so I’ve been spending days trying to figure out how i write. i know that sounds insane, but the thing is that i’m trying to figure out what i do with all these resources and references sitting around—do i have to carry all these books from place to place? do i photocopy the pertinent pages and carry those around? do i scan the pages? do i write out notes? what do i do?

somehow, inexplicably, stupidly, i can’t remember how i write anything that doesn’t just spring from my own whimsy. how did i forget how to write? when i wrote my thesis and papers and such many eons ago, i used notecards. i still have all my notecards ordered and banded together in card boxes. i wrote things out from the books in longhand on the cards. and i remember in some situations i typed the quotations or photocopied them and then taped them onto notecards. then i’d take the note card and arrange them in piles, based on whatever it was they supported or helped with. all that was for secondary stuff i think. i think that the poems or plays or novels that i was working with i just carried with me. i’m a big-time annotater. lots of notes in the book and lists of page numbers on the covers and endpages.

so i’ve been thinking am i supposed to do that? do i copy everything out on notecards? surely that’s insane. first it’s a waste of time cuz everything would need typed eventually, and second, my carpal tunnel would never allow it. i have endnote. i could try to type it all in there, but it doesn’t really seem suited to typing in notes. maybe annotation, but not extensive quotations. i’ve thought about creating a database and typing all my notes in there. creating my own online database. is that really how to do this? i keep wondering too if i can trust my notes. i mean will i catch everything or will i still need to carry all these books around to write.

i feel like i don’t even know how to write anymore and i don’t know when i forgot.