Hello, I’m Wendy Pratt; author and poet. I wrote a memoir, The Ghost Lake, about my experience of living on an ancient extinct glacial lake called Paleolake Flixton in North Yorkshire, and how I found my place in a long line of lake ancestry going back to the palaeolithic. I also wrote a poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to the memoir.
This is a post for paid subscribers. It’s about how I work with my easily bored, scatty brain to gather essential in-depth research notes for my books.
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Most of my books, especially the current one (a literary historical fiction novel) and my memoir, The Ghost Lake, have involved long stretches of intense research, done on a shoe string and with a brain that jumps about a lot. Because I have a portfolio career, my research and writing sit alongside my mentoring, manuscript appraisals, running courses and writing Substack posts. All of which also involve note taking and planning.
I want to tell you about the system I use that allows me to jump between different work and research without having to constantly open and close complex filing and note taking systems.
My four main rules for research and planning systems are:
Keep your system as simple as possible
Make everything easy to find
Work with the brain you have, not the one you’d like to have
Have easily repeatable methods and equipment
Let’s expand on this.
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