How I used Scrivener to Write my Book || Interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Hey everyone, welcome back to my YouTube series all around book writing. Today is, I guess, a special episode. I was interviewed by a really good friend of mine all about, I guess, the nerdy elements of book writing. So we went into sort of a deep dive with a little bit of screen sharing around how I use Scrivener, what my sort of Post-it note methodology was, and generally how do you take large amounts of information, somehow make a system of it, and turn it into a book. So that was the interview I did with the amazing Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She does a million different things. She is a neuroscience researcher and master's student at King's College London. She's founder of Ness Labs, which is a company that kind of creates products all around, I guess, mindful productivity. She's got a huge community of people that are all about trying to learn how to learn and learn how to be more productive. She's got an amazing newsletter called Make Her Mind, which I think has got over 10,000 people subscribed to it now. So a lot of people really keen to hear her ideas around how do you kind of mindfully do more and do it in a way that kind of isn't so cynical and maybe a bit healthier for us all. So she was the perfect person to speak to about it because she, like me, is super nerdy about systems of learning and kind of what are the different tools that we use in order to kind of get things into our head and get things out of our heads in productive ways. So, and the interview is actually going to be used in a course that she's creating at the moment all around exactly that, which I don't think is live at the moment, but once it is, I will put the link below, um, once she sends it to me. And if it's something you guys are interested in, you can go and see all the other interviews that she has done. And but for now, enjoy the interview, and don't forget, chuck your, your comments in the— your questions in the comments below, and, and let me know if there's anything else you want me to cover on this channel. Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. I'm like so nerdy about book writing process, so I'm just like quite excited to get to, to talk about it with someone who actually like cares about this stuff.

Amazing. So just to give people a little bit of an overview before we go into the nitty-gritty of your process, can you give people an overview of what it was like to write a book? It was your first one too, so I assume there was a lot of trial and error. So can you tell us a little bit more?

Yeah, definitely. Before I wrote the book, I was, or I am, a freelance writer. So I'd already done a little bit of, you know, having to go research a topic, interview some people. Try and work out what the story is that I'm wanting to tell, and then pull it all together. But normally my articles are, you know, between 800 words and 2,000 words, and, you know, I have this sort of brain, I can kind of hold quite a lot of stuff in my head, not so much remember it, but I can hold a system in my head a lot. So when I'm doing articles, I don't tend to need really thorough processes, shall we say. But I knew from the beginning that, you know, that was not going to work for, well, what turned out to be over a 100,000-word book. So basically, I suppose I started from the perspective of research. I'd written a proposal, which got sent, and you know, we sold the book off the proposal, and that was a sort of sample chapter, but that was essentially just like writing a long read, so I didn't really treat it like the book. It wasn't until I got the deal, and then I was like, okay, research time. So I did about 60 interviews in the end, anything from about an hour up to 2 hours roughly, with different individuals, experts, So I would, you know, record all of those and take notes. Sometimes I did the transcribing, sometimes other people did. I found it really useful to listen back and make notes myself because I could also hear my own thinking. I also at the same time was doing a lot of desk research, a lot of reading, whether that was books, articles, things other people had written about similar topics, and trying to capture all that. And I also did tons and tons of voice memos. That's kind of how I think. I think out loud in conversation, but without boring my boyfriend too many times. And so it would be voice memos to myself. And so then it was a sort of process of having to transcribe them and take notes off the back of them that I'd be doing wandering around town or whatever. And then after that, it was basically trying to, from all that research, pick out what were the sort of kernels of ideas and it didn't really matter where it fitted in the book. I had chapters that I already knew were going to exist, but I was trying to be as open-minded as possible about, it doesn't really matter where these kernels are, they're just interesting points I want to capture. I turned them into Post-it notes, which I've brought here as an example. Big piles of Post-its.

I love that.

So that was fun, going through like all the interviews again, all the voice memos, all the research, everything, and just pulling out these, just like, you know, like, I'll show you one. It's just got one line. It's really not much information at all. It's like, just an idea. And then I stuck them all up on a wall, clustered them by chapters, but also by like overarching ideas. So I had like a whole section on like, what does value mean, for instance, because I had tons of ideas around that. I then translated all that back into the digital. Into Scrivener, which for people who don't know, it's a tool that's built predominantly for writing projects for books or for like long-form pieces of reports or articles or whatever. And yeah, I used what they have as a corkboard method, which I can show you later on the screen share. And then what's quite cool is they can essentially— you can like flip the way you see your information Scrivener. So if you have like you know, your corkboard with your little post-its, you can click a button that turns it then into a manuscript, so it kind of gives you like sections, and those ended up being like the chapter sections. Also meant I could then move them around really easily. And then once I had all that, then it was kind of more traditional editing and drafting of writing. So yeah, that's kind of the— I mean, there was things that kind of, you know, I was still doing interviews when I was writing, and I was still reading stuff and capturing information, but generally that was kind of the sort of life cycle of the process of the book.

