really only need so much, don’t we? Take a look at the writerDeck community. A writerDeck is a device dedicated specifically and solely to writing, such as the Astrohaus Freewrite or the Alphasmart Neo. A group of people are now dedicated to creating and using single-use writing devices because our default devices now are too overstimulating and distracting.

My own WriteDeck, a ThinkPad X200T, incapable of everything except a text editor.

Twenty or thirty years ago, all computers were writerDecks. Sure, the Internet existed and there were definitely ways to waste time (Solitaire, anyone?). By the 1980s, most reporters had desktops of their own, clunky machines that did one thing well. They let you write.

And if I’m being honest, I think people should have the discipline to write even with the entire Internet at their fingertips. I still get up each morning and write my 750 words. putting on my playlist full of midwest emo instrumentals and just focus on my fingers on the keys. Anybody can do this.

But regardless, the writerDeck is such a temptation. To be able to go back in time, to have something that is as easy to write with as typing, instead of writing everything by hand. Again, don’t get me wrong—I love writing by hand and analogue methods, but for longform work, my hand will cramp and I will be in pain. I never learned how to write properly and it shows.

It’s not just the writing experience, though. There’s so much more.

Truth-Seeking Infrastructure

There used to be massive newsrooms full of people trying to find the truth and the story. Sure, a handful of these still remain, but they’re so few and far between, and they’ve been compromised. The Washington Post is owned by Amazon and Jeff Bezos, for fuck’s sake.

Take us back. I want to have to fax information—to hear that screech-hum of the machine, to watch the thermal paper curl as it emerged, warm to the touch. I want to call on a corded landline to get interviews, to have to travel to get the story, to accumulate plane tickets and hotel receipts and taxi vouchers in a big envelope from the travel desk. I want huge metal filing cabinets instead of unlimited cloud storage. I want to hear the satisfying thunk! of a drawer closing on months of research. I want three-ring metal binders and floppy disks clacking against each other in a desk drawer.

Once again, convenience has paved the way for the total collapse of the meaningful, slow work.

It’s a silly fantasy, of course. It’s important for me to disclaim and concede that a lot of this is still available to do. So sure, maybe in another world, where I was born earlier, and I was more of a traditional journalist. But then what? I grow old and see my industry collapse? The future always inevitably arrives. Such a fantasy is living in a bubble, in a distilled frozen time.

Slow Journalism in a Fast World

We don’t have to completely surrender to the speed and convenience of modern technology. The methods of those 80's and 90's journalists and the Philosophy behind them can still inform our work today. There’s an opportunity to reclaim intentionality somewhere in this nostalgia.

Slow journalism, as media scholars now call it, is a movement that takes its name from the slow food movement. Emphasizing openness and transparency, laying bare to audiences its sourcing and methods, it measures reporting time in months or years rather than days. And most importantly, it provides a complement and corrective to a constant stream of updates and breaking news, where amid the pressures of ever-present deadlines, fake news and conjecture often replace reporting.

Here’s how you can write like a 90s journalist today. Combining low-tech/analogue intentionality with modern tools:

1. Embrace the Physical Notebook

Modern journalists still swear by reporter’s notebooks for good reason. When you start writing notes, people feel the productivity, and it becomes a visual cue to keep talking. But if you slow down your notes or completely stop, it signals to an interviewee to steer back on subject.

Action Step: Invest in a quality reporter’s notebook (Field Notes, Blackwing, or Write Notepads all make excellent ones). Carry it everywhere. Date each page. Take notes about how places look, smell, sound. Don’t write everything down, you’re not a court reporter. Write down the quotes that matter, the sensory details you’ll forget, the observations that surprise you.

Pro tip: Develop your own shorthand system. Drop vowels, create symbols for common words in your beat. One reporter uses “C” for whatever their current topic is. It’s faster than typing and forces you to really listen.

2. Create Deliberate “Friction” in Your Process

The beauty of analogue journalism was the productive friction. You couldn’t instantly Google something. You had to call sources, visit libraries, conduct actual interviews. This friction led to deeper, more unexpected discoveries.

Action Step: Before you Google, stop. Who could you talk to instead? What primary source document exists? Could you visit the place you’re writing about? Create rules for yourself: for the first week of researching a story, no Wikipedia. Only interviews, observation, and primary sources. Use the Internet as verification, not as your starting point.

