Introduction to Obsidian for fiction writers

XPress Access | March Edition | Is this approach to note-taking productive or a form of procrastination?

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Working with a second brain

I needed to figure out a better way to keep track of everything in my life. From business obligations, Substack deadlines, to my fictional worldbuilding and story-plotting ideas, and so on. I purchased a yearly planner from Clever Fox this year, which helped me cross things off physical lists, but I burned out too quickly because it felt like added work.

Don’t get me wrong, I like writing on paper from time to time because it externalizes a lot of life’s stressors. The crux of the matter is that I don’t want to spend time doing things that aren’t getting me closer to my actual goals. Why spend an hour every day planning what I want to get done when I could simply start doing them?

Since Obsidian was my first major foray into this type of technology, it’ll be the one I focus on throughout this post. I’m partial to the aesthetics of it, but I couldn’t argue what makes it better than its competitors. One of the key points I heard was to stick with one program for a while to get the most out of it, rather than jumping between them. Time is wasted during the set-up phase, and there’s a big learning curve to each application, so it takes a lot of time.

With this overview, I hope to save you some time by helping to determine if you’d like to use it, or avoid it altogether. Thanks for being a free or paid subscriber to The Storyletter! Your support makes these XPress posts possible.

If you’re skeptical, it’s likely for good reason. Here’s a great video that demystifies the oftentimes magical nature presented about these programs: