Autumn, 2025

Dear Writer,

The tools that I've packed into the pages of Zettelkasten for Fiction Writers will help any writer in organizing and supporting your research, notes and drafts so you can finally get the words on the page. Whether building a hefty novel or tinkering with a short story, we will discover together how the zettelkasten is likely the key to wrangling your imagination and workflow into finished drafts.

For my plotters, this is the magic sauce. You will dig in with note cards and ideas and begin manifesting order and structure right away. With that locked in, your creativity will start to bubble and pop!

But I DO hear you pantsers: “All of that organization and planning KILLS the creative vibe! I need to write by seat of my pants!”

I get it. You need to create on the fly. But even a devoted panster can benefit from being able to lay your hands on a critical detail or a key idea when captured by the heat of writing — ordering the chaos feeds the fire! And understanding the power of the zettelkasten— German for “note box”— can laser focus you onto a writing task, making you unstoppable.

However you work, it’s all the same to me — I want to put useful tools, tips and prompts into the hands of any writer who needs a boost. I say that with my whole heart as I WAS that stuck writer.

I was marooned on an island of overwhelm, lost drafts, forgotten ideas, half-baked story threads and a serious lack of progress for DECADES.

For anyone who needs a testimonial, mine goes something like this:

After writing about 25,000 words of a novel while working as a night security guard in the mid 1990s… I got completely derailed by life. A full-time day job became a career, then came a new baby, followed by another baby… then a move to a new city, then a complete career change… and POW, I was blown WAY off the writing track. I faced cancer, yet another career change, and lots of life’s little challenges. So, my dream of being a writer, and my awesome fledgling novel (and all the ideas along with it) sat, untended, for over TWENTY YEARS!! Yikes.

Then, like life often does, I was given a path way back. With my kids grown and time to reflect on how much I missed my writing years… I started to think about that little start of a book I’d written. It became a constant companion in the back of my mind. The story wanted to be told! I wished for a way forward. Ask, and you shall receive!

In the autumn of 2021, I had the good fortune to take a long trip into the Idaho back country where I was off the grid for a whole week. On a whim I took that little file of writing and wondered: Could I get back in the saddle and finally breathe life into that novel?

In a word: YES. I wrote like a maniac. The “mom-brain” was long gone, the exhaustion of building a career was replaced by the security of a stable job, and all I had to do was hang out in camp and write my story! 

Each morning, I hauled my notecards and laptop to the cook tent. I would sit with hot coffee and sequence my scene and chapter ideas by scooting 3 x 2 ½ inch mini cards around the picnic table. (You’ll meet what became my “Analog Mobile Writing Systems” later!) Once I’d created that day’s writing goal, I’d stack the cards into the story sequence that made sense, and I’d start drafting late into the afternoon or evening.

Spoiler: This process of thinking, writing, questioning and rewriting would also help me eventually learn to communicate more and more within my zettelkasten and not need a human sounding board as much. My long-lost dreams of being a writer were reignited on that trip and it never felt better!

But my elation was short lived as—once home from the trip—I had to face the YEARS worth of journals, notes, random scribbles and note card bits… all of my previous attempts to revive that little story were littered across file cabinets, notebooks, file boxes and bookcases.

Double yikes.

My imagination needed some order, FAST. I was terrified I’d lose all my momentum in the heat of searching for long lost drafts and research. I was frozen at the thought of spiraling back onto the island of lost writing dreams. In a late-night panic, I turned to my old friend: YouTube.

Search: “Organization system for writing a novel”.

Zero.

Search: “How to organize story research”.

Zip.

Search: “Organization for writers”.

Setting aside the returns for ‘membership organizations that support writers’ — many of which I had belonged to at some time or another over the years — Nada.

My only option seemed to be: go down the road of endless digital apps and tools that did NOTHING for me but create confusing busy work with fancy bells & whistles.

No thanks.

Incidentally, there were plenty of helpful videos on plotting (though most were teaching the 8 plot points and the 3 act structure), but, nothing really addressed my problem:  I had all these notes and research items that informed all aspects of my story, as well as all of the character research I’d done in the recent months to prep for that long writing trip, but I had NO guidance on how to organize and easily access it all so it could drive my writing. It was all a murky bog of information with no order or way through.

I was beaten.

I resigned myself to rabbit holes on formulaic plot points derived from movies and lame digital solutions which basically amounted to creating an endless labyrinth of folders/files/links/tags. All of this resulted in a confusing rat’s nest of tangles and snags that sadly introduced a lot of noise and pointless digital activity that looked like progress but just further distracted me from getting the writing done.

It was UGLY.

Just as I was spinning out in a sea of video goo, I spotted something interesting. It was either a German miracle or a made-up catch word to sell some dumb product.

Zettelkasten.