3. Practice the Art of Deep Listening

One reporter describes using a notebook and pen specifically because it creates voids that interviewees feel obliged to fill. If they finish what they were intending to say, and you don’t immediately come back with another question because you’re scribbling down their words, they’ll often just keep going and say things they might not have wanted to say.

Action Step: In your next interview, bring a notebook instead of a laptop. Turn off all recording devices for at least one interview a month. Force yourself to listen so intently that you can write the story from memory if needed. Use a highlighter later to mark the juiciest quotes in your notes.

4. Build Your Physical Archive

Those metal filing cabinets were storage, yes. But they were a physical manifestation of your beat, your expertise. Opening a drawer meant seeing years of work at once, being able to cross-reference stories, to see patterns.

Action Step: Create a physical filing system for your most important projects. Print out key documents, interviews, and photos. Put them in folders or binders. Yes, also keep digital backups, but make the physical version your primary reference. The act of filing something, of physically organizing it, helps your brain make connections that scrolling through a cloud folder never will.

5. Write to a Single Deadline, Not Continuous Deadlines

In the 80s and 90s, newsrooms had distinct energy cycles. The sounds of typewriter bells increased, voices got louder, and tempers grew shorter as deadlines neared. Then—silence. The paper went to press. The work was done.

Action Step: Instead of constantly posting, tweeting, and updating, work in sprints toward single, major publication deadlines. Give yourself two weeks, a month, three months to report and write one substantial piece. Abandon tight deadlines in favor of time-consuming research and the writing of longer-form narratives. Experience that crescendo of energy, then the satisfaction of completion.

6. Develop an “Immersion” Practice

The best slow journalism involves what scholars call “reorientation,” a temporal tipping point where, through the experience of immersion, you abandon preconceptions and develop a situated point of view. Journalist Paul Salopek walked alongside Syrian refugees for weeks, he wrote how “everyone is going faster and faster and getting shallower and shallower. I said, ‘How about we slow down a bit to grab a little mindshare by going in the opposite direction.’”

Action Step: For your next major project, commit to being physically present for an extended period. Not a day and not a few hours. Weeks. Live in the world you’re writing about. Report on the quotidian and non-urgent stories, the everyday rhythms. Let yourself be surprised by what you find when you’re not rushing to the next thing.

7. Type Your Notes Immediately

This was gospel in the 80s and 90s: As soon as you got back to the office, you typed up your notes while you could still hear the person’s voice in your mind. You remembered things you didn’t write down. You could still decipher your scrawls.

Action Step: After every interview, every observation session, every research trip—type up your notes the same day. Not tomorrow. Today. You’ll remember details you didn’t write down. Your handwriting will still make sense. The story will still be alive in your body.

8. Create Multi-Sensory Records

Editors at the Open Notebook advise:

“If you are writing a book or magazine article where you might want to describe a scene, make sure you take notes at the scene about how the place looks, smells, sounds, etc.”

Action Step: In your notebook, dedicate space specifically to sensory details. What does this place smell like? What’s the quality of light? What sounds am I hearing that I’ll forget in an hour? Take photos not just of people, but of textures, colors, objects. Record short voice memos to capture someone’s cadence, the way they speak.

9. Collaborate Without Competition

In post-Katrina New Orleans, news organizations decided to team up to produce the slower, in-depth journalism their community needed. A radical idea. Non-competition became a practice for producing better work.

Action Step: Find another writer working on a similar beat or topic. Share sources. Share research. Edit each other’s work. In the age of infinite content, there’s no scarcity of stories—only a scarcity of time and resources to tell them well. Help each other tell them better.

10. Be Transparent About Your Methods

Slow journalism “would lay bare the way stories are reported, by, for example, crediting all sources, being clear about what is original journalism and what is reproduced PR copy, being clear about how information is obtained”.

Action Step: In your finished piece, consider adding a note about your reporting process. How many people did you interview? Over what time period? What archives did you visit? What surprised you? This transparency builds trust and teaches your readers how good journalism actually works.

