Tasting Notes With Robin Sloan

One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started taking notes, I ended up taking more and more of them

Two: Be very liberal about what you keep. If you're going through your notes, cross out one thing out of ten, rather than nine out of ten. Don't be too quick to dismiss ideas: you have no idea how material might be useful in the future. Something that may not seem like a great idea now may really bear fruit down the road – even years and years later.

I learned from using those Macs early on that form is always malleable. This became even more apparent when the web came into the picture. Think about it: there’s no way to make a web page or a blog that is not an act of playing with its form at the same time as you're creating its content. So it just seemed natural: the world was always telling me that you worked on those two things – the container and its contents – together.

As for what I take notes about, maybe because I’m a fiction writer at heart, a lot of the things I notice have to do with language.

For example, if I run across an amazing name of a person or a company or a street, I’ll record that for sure. Likewise, if I’m reading a book or something online, and I find a sentence that's evocative or strange – or one that I wish that I had written – I’ll save that, too.

That explains maybe 80% of what I capture. The rest is made up of things – either from the outside world or from the meanderings of my own brain – that have a certain ineffable taste to them.