That's amazing. Is there a part of this process that you felt was more challenging compared to the others, to you personally?

I mean, just the writing was the hardest bit, frankly. I think mainly because I was bored by that point. Not bored of the book, but because there's a whole thing in writing which maybe you've heard of, where some people are planners and some people are what's called pantsers, and I am a planner. So it means that I, pants kind of think as they write and build the story as they go, which tends to obviously work for fiction a little bit more than nonfiction when you have to do a little research. But with me, I kind of had planned like every beat of every chapter, and it changed a lot when I was writing, but at least for that first write, it was kind of like, I already know what I'm trying to say, I know what my argument is, I know what direction this is going in, so it was just quite tiresome to have to kind of fill in the gaps. But I think the other bit that I did find quite challenging, which is why the post were so useful for me was I had so many ideas, and I think the beauty of doing a book is, you know, some people when they write an article, they want to pull everything they possibly think about a topic, and you have to go, "No, I'm just saying this one thing. Get rid of that, get rid of that." With a book, it's like, "No, no, you can say everything." You can, and you can't. So it was sort of letting myself zoom out and get all these ideas and then kind of go, 'Okay, what is my single point? What's my argument? And then what order do I put these in to best storytell and make it interesting?' And so it was the sort of nitty-gritty of, I suppose, not just structuring ideas but making the ideas interesting and make it interesting to read through structure, if that makes sense. Absolutely.

I think it's very interesting what you're saying about the planners and the pencils because there's another metaphor that's being used sometimes, which is the architect and the gardeners.

Oh, I prefer that. That's nicer. Yeah.

Yeah. And I really like that one. And I personally, I force myself to be an architect for longer projects because you need to, you need some scaffolding. But at the same time, I face the exact same thing that you faced in the writing phase where if I know too much about what's going to happen, I get a little bit bored. I like the gardening phase of uncovering new seeds and, you know, being like, oh, that's an insight I didn't see coming, for example. So I find that really interesting that you face that, though, even though you're a planner.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the voice memos is my gardening. So it's me kind of trying to work out what is the point I'm trying to make. And I really, really enjoyed the process of trying to kind of really let myself kind of be the researcher, if that makes sense. I think sometimes when you're, particularly when you identify more as a writer or journalist more so than a researcher, although I do think I sit in the middle, sometimes you don't necessarily feel that you have the right to try and build on the research and add, oh, but it links to this thing, and I wonder if the person thought of that, and da da da da da, especially if you're reading something by, like, you know, a genius or Professor or whatever. I really enjoyed that kind of gardening process of letting my mind just go a bit kind of all over the place and trying. I guess like when you know that your brain does a lot of connecting itself, you have to kind of lean into that, otherwise you're never going to get to an interesting idea anyway. So if I don't do that writing, I do that talking, which is why writing becomes tiresome. Absolutely.

And, you know, that's the thing too. Lots of people— there's this myth of creativity where people think that you just wait and then there's this sudden burst of inspiration when really most new ideas, most innovation or most new insights that, you know, researchers, writers like you come up with are actually more of something that's called combinational creativity, right? It's just like looking at different things from a different angle that have been phrased in different ways by different people before you that bring you to this. And so, yeah, I love that you mentioned the fact that you need to lean into the fact that your brain tends to want to connect these things together.

Yes, final bit that I think people don't talk about enough, and I think it's a lot to do with the fact it's difficult to credit ideas, is a lot of my ideas come from conversations with friends, like out at dinner or chatting to my boyfriend in the evening, boring him with my book again. And I think, you know, there was many times that I would be out just with a mate, we'd be having a conversation about something completely different, something would come up and I'd be like, "Stop, stop, stop," and I'd be whapping my phone out and I'd be like, "Please, can I record? Just say that again, just say it again. Oh, the way you said that was amazing." And so So, you know, it's a hard thing to kind of attribute where you get ideas from. And also sometimes someone says something and then it kind of, you remember it a couple of days later, but you think it's your idea, but it wasn't. So I don't know, I think you have to lean into the fact that, you know, if you don't process things often and talk about things often for certain kind of thinkers and people like myself, then you're just not going to get to that kernel unless you let yourself free flow a little bit. Absolutely.