Photo by Thomas Charters on Unsplash

The Future Is the Past Is the Future

The newsrooms of the 80's and 90's were far from perfect. They were male-dominated, lacked diversity, and perpetuated problematic power structures. The industry was already under pressure as media companies demanded quick profits and began consolidating. The collapse was already beginning, even as those mechanical keyboards and typewriters clacked away.

But the methods—the intentional friction, the physical presence, the deep listening, the commitment to verification over speed—those remain valuable. Perhaps more valuable now than ever.

We can’t go back. Typewriters disappeared from newsrooms in the late 1980s. The news industry has collapsed. There’s a lot that isn’t coming back. But we can choose to work with the same integrity and care. We can choose depth over speed. We can choose to be present instead of perpetually connected.

So yes, keep your laptop. Keep your smartphone. Keep your WiFi. But also get a notebook. Use your hands. Go to the place. Talk to the person. Take your time. Create something that lasts longer than a trend or a news cycle.

Key Takeaways for Modern Writers

Carry a physical notebook everywhere and date every page
Create friction in your research process—talk to people before Googling
Practice deep listening without recording devices
Build a physical archive for important projects
Work toward single deadlines instead of constant publishing
Immerse yourself in your subject for extended periods
Type up notes immediately while memories are fresh
Capture multi-sensory details in the moment
Collaborate without competition with other writers
Be transparent about your reporting methods

The goal is to use technology intentionally rather than outright reject it. Write with the same thoughtfulness that defined the best journalism of decades past. In our world of information overload, slowing down is a necessity for doing work that matters. Write like the future depends on remembering the past. Because it does.

Brennan Kenneth Brown is a Queer Métis author and web developer based in Calgary, Alberta. He founded Write Club, a creative collective that has raised funds for literacy nonprofits. His work spans poetry, literary criticism, and independent journalism, with over a decade of writing publicly on Medium and nine published books. He runs Berry House, a values-driven studio building accessible JAMstack websites while offering pro bono support to marginalized communities.

Support my work: Ko-fi | Patreon | GitHub Sponsors | Gumroad | Amazon Author Page. Find more at blog.brennanbrown.ca.

Want to Decolonize Your Writing?

2025-10-25T00:00:00Z

The laptop is warm against my chest. October in Calgary, and I’ve got the window cracked because my anxiety needs air, even cooling into evening. My wooden desk—rough grain, two hundred small scratches from pens and coffee cups and the pressure of years, beside my Thunderbird necklace inherited from my grandfather beside it—holds everything I need right now. The laptop, a handwritten notebook (paper, because good thoughts refuse to live digitally), a mug of cooling decaf coffee, and my hands.

Foam and the Wooden Desk: How Ideas Live in Systems and in Hands

My hands know the difference between this desk and the rest of the world. The texture of the wood grain. They’ve typed 1,051,693 words across fourteen years. My hands write careful ceremonies and Queer theory and the specific terror of 3 AM panic into existence. Knowing things my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.

The question is how do I make those hands knowable to anyone else? How do I take what lives in my body, in this desk, in this particular October light falling through my Calgary window, and transform into something worth sharing?

The answer lives in systems. Not the glamorous kind. The unglamorous, technical kind which most writers never talk about because it contradicts the romantic notion of inspiration.

People imagine ideas arriving fully formed. A bolt of inspiration. The muse descending. That’s not what happens.

750 words. Not every day—expectation sets traps. But consistently. Over fourteen years. Since I was fifteen years old, I started writing on 750words.com, and though I’ve cycled through periods of daily devotion and months of abandonment, I’ve landed on a sustainable rhythm that doesn’t punish me for missing days. The practice is simple: open the file, set a loose intention, and write until something true arrives. No editing. No self-consciousness. No deleting. If I run out of things to say, I write “I don’t know what to write” until something emerges.

The files accumulate. Over 1,051,693 words since 2011. Maybe an intimidating amount of raw material, but only 10% of those words are ever meant for publication. The rest is processing. Thinking out loud. The internal monologue typed frantically at midnight.

Journals are laboratories of consciousness. Places where I experiment with voice, work through ideas, document the daily texture of existence that forms the bedrock of meaningful writing.

But that 10%? That’s where the literary journalism comes from.

Ideas arrive as fragments. Incomplete. Often contradictory. My anxiety manifests in my hands as tremor. I think of Indigenous healing systems rejecting mind/body dualism. Indigenous epistemologies, particularly those in North America, often emphasize a relational ontology that views the mind, body, and spirit as inseparable and interconnected with the land and community. A mechanical keyboard sounds like thinking. The prairie is a palimpsest—a landscape where new narratives are superimposed over the traces of preceding histories, a concept often used in the study of Canadian Prairie literature. Sarah Ahmed writes about disorientation as method in her book Queer Phenomenology. These aren’t ideas yet, but pieces of felt experience, research encounters, moments of noticing that have nowhere to live except the chaos of my daily writing practice.

For years, I let them stay scattered. I’d write them into my journal and then they’d disappear into the archive. I’d encounter the same thought again six months later unrecognizable and forgotten. I’d make the same connection independently, thinking it was new, when really it was something I’d already half-thought but never externalized.

I was losing my own thinking.

The mining process, what I call “the sort,” happens every Monday morning. I read back through the previous week’s writing looking for fragments that have the texture of publishable insight. Not the most polished fragments. Not the most coherent. But the ones that carry what I think of as “recognizable truth,” moments where I’ve articulated something that feels both specific to my experience and somehow universally resonant.

I move these fragments into a separate document. Currently it holds 47 potential pieces, ranging from half-finished thoughts to nearly-complete arguments. The act of mining matters. It prevents me from staring at a blank page wondering what to write. Instead, I’m asking: which of these fragments is ready? Which one has been building pressure in my brain for days? Which conversation do I keep returning to?

The laptop presses against my ribs. Outside, the Calgary wind picks up the way it does in October. Prairie wind that cuts through layers. I can hear it but not see it, which is the problem I’ve been trying to solve for months. How to make the invisible visible, how to catch the thinking that happens at the edges of consciousness and give it shape.

Foam doesn’t look like much. It’s markdown files in VS Code, a text editor most programmers use but most writers haven’t heard of. The software is almost invisible. What matters is the structure.

I start with atomic notes. Single ideas per file. Not summaries. Not essays. Thoughts small enough to hold entire in my head. This is the core principle of the Zettelkasten method, and it is a practice shared by many in the digital gardening community who have adopted Foam, often using it to build a “second brain” for knowledge management. Thoughts small enough to hold entire in my head:

”Anxiety manifests in my hands”
”epistemology rejecting mind/body dualism”
”Why mechanical keyboards feel like thinking”
”The prairie as palimpsest”
”Sarah Ahmed on disorientation as method” Each note is a bubble. Contained. Specific. Boundaried.

Then I connect them using [[double bracket syntax]]. Not hierarchy. Not “this file contains that file.” Relationship. Lateral connection. I write a note called “My particular brand of Queer anxiety” and I link it with [[anxiety-in-hands]]and [[Queer-embodiment]] and [[medication-side-effects]]. Links don’t imply subordination, instead these ideas talk to each other. They’re peers.

This approach is directly inspired by the Zettelkasten method (“slip-box”) method, a system of personal knowledge management developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it to write over 70 books and hundreds of articles. The Zettelkasten is built on the principle of atomic notes and hypertextual linking to create a web of thoughts, making it the philosophical ancestor of modern digital gardening tools like Foam.

When I open the graph visualization, a feature that shows every note as a node and every link as a connection, there’s no pyramid. I see a constellation. My anxiety writing clusters with my research on embodiment but also threads outward to technology, to prairie ecology, to Indigenous knowledge systems. The connections were always there. The system just makes them visible. This transition from a private, fragmented archive to a public, interconnected garden is a common theme for Foam users, who often discuss how the tool allows them to migrate their “digital garden” and “learn in public” by sharing their web of thoughts.

The backlinking is where revelation happens. Foam automatically discovers connections between notes, showing which other notes reference the currently active note. I’m working on a piece about Indigenous literature and literary gatekeeping when suddenly Foam surfaces something I’d forgotten, how months ago I wrote about settler colonialism and displacement, and I’d linked it to my anxiety writing, and those two threads connect through my research on geographic sovereignty. I didn’t consciously make that connection. My hands knew it. My thinking knew it. I couldn’t see it until the system showed me.

