Ludwig van Beethoven left behind hundreds of notebooks filled with ideas for new music. Yet, he apparently never looked at them while composing. “If I don’t write it down right away, I instantly forget it,” he supposedly said. “If I write it down, I never forget it and don’t have to look at it ever again.”

This is a nice sentiment. It works when you need to remember to buy cucumbers at the grocery store. Or when you really can’t forget to send that email again tomorrow. It even has some merit in the creative department: Writing a note is sending a message to your subconscious, and even if you don’t actively control what happens next, it might work its way back into your next creation.

But that little word, “might,” is the crux of the matter: Down here in the real world, where we’ve written neither our Moonlight Sonata nor our fifth symphony yet, we can’t rely on fate to hand us our best thoughts right when we need them. When assembling a big idea, we need to have all the pieces in our hands — or, rather, minds. This is a challenge for any individual project, let alone for our body of work at large.

For you, it could mean thousands of little comments on code you’ve written over the years. An email archive filled with gems sitting unused in the cloud. Or simply a notes folder on your phone, chaotic but not without wisdom.

For me, it’s a daily blog that now counts 1,600+ small snippets of insight. Many of these snippets are connected. I revisit ideas. I add to them. Sometimes, I cover the same topic several days in a row until I’ve said everything I have to say about it at the time. But then what?

Often, I spot patterns. I can see several notes converge into a larger theme. But how and when can I chain them together? I have a life, wife, and job. Not always in that order but rarely in one that doesn’t keep me busy. It’s hard to carve out time for extra essays, let alone the research it takes to piece them together.

So, when Scott Lamb asked me whether I wanted to poke around in TK, Medium’s new social writing app with a dash of AI, I had the perfect use case to test! 12 days later, the results are in: My latest essay, “Can You Have Infinite Inspiration and Motivation?” is a nine-minute read. It started from four notes, written in TK, yet it also contains elements from several pieces I’ve written on those subjects many years ago.

If you’re wondering how to turn a handful of notes into a proper piece of writing that can stand on its own, TK might be the helping hand you need. Here’s how it works.

Disclaimer: I was paid by Medium to write this tutorial. Scott and I talked a bit about use cases at a high level, but after that, I was free to do as I pleased. He has reviewed but not edited this article.

1. Take Notes, Take Notes, Take Notes

The easiest way to start using TK is to click into the daily prompt and jot down some thoughts. You can configure it, too: Do you want a random trigger, a spark based on your recent writing, or a connection on how others on TK have reacted to what you’ve shared? You can even set it to encourage you to finish existing drafts! Of course, if you want to start with a blank slate and your own reflections, you can deactivate the prompt, too.

For the first 10 days, I opened TK each morning and wrote my daily blog in that day’s note. One pattern quickly emerged: I kept thinking about inspiration, especially since the app made me want to write even more than usual.

Once you have a thread, start pulling on it! Let one idea lead to the next. Over the following days, I wrote about inspiration, motivation, some of the similarities and differences between the two, and how the app gave me more of both of them. Within a week, I had over 2,000 words of material on one subject!

By the way: Your notes on TK are private by default — but you can still share them! I added each of mine to the Public Journal library, where, usually, at least a few people read each one, and, sometimes, also comment. Share what you can, keep private what you can’t. This way, TK will allow you to write safely and casually yet still provide a tad of outside feedback.

Once you have enough notes, it’s time to make like the Avengers: assemble!

2. Use TK To Create a Structured Draft With Instructions

While writing in the app, you can type “@TK” at any point, and a small prompt bar will appear. You can ask research questions, get a take on your last paragraph, or quickly find synonyms. But the real magic of TK happens when you press the little blue icon in the bottom right corner (or Cmd/Ctrl+J on your keyboard): a note-specific chat sidebar opens.

I began with a simple ask: “Hey TK! I want to combine several notes into a draft for a longer Medium post. How do I start?” TK told me to list the relevant notes. Here, you’ll want to use quotation marks and the exact titles of your notes so TK can properly locate them in your archive. Mine were…

"Inspiration vs. Motivation"
"You Can Have Infinite Inspiration"
"You Can Have Infinite Motivation"
"The Magic of Doing It for Humans"

Another aside: If you’re not sure you have enough material, just ask TK and find out! If you put in a few thoughts every day, you’ll undoubtedly find patterns that connect within a month at most.

After recapping the core idea of each piece in a table, TK gave me a few options on how to combine them:

I picked number two, “unified essay,” and gave TK a little more context on one of the pieces. I ended on a suggestion:

We could start with the TK example, then go deeper on inspiration/motivation
each, then maybe close with the Inspiration vs. Motivation section. What do
you think? It’s okay to be critical.

TK came back with thoughts on what worked, what could become an issue, and a suggested structure:

One element TK did the heavy lifting on here is transitions. It pointed out where to cut or change endings and where to add more segues. I responded with the following prompt:

Sure, let's go with it. Pull as much as you can from the notes.
Don't tweak any of my original text. Only use those blocks to piece
the draft together. You can add notes/comments in-between on what
you think needs to happen where, but don't generate any text for me
or modify my original writing.