I do the same thing as you. I'm not sure, as someone who seems to love voice notes and recording people. I just type them, but I have— I literally have a note on my phone which is so long. It's just nuggets from what people told me, or— and I do the same thing you do. I interrupt people during conversations, like, just stop one second, how did you say that again? I'm just going to write it down. So I completely understand that process. The part that's fascinating, and I would love to hear how you're doing this, and this is why I would love for you to share your screen, is How do you go from these Post-its, these voice notes, the gardening part, to a book?

Because there's a huge gap between them. I'm still surprised as well, Anne-Laure. It's not just you, don't worry. Okay, let me show you the setup of my Scrivener. Okay, so over here on the left-hand side is, as you can see, is all different parts of the book. This is the full manuscript here. If I switch it like this, you'd be able to see the whole book. It would load eventually. Scrivener can sometimes be a little bit slow. It's not the most beautiful piece of M. Software.

Gives you more time to just think about stuff.

Yeah, exactly. But you can see from the dropdown, like here is the— as you can see, I did 4 kind of drafts before I submitted it to the publisher. Oh, spinning wheel of death. It'll be fine. Yeah, so here you go. So here, that's the most full version of my manuscript. It got edited more once it was at the publisher, but before I submitted it, this is it here. And this was 4th draft. But before I did any of this, these are all versions as well. I probably started here, which was notes, and this was kind of when I was just, you know, thinking of random things at certain times. This was, you know, a lot of this was taken from my notes, Notes app, same as you. So this was just, I think this was just me brainstorming a title, all really random. Meetings with my friend Parol. I did a whole load of stuff around like narrative stuff. This was all random stuff. And then I— this is a lot of like— this has come from voice memos. So you can actually see, this is audio files. I put all of my voice memos in here so you can see. And then I also had all my interviews. So these are all the expert interviews. And again, you can see, and when I've said done, that means I've then transcribed it or taken what I need from it, basically, like here. So this was basically a process of gathering all of these different things and obviously research down here. Are all my links and God knows what else. So I started here and once I'd kind of, I guess, got to the point that I could not write anymore, I basically decided to go through all of this again. And so I would basically go through every single interview. So these little ticks are to show that I'd A) transcribed it and then B) gone through it again to take all the Post-its. I think the green check meant I'd done the Post-its and basically it was it was just a case of like taking an interview. So let's see this one, for instance, just going through all the different notes from the discussion or from the transcription. And like, say, for instance, that says, "If solar and wind hadn't take off, more interest in fusion." That might be an idea that I thought, "Oh, I need to look into this idea of like, you know, fusion was kind of buggered because of these other things." And then I would take a Post-it and just probably write that exact thing down. Obviously this is in quantum computing, it's not in batteries. So going through individually all of these documents and basically collecting the little kernels, and that's why I have so many of them, basically, because that was, you know, that took a really long time, that took a couple of weeks. So that took a really long time, and then once I'd basically gone through these 3 bits here, and this one, I was like, okay, I need to transpose all my Post-its back into Scrivener so that I can then move them around digitally. Because I'd already done sticking these up on the wall and clustering everything into chapters and all that sort of thing. There you can see that was me on the final edit. I was like, yeah, this bit just doesn't work. Randomly putting anywhere. Okay, so here's my Post-its. So as you can see, I've clustered them by chapter here. These are my 9 chapters of the book. And then I also had a whole section just on hype, because obviously the book is on hype. And so there was a lot of like Post-its that didn't really have anything specific to do with, you know, a chapter, but more like the high-level ideas of hype. And then some of the more kind of broader ideas that I thought would be nice in the intro, and broader ideas for the outro. And so if you take a chapter here, what I've basically done is clustered all of the Post-its into one Post-it. So this is one Post-it, and everything in here, every line, is a single Post-it. So I have a Post-it that says those exact words somewhere in this pile. I don't know where.

Amazing. Yeah.

And so you can see that what I basically did was to try and group all of my Post-its. All the Post-its I had that had anything to do with GMOs went in here. Hunger, food cultures, farming. And this changed, you know, as I was transcribing the Post-its back into here. I thought, oh, I'm gonna have loads on cows or something, and then I'd realize I only had like 3 notes on that. So I'd be like, well, maybe actually that's to do with how farming works, for instance, or insects as protein, possibly. So eventually over time, I would just do one chapter at a time, because I wanted to try and keep everything in my head at once. I would get these kind of story beats. So I knew that in the food chapter, it was likely that I was going to have a section on GMOs, a section on hunger, a section on the system, section on food— you see what I mean? And so I did that for every chapter. So as you can see, they're all here. And then after I did that, I then basically copied this up into this rough initial first draft. So this started basically as a collection of Post-its. So you see, I just renamed them and added them. But if you go into this view, you'll see this was basically me just moving around the Post-its for the chap— the space chapter. If I go into space, maybe it'll be clearer.

