Writer’s block is a strange malady. A mental state of paralysis, the disorder is exclusive to writers; no one talks about lawyer’s or accountant’s or coal miner’s block.

The root of writer’s block is organizational rather than romantic. Some writers imagine themselves as uniquely tortured souls, like Prometheus chained to a rock while an eagle devoured his liver every day. The reality is, they are poor administrators. They lack a reliable technique to produce good first drafts.

I should know. I used to suffer from writer’s block. Instead of being a planner, I was a “pantser,” which is to say I flew by the seat of my pants. Outlining had become almost a foreign concept. My first drafts were a series of stops and starts … and stops and starts … and stops and starts. Not only was the process exhausting, but it was also counterproductive. I spent too much time doing too little.

A German Cure for Writer’s Block

In the last four or five years, one German technique to address writer’s block has gained popularity online. In the Zettelkasten system, you make a “zettel” or slip note and file it into a “kasten” or small box.

The system has four main steps:

1. Take notes while reading on a sheet of paper or legal notepad. These are your “fleeting” or temporary notes. They can be ideas that caught your fancy rather than comprehensive explanations.

2. Transfer your temporary notes to an index card or slip of paper. These are your “permanent” notes, which is to say they are evergreen, or “bibliographic notes, which means they are specific to a project. See the image below.

3. File your permanent notes in a crate, box, or library card. Arrange the notes by idea rather than topic: “evidence the earth is round,” not “things on the earth.” To organize ideas, you can draw a number and circle it in a red pen.

4. Once you compile enough notes in a box, flip through them to look for connections among ideas. What stands out? Is there a pattern? Can you synthesize the ideas?

Your answers can and should be the bones of a first draft. That’s a big step. You don’t have to worry about staring at a blank screen or piece of paper; you wrote something already. As Sonke Ahrens, author of Taking Smart Notes, a book on the Zettelkasten system, writes, “Getting something that is already written is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.”

(The Zettelkasten system has an online version. You write a note in an app such as Evernote or in a Word document and file it in a program such as Obsidian, Tiddly Wiki, or Roam Research).

The Zettelkasten system’s benefits

I like the Zettelkasten system for three reasons.

1. Its note-taking method is active rather than passive. When doing research, you write notes in your words, not the author’s. This means no highlighting; no writing in the margins, either. You must understand the material; you’ can’t parrot it. This insight has been around for a while; author and blogger Scott Young made the idea central to his most recent book, Ultralearning. Still, I say authors cannot emphasize active notetaking enough.

2. The odds you will connect ideas are maximized. The method is one big idea or ideas generator. You can’t help but to connect and compare ideas. By perusing your slip notes in a crate, they jump out.

3. The system stores information in one place, not a bunch of places. To baseball card- or stamp collectors, the Zettelkasten system may feel familiar. You sift through your material to put your best stuff in a single place or repository. Instead of stamps or baseball cards in a binder, you put index cards in a small crate or library card holder.

The benefits are hard to overstate. Without a centralized organizational tool, my notes are scattered about my office; some are in desk drawers or notebooks, while others are in emails, computer files, books, or magazines. Retrieving my notes should be easier. The last thing a book writer wants is to strain mental energy to find his own research!

In summary, the Zettelkasten system is highly useful. Better than any method I know, it organizes content well.

The Zettelkasten system’s one downside

The problem is, the Zettelkasten system’s approach to shaping an article or book is less than finely tuned. It assumes writers outline their stories. Given that many writers suffer from writer’s block, the assumption is mistaken.

Zettelkasten’s defenders might disagree. The system’s founder, Niklas Luhmann, a late 20^th century German sociologist, was legendarily productive. He produced 70 books and more than 400 articles. As Mr. Ahrens noted, Mr. Luhmann produced more books after his death, in 1998, than most academics do while alive. Looked at more closely, though, this claim is unproven.