Luckily, it turned out to be a German miracle!

A YouTuber and author named Scott Scheper had a ton of videos on using a zettelkasten, which is a “note box” and note card system that he’d been deep diving into for his own writing projects. He was enthusiastic, hilarious, a little irreverent, but very passionate about how his simple but thorough system could revolutionize writing. He even went to great lengths to demonstrate HOW he created and used the cards with the system to get his writing done — all with a high level of organization, creativity, and even some cool discoveries that grew out of seeing topics and categories on note cards stacked together through the lens of one’s own thoughts.

Ok. That sounded promising.

The deal was sealed for me when I learned that Scott (my new mentor) was a firm advocate for analog writing and for using an analog system with which to track and grow ideas and research. Having just lost EVERYTHING on my new laptop in a crash (!!) and then losing my removable hard drive with YEARS of material on it (also in a bizarre glitch the very next month!) — I was ready for something NOT digital! And I had just bought a cool retractable fountain pen! Woohoo! A good omen!

But Scott's writing was all nonfiction. And the sociologist, (Niklas Luhmann) whose system he’d studied and perfected had also championed the zettelkasten system for his own prolific academic paper and book writing career. As a matter of fact, in his roughly thirty-year career, Luhmann produced six hundred academic papers and seventy books! But they were all nonfiction.

Ugghh. That gave me pause. What if I invested yet another chunk of time learning this system and it didn’t cross apply to writing a novel? What if it just derailed me away from what progress I had made and I got lost in piles of note card hell? Junior high school English class flashbacks, anyone?

I decided NOT to let the ‘What If’ monster in. This was a lifeline that simply HAD to succeed. Besides, I had been a debater back in the pre-computer days and I felt that note cards were a native language! I was so excited by the possibilities that I threw my cautions to the wind and plowed in. I focused first on all of the research and drafts that I had to sort through, and I just committed to making the system work. My ship had landed me on terra firma, and I burned it in an act of faith.

First, I binge watched ALL of Scott’s videos over a long weekend. And then, I watched them all again. I immediately saw the application of his book Antinet Zettelkasten to my fiction writing dilemma. I would get my zettelkasten started and then I would add my own additional buckets for the components of my novel.

With my heading clear I started building out my zettelkasten around all things that were informing my novel. It was Heaven!

After setting up my own system, I was cranking out chapters like a pro. The order that emerged was SO satisfying. I didn’t have to go searching endlessly to find what car a character drove in 1987 — it was all saved in my Character Development back story cards!! Don’t worry, you learn in my book how to start your very own Character Development section for feeding your writing!

More than anything, the single note box environment for organization was exhilarating. No more worry or wondering where some journal or paper scrap was. No more wondering how I was thinking about that important plot twist. My imagination had found order, and the implementation set me free.

I finished writing that novel and officially became the AntiNovelist. Does this mean I’m ANTI novels? Heck no! Though my well-read colleagues might perceive "antinovelist" in the tradition of the movement that was spurred by those wanting to push back against more traditional forms of narrative by embracing an experimental or free form character development and plot structure.

This is not that!

AntiNovelist for our purposes is a term for a modern movement. It means I follow the organization system that Scott Scheper established in Niklaus Luhmann’s tradition as the basis for building a zettelkasten or “note box”. It means the foundation for my writing is ANTI:

A = Analog research, development and organization

N = Numeric-alpha addressing convention

T = Treelike branches of knowledge development

I = Indexed by Key Words and numeric-alpha addresses for ease of search and use

Why did I take this up as my writing revolution? Easy! Once I got started, everything from my inspirations to my plot threads to my character ideas were captured out of my head and safely installed in my note box! My zettelkasten was alive and thriving and I would never regret abandoning the chaos of ‘random journals and endless apps full of notes’. I had created a lifelong writing partner and named it Wilma after the amazing mule who carried me 3 1/2 hours into the Idaho back country where I found my writing again and then brought me safely back out.

The zettelkasten process worked SO well in fact, that within short order my single book was re-organized into a trilogy! With the power of the note box to organize and guide me, I could see the whole world of my story and all the books that my story world could contain!

That is what brings me to you. I experienced such a profound shift in my productivity and my ability to dig deep into my writing process that I just couldn’t WAIT to share what I’d learned with my fellow writers. At the request of my super fans, I set aside my novel halfway through the developmental edit and wrote the book you now hold in your hands to help YOU do what I did.

Whether you’re stuck at the beginning, you’ve stalled out mid-way, you’ve let your writing go by the wayside, or you just need a boost because you have no idea how to get started on that story you’ve been dreaming about — I’ve got you! It’s such a simple system but yields an endless bounty of creativity, organization and plain joy.

Congratulations! If you’re still reading, you’re ready to discover Where Imagination Finds Order. Grab my book and let’s get started!!