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The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature.
🏷️ Categories: Writing, Creativity, Zettelkasten.
Every day, I send myself dozens of WhatsApp messages.
And photos, and voice notes, and screenshots of all sorts of things. It’s indispensable digital junk, because whenever I come across an interesting idea that I hear on the bus, on the street, while I’m at a bar or in an office, I compulsively write it down so I can draw inspiration from it later. I say “compulsively” because for a long time I considered that anxiety to collect things the writer’s disease. It’s the collector’s fallacy. It creates a feeling of progress even though you’re not actually moving forward at all… A serious writer works fragments until they take shape; they don’t leave them rotting in a folder…
So why was I accumulating notes?
Because when I wrote in my journal at night, I liked expanding on the ideas from the day. If I didn’t have many ideas on a given day, I would tell myself, “So what did you do today, Álvaro?” I felt pressure to turn chaos into something coherent within 24 hours, and since you can’t always produce something brilliant in 24 hours, I became overwhelmed. The notes waiting to be processed piled up like a massive avalanche, growing larger and larger as time went by.
It was while reading Albert Camus’s notebooks that I realized what was wrong with my process…
In 2025, The Complete Notebooks was published, the first complete translation of his personal notebooks. I have to tell you, I felt seen. Camus writes down an idea for a novel next to a complaint about how disgusting the weather has been lately. He writes a carefully developed reflection on loneliness and then jumps to something that happened to him that day on the street. It’s erratic, very erratic. All of this was going through his mind day after day while he was writing works such as The Stranger or The Plague.
Camus didn’t write his “journal” in the modern sense of an orderly confession of what happened to him that day. Rather, it was a “mental warehouse,” you might say.
That changed the way I write my own.
At first, I treated my journal as a meticulous record of what happened during the day, but it failed to capture the day’s inspiration. By obsessing over capturing everything that inspired me, I ruined the journal. Eventually, I understood Camus’s idea of a “mental warehouse.” If you look at it that way, a warehouse isn’t a place where you use everything; it’s simply where all the valuable products are kept, neatly organized. Valuable ideas go in there and stay there, waiting for a reason to return to them.
Hold on to that.
Instead of sitting down to “polish ideas” for publication, I started capturing and doing nothing else. Less material, but carefully chosen and without rushing. That’s what he did. Camus returned to his own fragments again and again. A note about the weather in Algiers might resurface much later, transformed into a scene in a novel. Perhaps an annoyance about feeling unwell or guilty would resurface over the course of days and days until it crystallized into the idea for one of his works, such as The Fall or The Stranger. That’s what I mean. Reading his notebooks in their entirety made this apparent again and again. It seemed as though Camus’s ideas were collected, worked on over weeks or months, and gradually connected the loose ends until they took shape. In the process, all the chaff was discarded, leaving only the grain.
Daily reflection was the way to sift through all this material.
My publishing pace is, of course, faster than Camus’s. A Substack article has little in common with a novel, but that doesn’t make the process any less valuable. Good ideas increasingly emerge in my articles through daily distillation, just as they did for Camus. The same idea can roll around in my journal for weeks, expanding day by day, while I record the events of everyday life.
“Masterpieces are not born from a single isolated act; they are the result of years of shared thought, so that accumulated experience lies behind a single voice.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
That is the key to Camus’s method.
I think it’s more urgent today than it was in Camus’s time, in fact. He lived in a slow, analog world, with plenty of time between one stimulus and the next, but… what about us? We live bombarded by a deafening noise in which most people simply keep running without stopping to think. A journal as a mental warehouse forces you to stop for a second instead of letting everything disappear into the black hole of infinite scrolling.
So if you don’t know how to write today, do this.
Open the page and write down the sentence someone said to you this morning that caught your attention. Also save the existential question you asked yourself last night while staring at the ceiling as you tried to fall asleep, along with that quote you saw on social media that you liked. From there, tag where those ideas are in your notebook and, day by day, keep bringing them back to mind and expanding them with whatever new things you encounter.
Before writing anything new, reread your latest entries.
Be highly selective. Save exquisite ideas and return to them day after day, pushing them a little further each time. Repeat this, day after day, week after week, and one day (you won’t know which one) you’ll discover that the loose thread you’ve been dragging along for months has, without you fully planning it, turned into a complete, well-articulated idea.
Don’t write essays.
Write fragments that might one day become essays.
“Your job isn’t to find these ideas, but to recognize them when they appear.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:
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References
Camus, A. (2025). The complete notebooks.
Well said, Alvaro. I do something similar. It's a file on my laptop desktop called "Story Ideas." It's quite a jumble, but it is the warehouse of bits of conversation, FB memes, memories, news events. Whatever sparks an idea for a story. Sometimes even a comment I write ends up in there as the kernal of a story. The world is filled with inspiration. I'm surprised when someone says, I can't think of anything to write. Holy merde!
Have you read Joan Didion’s essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”? It is in this vein as well, with her own distinctive voice and spin. It’s luscious, and I carry a notebook all the time as well. Cheers!