I highly recommend instructing TK, or any AI for that matter, to add such “do not modify” instructions when trying to arrive at a clean draft of your own work. The result was a working draft, right in that note on TK, complete with editorial notes on everything we’d discussed thus far:

In theory, I could have started editing here. In practice, I wanted to take one more step, and it’s that step where an AI writing assistant really shines:

3. Cross-Reference the Draft Against Your Existing Body of Work

It’s not like I haven’t written about inspiration and motivation before. In fact, when I started in my early 20s, it was all I could talk about.

But which pieces from my catalog had any other, relevant points that were missing from the draft? Where were the ideas contradicting what I was putting forward here?

Historically, this is a job I did manually. I would search my archives and memory, pick out the most original pieces, and scan them for any connections. Cross-referencing is one of the most time-consuming phases of creating a piece with a solid line of argumentation — and thus another perfect testing ground for TK.

This time, I only did a brief round of curation, then exported a dozen or so related posts from my Wordpress blog, and added them into a new, private library on TK, which I titled “Essay Pieces Drafts.”

For the export, I used Robert DeVore’s Markdown Exporter for Wordpress. It’s a free plugin that creates a neat ZIP file with a pre-filtered list of posts in a programming language TK can read.

For an import, all you have to do is click your profile icon in the bottom left corner, then “Import,” then select “Obsidian / Markdown” as the option and upload your file. You can even create a new library right in that window so all your posts will land in the same place.

The result looked like this:

With my research file in hand, I went back to TK:

I do have one more question/research for you to do. In my notebook
"Essay Pieces Drafts" I have added some of my older work on
inspiration and motivation. Some of the pieces are up to 10 years old,
just for context. Could you scan that notebook and tell me:
Which ideas or unique concepts might be worth including in this new,
more recent piece we're assembling?

TK came back with nine additional angles for me to consider. For each, it included a quote and an argument:

It even created a table with suggestions on what might truly be worth adding to the piece:

Now, it was my turn to give feedback. I reflected on the suggestions, told TK which references to add where, and clean up the editing notes one last time. Here’s the prompt in more detail:

Handily, TK even let me preview the edits. I confirmed they were all only insertions of notes, hit “Accept All,” and…that’s it!

Now, all that was left was the hard part: the editing.

4. Edit Your Fully Prepped Draft Into the Final Result

The famous adage “write drunk, edit sober” goes back to a character in a novel by Peter De Vries. Hemingway, who is often credited with the saying, actually wrote dry as a nun first thing in the morning. Alas, in the age of AI, both of them might say: “Prep with AI, edit without.”

Even if you let TK suggest or draft a few lines during structuring or cross-referencing your piece — which, by the way, it automatically marks in blue so they’re easy for you to spot and accredit — I highly recommend you do a proper editing pass of your piece with only your intelligence, nothing artificial.

In my case, I ported the full draft, with notes, into Medium. You can view it exactly as it came out of TK here. Then, I set to editing, using the notes as a guide. But not before I asked for one last round of advice:

Fantastic, thanks! Any other thoughts, ideas, or final pointers
you have for me as I try to edit this piece into something tight
and snappy while still keeping it interesting and original?

TK was happy to share a few pointers:

Whenever I reached one of the notes while editing, I reflected on it. Take this cross-reference, for example:

These examples were nice, but they really didn’t fit into the metaphor I was building in that section. So, I left them out. Other notes I followed exactly as instructed. This one, for example:

Once I was done, I wrapped up with the usuals: Title, subtitle, tags, and cover image. Then, I pushed the piece live:

Can You Have Infinite Inspiration and Motivation?

And that’s how you use TK to turn a couple of notes into a proper long-form article!

Some artists are born with innate genius. They can take notes or not, compose drunk or sober, apparently even lose their hearing yet still craft the most goosebump-inducing symphonies.

For most of us, however, making art means work, work, and more work. Our notes are the bedrock of said work, and the more often we can use them to construct a truly productive piece, the closer we’ll get to our dreams.

I’m happy with my experiment — just as I’m sure the process will evolve. I’m wondering what else TK might help me surface, especially among notes I didn’t already think would connect.

Try it. Gather notes for a week or two. Let TK help you come up with a structure. Treat yourself to a for-once easy cross-referencing run. And then edit a piece of coal into a diamond.

On that, I’m sure even Beethoven and I would agree: In the end, there’s nothing more satisfying than sharing a piece of art you’ve put your best effort into — and it can all start with a handful of notes.

This Friday, September 18, is Medium Day. It’s Medium’s annual, free conference with over 100 different talks from writers, editors, and experts. It’s not just about writing either. There’ll be talks about game design, talks about history, and talks about Arabic calligraphy being a spiritual art. It’s super cool and 100% free.

I’m honored to also host a session. It’s about…

Here’s my 30-second pitch for why you should attend:

Our ability to think has never been more under threat. By AI, social media, and algorithms. By endless information, distracting work environments, and failing academic institutions. Writing is the single-best way to build, perfect, and maintain this skill, because writing IS thinking. A daily blog ensures you practice thinking every day and comes with countless benefits. In this session, you’ll learn why every human, including you, should write one, and how you can maintain this most rewarding of habits — from someone who’s been doing it every day for over 1,500 days.

My talk is from 2:30–3:00 PM CEST on Friday, September 18. If you want to join, you can register here for free, then add my talk to your schedule inside the Zoom event. Hope to see you there!