Index Cards in a Digital World
A writer’s struggle to organize thought chaos
I’m working on a book project. Like every writing project, it has lots of parts. And as the concept germinates, ideas run wild across the pristine landscape of a book imagined, trampling the thing practically to death before I begin. The result? Brain chaos.
Universe, please help me organize my thoughts before they escape — I forgot the working title between the bathroom stall where I thought of it and my office where I went to write it down! But not before it managed to wriggle itself off the tip of my tongue. With that vague notion hanging by a breath, I started to get an inkling, and with a bit of internet assistance, I landed upon it and sent it to myself in a text message.
In a long ago and far away academic world, I used index cards when writing my my master’s thesis. I wrote every quotation, idea, bibliographic notation, ad nauseum (as defined by the Urban Dictionary — repetitious to the point of wanting to throw up) on index cards. It helped me finish the project. I could lay them out and group them into sections, chapters, references, and subsections, put a checkmark on them when they had been used, and throw a bunch of them into the ad nauseum pile.
But now I wonder if index cards are passé. I had a trial version of a popular…