Yeah.

So these are the ones I started with, and then these are the story beat ones. But what's great is when you kind of gather all your Post-its like this, or in my case, my Post-its. You can write all your little bits. I did it over in this section here, editing down, "Oh, actually, that's not good." And then I would drag these around to try and make it the right order for the chapter, because obviously, I didn't— conclusion wasn't going to be in the middle, for instance. And then what's great is you can just click this button up here, and it basically— you see these lines? These are between each Post-it. So it translates all of your little notes into bits. And so what it looked like is, I see how there's loads of just like bullet points and stuff. So what I would then do is I went back and tried to fill in with actual writing. And you can see that in the sort of second, first proper draft. Where's space?

Here.

You'll see it's exactly the same as up here, but instead of it just being bullet points, you have like actual writing. And in red is basically what I added in between. So a little bit pernickety probably to a lot of people, but it was like, what I was so stressed about was I was stressed I was going to lose ideas as I started to try and put it all together. I was really worried that I'd have these, you know, I'd be talking to someone and they'd say something like, I don't know, satellite law, and I was so worried that I'd lose, oh, I need to look into satellite law and I need to make sure I like hit that beat at some point. So for me, this was a way of almost like taking on a journey all these ideas through different phases and like making sure I didn't lose any along the way unless they deserved to be lost, but they're still there somewhere, you know, they're in these sections somewhere. But it was like a sort of process of going, okay, what am I actually trying to say? What order do I put these ideas in? How do I make sure that I'm kind of not saying the same thing twice. So a lot of the gathering of the Post-its was also to be like, oh, I actually have two Post-its to say the exact same thing, right, chuck that one out, just keep one. So it was kind of a— I was just so stressed out about losing so much stuff. And as you can see, I've kept like everything. So this is, you know, first draft, second draft, that is US market edits, and I just changed the color so that I could see basically what was— oh, Oh, Cancer I did last. We didn't have very many goals of that chapter, shall we say. Oh, the little pause button is on top of this. Here we go. Hopefully it'll make sense anyway. So you can see I actually didn't change— there you go. So there's the changes here in blue.

Yeah, so I love that it's a very iterative process. I think lots of people who struggle with creating original content are paralyzed because they don't know where to start, and I love that you start with the tiniest, like, atomic, like, little nuggets of information that you can get, which is just a Post-it based on something you read or you heard or a conversation that you had. And then only you try to, you know, basically build more meaning out of these. And the second thing I really like is how selective you are with the Post-it notes. Something that I've seen lots of people do is they read a book and they basically take very long notes of the book that is almost a copy of the book with lots of quotes from the book. And they have this thing that has nothing in their own words, that is nothing that is their own ideas, which is just basically something that gives them the illusion of having digested the content of the book because they copied and pasted a bunch of snippets from it. Whereas the Post-it note is very interesting because you don't have that much space there. And you basically collect ideas that are relevant to your work and that's it. And then you convert these into bigger chapters, etc. But I love that approach that forces you to actually think about what is relevant to your work.

Yeah, I think a lot of that is because I'm the sort of person that gets really caught up with books. I mean, I annoyingly don't have one right to hand. But I could probably just grab one to show you from behind. Yeah, I'm the sort of person that when I'm reading, I don't know if you can see this, but it's all, you know, folded over, there's stuff written all over.

I did the same with your book, by the way.

That's great! That's what I want!

