Tasting Notes with Robin Sloan

I’m sitting on a Zoom with the best-selling fiction writer Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

He opens his notes app, nvALT, and the word “empire” is still loaded into the search box from a previous session.

“I’ve been going back to my notes a lot recently, looking for things related to fantasy stories, and epics,” he explains. He flips to the first note and it’s a novel compressed into 3 vivid sentences:

“A man sitting in a coffee shop all day, running an empire from just his phone. A new one delivered every day by an associate. He is the central node.”

“That’s it,” Robin says. He smacks lips in a half-joking, half-serious way and his eyes twinkle like he’s found real treasure buried under an amusement park pirate ship. “It’s got the taste.”

The taste. Robin’s on the hunt for things that have it—words, phrases, ideas, that have the ineffable thing that makes them good. Some of Robin’s notes are just garbage. But some of them become his building blocks, the atomic units, the bricks that turn into his best-selling novels, his multimedia projects, or the olive grove that he runs with his partner. 

But the interesting thing about Robin is he doesn’t look at these things as bricks exactly. They don’t combine together in predictable, linear ways.

Instead, Robin’s notes are more like ingredients—deep yellow saffron, Ceylon cinnamon, black garlic, and white truffle—bits of the world that he throws together into a pot and covers with a heavy lid. He turns up the heat, he adds salt to taste—until out comes a story. 

When we talked, I was interested in how Robin organizes his voluminous collection of notes, but I was really interested in something else: what gives a note that taste?

“I honestly don’t think I can say. If I could describe fully what makes a note special there’s a sense in which I wouldn’t need it anymore. The description that captures it fully, is the same as the note. This whole process of note-taking is a very gradual process of me finding my way towards something."

These are Robin’s answers as told to Dan Shipper, edited for length and clarity.

Robin introduces himself

My name is Robin Sloan. I'm a fiction writer – I’ve written the novels Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and Sourdough – and a media inventor.

I pay my bills by writing novels, but I’m currently designing and creating a video game – and I also work with my partner making olive oil.

I create content, but I play with the content’s container, too

I describe myself as a ‘media inventor’, which I know sounds like a strange label. To me, it means that a lot of my work – not really my novels, but almost everything else – involves inventing a format or container at the same time that I’m writing or imagining what goes into it.

This might be because I’m a member of what some people call ‘the Oregon Trail generation’ –  those who played Oregon Trail on Macs when we were in elementary school back in the late ‘80s. We grew up with computers and the internet, but in a way that was kind of in-between our parents’ generation, who had the internet dropped down on them like a ton of bricks, and people younger than us, who grew up in a world where the internet was everywhere, like oxygen or sunlight.

I learned from using those Macs early on that form is always malleable. This became even more apparent when the web came into the picture. Think about it: there’s no way to make a web page or a blog that is not an act of playing with its form at the same time as you're creating its content. So it just seemed natural: the world was always telling me that you worked on those two things – the container and its contents – together.

I take notes by hand, and I take a lot of them

For more than a decade, I’ve been very committed to taking notes by hand, usually in a little notebook that I keep in my pocket. At this point, I need to stop buying those Field Notes notebooks because I must have a lifetime’s supply of them stored up.

When you’re the kind of fiction writer that I am, you're constantly thinking of things, seeing things, reading things, overhearing things – and it turns out that how you take notice of those things can be really valuable in ways you can’t necessarily predict. You have to save that stuff, because you have no idea how it might be useful later.

I’m also devoted to what I think of as my ‘happy pen’ – a super-cheap one you can get from Muji. I have boxes and boxes of them. It’s a 0.7mm, capless pen, and the body is transparent, which I like, because you get to see the ink inside. I’ve tried a lot of basic pens, but this one is my favorite by a pretty wide margin. I stock up on them too, because when I don't have one and I'm stuck with a different pen, I actually feel a little off-kilter.

I don’t have my system for taking notes totally figured out – it actually ebbs and flows all the time – but the important thing is that I take a lot of them.

I transfer my notes from paper to nvALT

Many years ago, I realized that I wanted to get serious about saving all those notes digitally. I didn't want my notebooks to just get thrown away or stuffed into a box – I wanted to preserve them in a way I could access. So I started to use a little program called nvALT, which is a very fast note-taking program for the Mac.

Transferring my notes from notebooks into nvALT is a process that I always enjoy. When I fill up a physical notebook, I'll go through it, acting as a sort of loose, first filter for the material I’ve accumulated. I’ll cross out a few things that are obviously garbage, but most of my notes make the cut, and I transcribe them into nvALT.

When that’s done, I throw away the notebook.

Noticing things that have that special... taste

As for what I take notes about, maybe because I’m a fiction writer at heart, a lot of the things I notice have to do with language.

For example, if I run across an amazing name of a person or a company or a street, I’ll record that for sure. Likewise, if I’m reading a book or something online, and I find a sentence that's evocative or strange – or one that I wish that I had written – I’ll save that, too.

That explains maybe 80% of what I capture. The rest is made up of things – either from the outside world or from the meanderings of my own brain – that have a certain ineffable taste to them. 

That ‘taste’ is a very personal thing, and I don’t think I can really explain it. But I’m pretty sure it means that, for me, note-taking is a very long-term, gradual process of finding my way towards something; I just can’t quite articulate what that something is.