I like the way that John Erickson documents his sources in a simple and clear manner here.

Simply:

Name of author > Publication date > Page number

Uh. Why couldn’t we learn to cite sources like this all those years we spent in school? Rather than spending hours skimming back and forth between formatting guides. This is bold, no italics. You only capitalize the first letter. Minus 10 points because you forgot a comma. What hogwash.

I need to do a comprehensive post on how I read, annotate, and document books here too.

The short version is that, I mostly use Evernote.

The system I use in documenting my research follows this pattern: [Lewis 2001: 49]. It is a system used by archeologists, and I have found it to be the least cumbersome of the several methods of footnoting. It gives us the name of the author, the publication date of the source, and the page number. Most readers won’t do anything with that information, but those who wish to trace the source can find it listed in the bibliography.

-John Erickson, Story Craft (Amazon)

I have never been able to keep up with any of the various private notebooks I have bought over the years.

They have started as journals, scratchpads, lists, and simply a place to doodle and take notes. But none of them stuck in an enduring way.

I would scribble my way through the first 20% or so and then set it aside.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it was just the youth of it?

Maybe blogging and my ability to persist met at exactly the right time?

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem