Use 5 x 8 cards! Salvation. Every idea, every separable quote, every item from the literature I was researching, each went onto its own card. Organizing the eventual 1,800 cards into piles was defining the chapters; subpiles defined the sections; sequence within the subpiles defined the sequence of the day’s writing. This was THE handle without which I would have floundered for months.
Define in a sentence what the book is about. Searching for that sentence organizes your thinking; using it organizes your writing. Revising consists of removing everything that isn’t in support of that sentence. In my case (The Media Lab, 1987, Viking) the sentence was a quote, “How will we directly connect our nervous
