First Draft from Outline – a Compiler Script
Last week I completed a script to help automate the process of compiling a first draft from an outline and Zettel notes. You can find it on GitHub or install it as a gem from the terminal: gem install zettel_outline. Learn more about the format it supports and how you can adopt it to your Zettelkasten note archive.
The current version 0.1.0 supports Sascha’s and my note archives. Our notes adhere to a similar convention. If yours don’t, you’ll have to tweak the script until it works – contributions are highly welcome! I cannot cover every edge case of every note archive convention myself, so you will have to dirty your own hands for now to adapt it to your needs.
Why Outlines?
Outlines are useful to write anything. Back in 2013 (!) I wrote about how to “ease into writing” using an outline with Zettel note references. Then I showed how to re-create this method with a project Zettelkasten using Evernote. Not too long ago, Sascha explained how one of his manuscripts came about using the method of organically growing outlines.
The outlines are converted to the first draft of the final text by hand in a step we call “assembling”: you paste in a Zettel note wherever a Zettel reference is. Referencing is easy thanks to Zettel note IDs. You see, outlines and Zettel notes can like each other very much.
How an Outlines Becomes a Draft
My draft outline in Evernote contains a section like this (see the full outline here):
Introduction: Should we be allowed to disagree and break with our families?
- The case of 18-year old Nasser, sueing his parents for trying to abduct him and force-marry to someone he didn’t care about
- §201505251140 Nasser’s Case
- §201505202128 Concept Forced Marriage
- While it’s necessary to look at his parent’s claims to fully understand the situation, it isn’t necessary to understand their point in order to judge Nasser’s actions.
- Not the truth of Nasser’s convictions or that of his parents are important. Their coherent set of convictions matters monstly.
- §201506251030 How to live: Responsibility for our lives VS Accuracy of moral convictions
- How can we resolve the issue that both parties may be equally convinced in and equally morally responsible for their actions?
- – We will turn to authenticity, and owning one’s live, and that Nasser’s parents violate the principle of non-harmful interfering.
- §201503192013 Swim-lane metaphor for morals and ethics
- §201503230933 Concept authenticity
- We have to understand his point of view and his system of values first and foremost. It doesn’t make sense to try and force an external template onto a complex interpretive system. (We’ll see why that is so.)
- §201506120831 Interpretations have truth-value
- What does it mean to marry someone, anyway?
- §200910011300 Concept Institution
- §200912061046 Concept social role
- §201506211426 What is marriage?
It’s a nested list. Some items are comments or headings, some are Zettel references. Since Sascha and I usually work in plain text, it looks a bit different when not rendered for the web:
* What does it mean to marry someone, anyway?
* §200910011300 Concept Institution
* §200912061046 Concept social role
* §201506211426 What is marriage?
The pattern is simple: items start with an asterisk or a dash; sub-items are be indented by 4 spaces or a tabular character. That’s what lists look like in Markdown.
When I invoke the script from the terminal like this:
$ zettel_outline -f outline.txt -a ~/Archive/ -o draft.txt
… I end up with a new file called draft.txt that contains the contents of each references Zettel note:
<!-- §200910011300 Concept Institution -->
When two people recognize recurring actions as types of actions,
and when this typification is reciprocal, that is,
both share this assessment. Institutions are like agreements,
only implicit. You perform actions and someone else forms justified
expectations about your behavior in certain situations.
That's habitualization; and if your concrete actions vary
while being of a common type, we've got typification.
[#berger-luckmann1980sozkon][]
> Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal
> typification of habitualized actions by types of actors.
> Put differently, any such typification is an
> institution.[53][#berger1966con]
...
<!-- §200912061046 Concept social role -->
...
<!-- §201506211426 What is marriage? -->
...
I have done this for the Evernote-hosted project manually. Compare the above to the 6500 words result. I would have very much preferred a script back then.
How the Script Works
You have to have Ruby installed. Macs come with Ruby already.
Ruby packages are called “gems”. My script is delivered as a gem, too, and you can install it thus from the terminal:
$ gem install zettel_outline
Now the zettel_outline command is available from the terminal. It requires three parameters:
-f, an outline file like I have presented above,-a, the path to your Zettel note archive, and-o, the file it should write the output to.
In order for the archive-browsing option to work, all your notes have to be in a single folder in plain text format. Also it is assumed that your notes adhere to the naming convention of ID + title, like:
200910011300 Concept Institution.txt
200912061046 Concept social role.txt
201503192013 Swim-lane metaphor for morals and ethics.txt
201503230933 Concept authenticity.txt
201506120831 Interpretations have truth-value.txt
201506211426 What is marriage.txt
Adopting Your Own Naming Scheme
If your notes end with the ID instead of start with it, you’ll have to tweak the note Finder which is responsible for finding files in your archive folder. There you could also implement searching in sub-folders if needed.
If your notes don’t have a numerical ID, then you’ll have to tweak the ZettelInfo that determines which portion of a line of text from the outline file becomes what. Currently, the portion identified as ID is the search term in the above mentioned Finder. If you’re Dan Sheffler, then you might want to make the whole line of text the ID and use the existing mechanism to search for a similarly-named note.
Over time, I imagine the script could recognize different styles so users can choose how they want the outline to be parsed. The current version is a very humble start probably nobody but Sascha and me can make use of at the moment :)