You’re writing about embodiment and suddenly you see, oh, this appears in my anxiety research, and my Queer space-making notes, and my work on Indigenous healing. The system didn’t know those connections when I wrote them. It discovered them. Made them explicit.

An expansion is not a fragment. I’ve been thinking about why my Apple Watch thinks I’m dying when I write poetry is a fragment. It’s maybe 200 words, an observation without architecture. An article is that observation plus research, context, examples, and the weird circular path back to where it started.

This is where I spend most of my energy, expanding fragments into complete thoughts. I start by asking three questions:

What’s the core insight? Not the hook or the clever opening, but the actual thing I’m trying to say. The essential truth underneath.
What does the reader need to understand first? What context, research, or definition makes sense of this insight? What scaffolding needs to be in place?
How does this connect to something bigger? This is the moment where a personal observation becomes cultural commentary. The Apple Watch isn’t about my anxiety, rather the idea is how technology mediates our understanding of our own bodies, how quantification shapes experience, how the digital world enforces mind/body separation.

Once I have those three elements, the structure reveals itself. Opening scene (sensory, specific). Context and research. Personal experience that illustrates the problem. Broader implications. Closing that loops back to the opening with new understanding.

The expansion happens in layers. First draft is rough. I follow the outline but don’t worry about elegance. I cite sources in brackets [Author, Year], include the research that supports my thinking, plant my personal anecdotes where they do actual work. Second pass, I smooth transitions, cut repetition, make sure the voice sounds like me. Third pass, I verify citations, check facts, read aloud to catch awkward phrasing. Total time: 2–3 hours per piece. Some take longer when I’m wrestling with something complex or personal.

I lean back from the desk. The laptop is warm now. I set it aside carefully on the wooden surface and pick up my handwritten notebook instead. The system can’t capture the way an idea feels in my hands before it becomes language. Hesitation. Crossing-out. Physical resistance of pen on paper when I’m trying to articulate something true.

The Western Mind vs. Everything Else

Western knowledge organization is obsessed with hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being, a concept that dominated Western thought from the Middle Ages, is the classic example of this obsession. A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, positing a fixed order of superiority and inferiority. This linear, top-down approach is also reflected in the Western worldview’s perception of time, which is usually linearly structured and future-orientated. The outline. The file folder nested inside the file folder nested inside another file folder. Subject → Category → Subcategory. You impose order from the top down, descending.

It made sense for libraries. For bureaucracy. For organizing physical objects that can only exist in one place at a time. But that’s not how thinking works. That’s not how knowledge actually lives in a body, or in a culture, or in a life.

When I’m researching Indigenous sovereignty, I simultaneously need academic theory (but not as “superior” to other ways of knowing), personal experience (but not as merely “anecdotal”), poetry and metaphor (but not as “decorative”), community knowledge (but not as “folklore”), scientific research (but not as the “final word”). Woven. Lateral. Each one informs the others. Cut one thread and the whole thing changes shape.

A traditional note-taking system forces you to choose: is this academic content or personal reflection or cultural context? Where does it belong? The system demands you make it fit into predetermined categories. You’re forced to decide what something is before you understand what it means.

Foam asks where else does this connect? Mirroring a tenet of Indigenous relationality, which is often described as a commitment to an ethic of relationships extending beyond the human to the non-human world.

The wind rattles the window. I’ve left it open too long, and the room is cooling. But moving my body right now feels like it would interrupt something necessary. So I sit in the cooling room with my hands on the wooden desk and I think about how the Elders I’ve met never organized knowledge into categories, but through relationship.

I’d hear stories about the plants and the animals and how they were connected, not as a metaphor but as actual structural principle. The knowledge wasn’t stored as separate pieces, but existed in relationship. You couldn’t understand one thing without understanding its connection to everything else. Knowledge is relational by design. Everything spoke to everything else.

That’s not linear. That’s lateral. Rhizomatic. The way Foam structures information. This is a direct echo of the philosophical concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Guattari, which describes a non-hierarchical, acentered, and perpetually connecting network

This isn’t coincidence. Western note-taking systems are built on Western epistemology. The assumption that knowledge can be organized hierarchically. Separating different types of knowledge into different categories. Privileging the linear, the singular, and the definitive.

