I had forgotten how trying it can be to trial new software in an established system. Obsidian was the trial and the system is my note-taking and journaling processes. Those processes are the product of a lot of previous experimentation and habit.
You can see my Obsidian journey here:
- Phone writing is more freeing than I imagined (In which I credit Obsidian with things that it doesn’t really deserve the credit for after all. I mean, autoclosing quotes aren’t really that big of a deal. :D)
- Obsidian is great, but is it for me? (I should have listened to myself when I said, “I don’t love it for my notes in general”, before I made a bunch of more notes.)
- Time to give up on Obsidian? (In which I was struggling to make a decision.)
- Second (and third) thoughts on Obsidian (In which I say, “I kind of think I’m going to stick with Obsidian after all.” Oh, how wrong I was.)
- Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story (In which Gemini presents my decision process as a poorly written story that still somehow makes me smile every time I read it.)
Obsidian wasn’t bad. It just isn’t for me. It keeps your notes in markdown files, which I love the idea of, but the execution of, not so much. Markdown files are full of formatting syntax (lots of * and _ and [ and the like) that can make a pure text file look messy.
I know it’s supposed to be the bare bones option for formatted text that transfers the easiest to other formats, but…I don’t like it. It takes me back to the days of unformatted forums and email loops where you were so desperate to get someone to understand you that you were emphasizing *all* your words, and just *hoping* they’d *get* it. Or writing fan fiction and thinking how can I portray thoughts for my *telepathic* hero? *** Oh, yeah, let’s just do it like this! ***
I’m exaggerating, but it really does remind me of those days.
I gave it a good try. I thought, well, that’s not too bad, I only made a few—okay, wait, are you kidding me? I made 144 notes in like 4 or 5 days?!
Yeah. So…
No one really tells you how hard it’ll be to get these notes out of this system and back into one that works for you.
I mean, I could leave them all as MD (markdown) files. But that would be a terrible mix of old and not-even-new systems, and I can’t do that.
So here I am tonight, using a plug-in to get the notes into an ODT file so I can preserve the reading view format from Obsidian where it’s really needed, and just taking the text straight from the MD file when I don’t care or the note doesn’t have any formatting I want to preserve.
I keep running into little finicky issues, like some notes fail to export as ODT because (I’m not kidding) they have a rogue non-breaking space character in the text somewhere.
What led to this? I just got tired of having to think about my notes.
A note-taking and journaling system that doesn’t stay out of my head and out of my way isn’t a good system for me. That’s really all it came down to. When I was taking notes with Obsidian, I was thinking about my notes all the time, but not in a useful way. I felt like I was spending more time managing the tool than truly using it and trying to get used to things I wasn’t sure I needed to get used to.
I also realized something important during all this experimentation.
Because I’m a discovery writer, a lot of my notes are random. They’re not a pre-written, structured collection of character profiles or locations or well-organized world-building goodies. They’re just random notes about things I want to remember, might need to remember, or should remember: some character names, maybe something about a location, or something I’m thinking about putting in the book but maybe don’t know if it’ll work out yet. Putting these notes into Obsidian was tempting but then I had to think about how I’d use them.
I wasn’t going to use them. Hell, I don’t use a lot of them even now. I have an ODT file in every series folder I have that has the most important names for characters (the ones I remembered when I made the list, anyway) with some descriptions, some location notes, but far from all, and half the time not even the ones I need right this moment, just the ones I found the last time I needed to know something and decided I should probably keep for the next time.
I search my master file for my series for most things, using Calibre’s powerful search. (How I find things I need to know (for the next book).) You know you can specify how many characters away a word can be from another before it shows up as a hit in the search? Yeah, there’s some good stuff there. All it requires is a document with all my books and stories in it for any one series, and it’s good. I already have that. I’ve been keeping one almost from the very beginning. One of them has 9 novels, a novella, and about 15 short stories in it. And it works.
For everything else, like that eye color that I never actually call someone’s eye color because it just gets mentioned in the story in the context of some moment? That’s what the notes are for: the things I really might not be able to find later without a lot of digging.
Obsidian is built for a workflow I don’t have, and it’s useful for a system I don’t use.
In fact, just last night, I decided I was done with trying to journal. I’ve spent thirteen years journaling and when I look back I just see an ocean of notes and pages where I talk about everything in my life that didn’t go the way I wanted. I’m not good at highlighting what went well or what worked; I highlight everything I shouldn’t.
It’s time to stop that, too.
Obsidian feels like a piece of software built on a philosophy that I don’t want to follow anymore, and that I never really followed to begin with.
I wanted to find a way to use Obsidian, because I like the idea of it. But the practical side of things caught up with me, and in a sense, I can also credit this experiment with making me face a few other truths, too.
This experiment succeeded wildly in the only way that mattered: it taught me something about myself that I don’t think I would’ve paid attention to otherwise.
Get out of my own way. Use what works, even if it means doing things a little differently than someone else would. Don’t keep inflicting journal injuries on myself. (Maybe I’ll explain that one in another post sometime, but I think the context is here, if you look deep enough.) :D