// ABOUT ME Site: https://nicolevanderhoeven.com Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@nicole My travel YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/luckydippers k6 YouTube channel: http..." --- Writing a book in Obsidian: The beginning  ## Metadata - Author: [[Nicole van der Hoeven]] - Full Title: Writing a book in Obsidian: The beginning - Category: #articles - Document Note: The text describes the process of writing a book in Obsidian. The author has already imported all of their notes into a vault and has identified some plugins that may be useful for long-form writing. They plan to process their videos, create notes, come up with an outline and use a plugin called Spaced Repetition to remind them of notes. They then intend to write and prioritize the notes and investigate how to use the plugin for writing. - Summary: I'm writing a book in Obsidian-- about Obsidian! And I want to share it all with you. This is the beginning of that journey: what I'm starting with, my idea, and the plugins I'm using to get it done. This is all a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions about what I should do, I'd love to hear them! // RESOURCES MENTIONED Read Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker novel here; https://www.brandonsanderson.com/warbreaker-introduction/ Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson/description Patreon: https://patreon.com/nicolevdh // TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 00:55 The idea for the book 02:03 Step 1 - Collect content 04:50 Step 2 - Process videos 06:48 Step 3 - Review structure, connect 07:43 Step 4 - Follow my interest 08:22 Step 5 - Create book outline --- // ABOUT ME Site: https://nicolevanderhoeven.com Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@nicole My travel YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/luckydippers k6 YouTube channel: http... - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NosD77WX7qM&ab_channel=NicolevanderHoeven - In 2008, the fantasy author Brandon Sandersonwrote a book called Warbreaker.But to everyone's surprise,he posted every single chapter of it online, raw,as he was writing it.You can still check it out today.And when you read it,you can definitely see how things change chapter by chapter,in response to feedback, but also just story development.I love this concept of writing or learning in public,and I wanna try it too, but the question is, did this work for himbecause he's already a fantastic and experienced author?Or would this approach also be viablefor someone much more average,like someone who hasn't written a book before ever?Well, that's what I wanna find out.In this video, I'm gonna share with youhow I plan to write a book in semi-public,using, what else, Obsidian.Here's my idea.I already have a system in placefor using Obsidian to take my notes, and build upon them and watch structures emerge,and somehow narrow those things downinto a coherent, short-form piece of content,like a video or a presentation or a blog post.But I've never done that with anything longer.I've tried to write a book many, many times,but I've never actually stuck with itlong enough to succeed.So, I wanna give this a real go this year.And I gotta say, it's pretty daunting to admit that I'm trying something like this in public.I also want to see if Obsidian as a toolis good enough to use for publishing long-form content.Hopefully, at the end of all this, I'm gonna publish a book,I'm gonna self-publish it.I'm not sure exactly how yet,but I figure I'll take you along with me on the journey.The book is definitely going to beabout Obsidian, or note taking,I'm not entirely sure of the angle yet,but those are definitely thingsthat I have a lot of already. Let me show you what I've got.So this is a vault that Patreons already have access to,and it's tentatively titled Obsidian Playbook.Don't hold me to that title,because I don't know if I'm going to stick to it.But I think step one of this entire processis going to be getting everything I've made about Obsidianinto this one vault, and I'm most of the way there.First, I've got a video database of, I think,every video that I've created.I think I might be a little bit behind on some of them. I'm using some Dataview frontmatter already,just so I can search for them later,I'm not actually sure if I'm going to do that.But I'm just trying to anticipate what I'm going to need.So I have the video embedded here,and some timestamps as well.Now this is gonna be a problem,because I have a lot of videos,and I haven't really put in a lot of actual text.So, Obsidian doesn't do great with text,and so perhaps that's something that I need to start with. So I also have this video database note,where I have links to everything,and I do also have a Dataview query here,I'm not sure if I'm going to use it yet,but at least I can see what is out there.As you can see, not everything is tagged appropriately.I started this before I settled on the conventionfor tags and frontmatter and such,but, I mean, that's just the reality of it.I also included some text notes here. And I'm using the structure from a course I just released,Obsidian for Everyone.And I don't have all of the videos here,but I do have some of the thingsthat I wrote about in there.As well as some workflows for Obsidian.I've got things like Obsidian releasesthat I've written about.It's not complete, it's just the ones that I wrote about.And basically anything else that I already hadas notes in my actual vault,I've kind of moved over to here. There's a lot of empty stuff here,some of these are just placeholders.And I'm not really surehow everything's going to fit in together yet.I'm just kind of putting everything in hereand seeing where I am.I also have some stuff on other tools.I'm not entirely sure how far I'm going to gointo other tools, but I did already have some notes,so I might as well put them here.Now the interesting thing is that after all of that,after importing everything that I've got, or almost everything, I'm pretty close.I already have 25,149 words.This is the thing that makes me realize like,"Hey, I could actually finish a book on this."Will it be a good one, I don't know,but it's gonna be a book.So this is what I've done so far.Now for things that I'm planning to do.I think the second stepis going to be processing all of these videos,and actually getting them consistent,in terms of the frontmatter and the tags. And possibly,I need to maybe pull in the transcripts or something,or write what I said in the videoso that I have a little bit more to go on.A lot of these are also just not tagged,so that's something.I need to put frontmatterin these and maybe link all of these timestamps.I also need to actually create notesfor each of these plugins, because they don't exist.So I only have some community plugin notes, and honestly,they're not even that fully fleshed out. I think Dataview's the most fleshed out,because I have examples.These are from my personal notesas well as from Patreon stuff.But I've actually talked about way more pluginsthan I have notes on.I think the core plugins I'm pretty sold on,I kind of really explored thisand wrote a lot for the course that I just did.I'm not including the videos here, but hey,at least I have screenshots in that.So I just need to cross reference these videos, have text to cross reference to the actual plugins.And also because my stuffis so video and screenshot-intensive.I mean, this is a tutorial kind of thing,so, those things normally are very media-intensive.I'm also exploring what it might look likeif a book that I write isn't actually a book.Like, what if it's not actually a physical book,what if it's more of an interactive experience? Maybe is it possible that I just publish somethingusing Obsidian Publish and leave it at that?I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it,I'm not even thinking of the commercial side.But just the ideaof exploring a different form of publishing,is really exciting to me.The third thing that I want to do,I also want to install plugins like ExcaliBrain,because I think I'm going to need to be ableto look strategically at the entire structure. So I'm going to need Excalidraw.Enable that.And also install ExcaliBrain.Because I could look at the graph view,but I've always found this not really that useful,like it's nice when you're starting out,but when you really want to see more nuanced connections,it doesn't really work that well.Like, for example, the Changelog is linked to everywhere,but that's not really useful at all to me, unless I'm trying to see my progress.Instead, what I really wanted to use is ExcaliBrain.Because I think it'll let me explore linkages between notesand spot gaps more than the graph view would.Step number four is going to be to follow my interest,and create the notes that make sense at the time.Now this is the pointwhere I'm not sure that this is going to workfor our long-form stuff,because it just seems very meandering and lackadaisical.I know that this works in my main vault, and when I follow that approach,I just come up with a bunch of moments of serendipitywhere because I have such diverse topics in there,it's almost impossible to work on one ideawithout it colliding with another, and I really love that.But I don't know if maybe I need somethinga little bit more structured in this instance.I guess we'll see.Step number fiveis going to be coming up with an outline for the bookbased on the notes that I have,and then starting to put it all together and maybe strategically filling out some notes.One plugin that I'm thinking of using for thisis called Longform.I haven't really dug into it yet.I think this is gonna bea little bit later on in the process.But the plugin Longformis supposed to be really good at writing novels,or I guess longer screenplays or something,where there are specific scenes.For the moment, though,I'm thinking of using a plugin called Incremental Writing.Now I have used this plugin beforeand I really love the idea of it. Which is that instead of writing somethingfrom start to finish,it might be easier to write a little bit at a timeon many different notes, and then just trying to increasethe entire body of knowledge.And that way you're not starting from scratch,you're just rearranging building blocks in the end.Which sounds awesome.The reason that I stopped using it in my main vault,is that it just got to be too much of a hassleto prioritize things, I have different aspects of my life, I have work stuff, I have personal stuff,which now is also YouTube stuff.And then it became to be too muchto think about which one is more important to me right now?Something for YouTube, or something for my personal life,things like that,that I didn't feel like making a decision on all the time.But I think it might actually work for something like this,because everything in this entire vaultis going to be about a single project. This is one case where maybe having a separate vault for itmight work in my favor.So how this is going to workis that I can open up the incremental writing plugin.And I can, let's say, open the queue.Right now there is no queueand there also isn't anything on it.But this queue is going to be stored in this queue folder,which I've set to be system IW queues.Now this queue is going to be a list, basically,of everything that I want to work on. And then I'm going to add note to this queue.That note has been added to the queue with priority 34.Next rep is said to be today.Okay, let's add something else,so let's add the video Database,and I want to add this one as well.And I'll add to queue.Now when I go to the queue, now there should be two notes.I'm not entirely sure how the priority is assigned, I think, it's just because it was added later.So hopefully with the incremental plugin,I'm going to be able to have a single repositoryfor everything that I want to work on,and prioritized as well, if I want that.And then go through the list and just work and writeas much as I want or as little as I want,and then move on to the next one.I want to stress that this is not a recommendationfor the plugins that I've mentioned just yet.I'm just giving you a sneak peekof what I'm going to be trying out.As an example, I was already thinking while I was recording this video,that the Spaced Repetition plugin,while geared primarily towards flashcards,can also actually havesome sort of an incremental writing-like experience,if you use it to remind you of notesrather than of questions or answers.So that's something that I'd also like to investigate.So how good is Obsidian at writing long-form content?I have no idea, I know that it can be done,or at least I've heard that it can be done. But there aren't many resourcesfor how to actually do it in practice,or if I've missed any, please leave it in the comment below,because I would love to seewhat authors are doing with Obsidianthat I don't yet know of.I'm also wondering if this is a good timeto explore alternative formats to the traditional book.Like, could you have a bookthat is more of a choose your own adventure,and would that be more interestingthan something that has an enforced order of readingfrom A to Z?I don't know, I'm hoping to find that out. And I'll keep you updated as I go.Thank you for watching, (speaks French)., Writing a book in Obsidian: The beginning, Nicole van der Hoeven, 01gtmfq802gysc7rejqybys2f1.