Foam’s structure aligns more with epistemologies that never separated those things. With ways of thinking where everything is connected, where different types of knowledge inhabit the same space, where understanding happens through relationship rather than category. This relational approach is central to Indigenous Knowledge Systems, where knowledge is often situated in relationship to a specific location, experience, and group of people rather than being an abstract, universal truth. Indeed, studies on Indigenous Knowledge Organization have found a preference for non-hierarchical and less linear structures than what current mainstream classification systems provide.

Getting Into the Weeds: The Actual Workflow

My Foam workspace has several anchor systems, and explaining them is important because people often ask isn’t this too complicated? Won’t it take too much time?

Yes and no.

The Daily Note is an inbox. Thoughts arrive throughout the day. I capture ideas in a date-based file. A holding place. Later, I process them into the permanent graph.

The Evergreen Notes are the permanent residents. Notes on concepts that don’t change: “anxiety,” “queer embodiment,” “Indigenous epistemology,” “prairie ecology.” I return to these constantly and they accumulate links. The connection density shows what matters most in my actual thinking versus what I imagine matters.

The Literature Nodes are specific. Every book I’m reading gets a note. Not a summary—summaries are useless. Specific passages. Specific connections. When I link [[Ahmed on disorientation]]into my writing about queer space-making, the system shows, oh, I’ve connected Ahmed to five other pieces. Here’s what else I was thinking about when I was reading Ahmed. Here’s the context that makes this reference meaningful.

The Orphan and Placeholder Reviews are the maintenance work nobody talks about. Foam can identify orphan notes (notes with no connections) and dead links (wikilinks to notes that don’t exist yet). Orphans are usually mistakes or outdated thinking. I review them regularly and either connect them back into the network or recognize them as dead ends worth abandoning. The dead links show gaps in my thinking, places where I’ve referenced something I haven’t articulated yet.

The Publish Setup allows me to publish to GitHub Pages with minimal configuration or to any web hosting platform like Netlify or Vercel. My actual published canon lives there: a public-facing selection of my strongest writing, with the connections visible. Readers can click through the same lateral system I use privately.

This is the unsexy part of having a knowledge system. Not the revelation. The maintenance. The regular work of deciding what stays and what goes.

I get up and close the window. The room is too cold now. When I sit back down, I notice the scratch on the desk where I once pressed too hard with a pen, trying to think through something difficult. The mark is still visible. I run my hand over it—the wood is rough there—and I think about how ideas also leave marks. How the thinking you do changes the surface you’re thinking on, even if nobody else can see it.

As I build a body of writing for Medium, Foam becomes increasingly valuable. Not for organization. For revelation.

I write 750 words daily in 750words.com. I capture raw thought. Some percentage becomes medium-length essays or full literary journalism. But the connections between pieces is where the work happens.

When I’m researching a piece on Indigenous literature and literary gatekeeping, Foam shows me you’ve already explored this through your anxiety writing. You’ve already connected this to your work on Queer space-making. Here’s where your thinking has been latent. Here’s where you need to be more explicit. Here’s where you’re actually saying something nobody else is saying, because this particular combination of connections only exists in this particular mind shaped by this particular culture and geography and body.

The lateral structure prevents fragmentation. It forces integration. It ensures my work stays connected to my actual thinking rather than breaking into disconnected pieces. It means that my Wednesday investigation pieces aren’t isolated from my Monday process posts, aren’t separate from my Friday craft essays. Instead, they all exist in relation to each other, the way ideas actually exist in the body and in culture.

I save the document and close the laptop. The wooden desk is suddenly empty except for the notebook and the cooling mug of tea and my hands. Outside, Calgary’s October is darkening into evening. Winds have calmed.

Tomorrow I’ll open Foam again and see what connections the night has revealed. I’ll sit at this desk and let my hands find their way through the language. I’ll look for the ideas that are trying to become visible, the thoughts that have been waiting in the lattice of my own writing, the connections that only exist because I’ve learned to build systems that honour lateral thinking instead of forcing it into hierarchies.

The wooden desk will still be here. My hands will still know its texture. And somewhere in the infrastructure—in the markdown files and the wikilinks and the graph visualization showing constellations of thought. Another pattern will emerge, waiting to be seen, waiting to be heard.

Originally posted here.