How do we know Mr. Luhmann’s books are well organized? An Amazon page for one book notes that “significant parts of his extensive output remain unavailable to a non-German speaking audience.” Not only that, but also Mr. Luhmann’s works have drawn criticism for being “highly dense” and “abstract.” 

While Mr. Luhmann may not have devised a system for shaping an article or book, other writers have done so.

An American cure for writer’s block

The one I like best is David A. Fryxell, the former editor of Writer’s Digest. In books such as Write Faster, Write Better, Mr. Fryxell spelled out a brainy and comprehensive system for structuring a piece of writing. At the heart of his technique are five steps:

1. Number your notes while researching. Do this during or after your research. This is similar to the Zettelkasten system with one difference. Make notes on a legal pad or reporter’s notebook rather than index cards.

2. Summarize your thesis in five- to seven words on a legal notepad. Think of a Hollywood “high concept”: a pitch that combines two ideas into one. The 1993 film “Groundhog Day” could be described as Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” meets the original “Twilight Zone” TV series.

3. Write your exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement sections with your brief thesis statement in mind. This is a challenge, a kind of writer’s jigsaw puzzle. You mix and match your research notes into one of the categories above.

4. If you get stuck writing your outline, use your sleeping unconscious to spot patterns and connect ideas. Outlining a story is mentally taxing. When you’re out of gas, you are better off seeking the care of nature’s soft nurse rather than grinding away. It’s not only easier but also more productive. Plus, your unconscious will help you figure out your outline in a way that a taxed, conscious mind cannot.

5. Plow through your sentences until you have finished your first draft. This, too, is a challenge. It’s tempting to follow the lead of Lot’s wife and look back at the past, in this case a word here or there. Don’t. Do. It. Looking back holds you back, as Lot’s wife discovered. You can’t development momentum in your rough draft.

I used Mr. Fryxell’s system for my book on the McGovern Commission of the late 1960s and early ’70s, and the results speak for themselves. Whatever its faults, nobody has claimed the book was poorly organized. This is no accident. Mr. Fryxell has said he borrowed his system on that of New Yorker writer John McPhee in part at least. He calls his method “architectonics.”

Architectonics has weaknesses, though.

Its applicability is limited.

Instead of stashing index cards in crates, you use legal notepads and manila folders. This is good for a single project such as an article or book; Mr. Fryxell said he devised the system while a newspaper columnist who needed to churn out multiple columns a week. The system is not good, however, for those looking to find common threads among multiple projects across a writer’s career. The writer lacks a centralized repository for storing research.  

To be sure, in Mr. Fryxell’s system the user can use his memory for insights. Yet memories, like hearts and thoughts, fade away. Try to name your daily wardrobe 10 or 15 years ago. It’s next to impossible!

A third organizational technique

For historians and journalists, there is another organizational device for both content and structure. It’s the timeline. Simply write a year at the top of the page and the important dates under it.

Non-fiction writer Erik Larson, author of books such as Devil in the White City and Dead Wake, called the timeline his “secret weapon.” As he explained,

I have a really limited memory. It’s always been the case. With each book, it’s very hard for me, afterward, to do interviews about it because I’ve forgotten most of it. So this process, this chronology, is really a way of compensating for my lack of an ability to memorize detail, although I am very good at conceptual recollection. So that’s the way the chronology is vital to me, to spark the recollections and to help me make vivid the conceptual things.

 A holy trinity of structure

Ideally, a writer would use all three techniques—the Zettelkasten system, architectonics, and the timeline. For most writers in need of curing their writer’s block, I recommend using both the architectonics and Zettelkasten methods. You become a literary architect and interior designer. As an architect, you can design the overall structure or outside structure, while as an interior designer, you can design the inside scheme.

For beginning writers, I think Architectonics is a simpler and easier technique in the short run. You don’t need to buy or find a special crate or create a second set of notes.  In the long run, though, the Zettelkasten method is more promising. That killer idea you had seven years ago will be filed away and easy to retrieve rather stashed than somewhere in your house.

You will become so organized that writer’s block will be a distant memory.

What did everybody think? 

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