I dug your book everywhere because I—

Honestly, this is what I like. I think it's— I personally think it's the best way to read books if you have a brain that works in a similar way to ours. If you don't, then maybe maybe not, but yeah, I write all over books, and a lot of time I'm circling entire paragraphs, and it's like, I'm not gonna be able to capture that if I'm then using it for research for something else. And actually at the moment, I'm now on book 2, and I'm trying to iterate my process even more and try and make it a bit better, and this one actually, there's a lot more books to read as research, whereas with Smoke and Mirrors, there weren't as many, I didn't actually use as many full books as as sources, it was more a chapter here, chapter there. So with this one, it's like taking these humongous big texts and trying to somehow get insights out. So what I'm doing at the moment is annotating the book, just reading it and annotating it, not thinking much about it. And then I'm actually using Roam, which I know you love, to try and basically go back through every page. I'm trying to like chapter, kind of capture summaries of what I've got, and just if I've got a folded page Why did I fold it? And again, exactly, you said, trying not to type what's there unless I'm going to use it as a quote, but rather re-summarize it, because otherwise it's not going in for me. And I'm sure a lot of people, it's probably the same, it just doesn't capture it. So with the post-its, when I was doing the first time, it was just that— I don't know, I guess I'm always trying to think of like, what's the— if it was an article, like, my kind of thing was if it's not a sort of full article, don't write it on a Post-it. It's kind of like every Post-it could actually be constructed into like an 800-word article if you've got a full argument around it. So, you know, if it was just like, "This law came in in 1960," I wouldn't write that. But I'd maybe write something like, "This law hasn't been updated since 1960." And then you're like, "Oh, okay, well, what's the discussion around the fact it's not been updated?" So it wasn't just capturing facts, it was more like capturing angles or capturing arguments as well, and things that reinforced what I was trying to say. And all the facts I knew were in Scrivener, and I wasn't going to lose them, if that makes sense.

It looks like just Post-its, but it is the original source of what allowed you to create a book. In the end.

Well, it was a lovely feeling when I finished the Post-its. I remember sort of sitting them out in front of me and being like, I know my book is in here. It was a lovely feeling, just like I have so many arg— I knew I had too much as well, which was a nice feeling, because sometimes when you're writing a book, you know, when you're feeling— when you're having a good day, you know there's too much, and then you're having a bad day and you're like, I'm not saying anything, I'm just repeating myself, this is rubbish. And when— so when you see these like massive piles of Post-its, you're like, no, there's tons of ideas in here and this is really exciting. But I think for me as well, I'm quite— I sometimes feel a bit out of control of information, and Roam has actually been really helpful in some respects recently to kind of help with that. Although I still feel sometimes overwhelmed by the fact that I'm not using it to the potential it has, you know, and have all these feelings. But I think the thing with the Post-its for me was just being able to, you know, kind of create a boundary around the book and be like, there's nothing else other than these Post-its, right? You don't need to go and look at anything else, you just need these, and now move them around. And as opposed to when you're on your computer, you're hyperlinking something, you're going off and looking at Wikipedia, you're going off and reading another book, and I was like, no, you're not allowed to do that, you're only allowed to look at these piles. And it made it kind of more manageable somehow because it was this sort of, um, enclosed system, if you will, of information. Smoke and Mirrors had a lot of opinion in it, which was fun to write, and a lot of it was also, I guess, gathering a lot of different opinions and takes on things, and then somehow trying to make sense of what my take was off the back of all of that. And of course, you know, getting, you know, fact-checking, getting the real information from the sources. But there was less kind of, shall we say, going and reading tons of science papers and whatnot. Whereas with the second book, there's quite a bit more, it's quite a lot of law in it, and I don't know law very well, so I'm having to read a lot of foundational texts to try and understand stuff. So it is a slightly, it's a slightly different approach because I do need to kind of gather a lot more, shall we say, desk research information. So for that, I'm also using Mendeley. Which I know I'm assuming you use for your MBA.

I use Zotero, it's the same.

Fine, yeah, exactly. So yeah, I've been using that and finding that also to be really— if you can wrangle around the system and make it work for you, it can be really, really, really useful. But it's always that way of like, I don't know, I like to contain information in places, but at the same time, if you can't transfer it very easily, it gets a little bit— and I definitely find myself you know, you mentioned it before we started recording, but like how people can get a little bit in the weeds trying to work out what system to use as opposed to just doing the thing. And I'm so, so guilty for that, because there's always a better way, but it's more just about, you know, making sure for your own head you can kind of keep track of stuff. And that's something I've been wrestling a little bit because it is a sort of different research challenge this time than previously.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, this is amazing. I'm totally going to steal some of your ideas. Please! Amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing your process with us today.

No worries.

It was so interesting. And I, you know, I just, I love that you have both the experience of writing shorter articles as a journalist and a freelance writer and a book. And good luck with the second one. Looks like it's going to be a lot of work, but I can't wait to read it.

Yeah, no, it's— there's a lot— well, not a lot more to be done, but a very different kind of research challenge, but actually one I think I'm enjoying a bit more than doing tons and tons of interviews. It's quite nice to just sit with texts and see what happens. So awesome, thank you so much.

Thank you.