How I use Obsidian for my Creative Writing Process - The Basics
As a writer, I am always searching for new resources that might help me in my writing process. Lately, Obsidian has been my absolute favorite tool to use when planning and writing my stories. This blog post shows you how I use Obsidian to make my writing process a little easier! Let's get into it:
1. What is Obsidian?
Obsidian is a note-taking app that allows you to link your notes to each other and keep them organized—exactly what a writer needs.
2. How to use Obsidian for the Planning Process:
The planning process for my stories is always extremely chaotic. Normally, I write down hundreds of notes, which I then forget about or can’t find anymore (Oops!). Or I do not like how other apps visualize my notes (I need visually pleasing notes, or else I won’t feel motivated to work on them anymore). I needed an app that allowed me to be chaotic without my notes becoming too confusing to make any sense out of them. That's where Obsidian comes into play. If you recognize yourself in what I have just said, you will definitely like it as much as I do!
So let’s see how you can use it:
Creating a New Vault
I start off by creating a new vault. You can decide where you want to save it.
Click on “create“ and decide on a name for your new vault. Your new vault will look something like this:
2. Creating New Notes
After this you can start creating notes. Just click on the icon on the left corner of the page:
I also like to add a homepage to my vault—this is the page that will always be opened first when you open your vault—in which I write down all the basic information about my project.
3. Creating Folders
Next, I like to create folders for all the topics I know I will work on. Here is an example of the folders I use for the story I am currently working on:
You can include everything you want here. Add as many folders as you need, and add notes to them.
4.Taking Notes and Connecting them
The cool thing in Obsidian is that you can easily connect notes with each other. If you have a note about your main character A, for example, and you’re talking about how they will meet side character B, you can simply write two square brackets [[ ]] and then add the content in between. So you’d write: [[side character B]] and it would turn into a link to a new note.
And once you’ve added a few notes, you can take a look at the graph view that Obsidian provides for your notes. This can look something like this:
This is the graph view of my current creative writing project.
Really cool, isn’t it? Like this, you can easily see what notes are connected to each other by simply putting your cursor on one node. Also, if more notes are connected to one specific note, the size of said note grows. So you can easily see which notes have the most connections. In my case, these are the notes about my main characters.
5. Canvas in Obsidian
This is another feature that I enjoy a lot in Obsidian. You can create different canvases to work on. I have one for my plotline, for my locations and for the relationship between characters, because I think with a canvas you can make your notes visually pleasing, and I like that a lot. Here is what your canvas could look like:
This example is part of the plotline for my new story. As you can see, I added inspiration pictures from Pinterest to the scenes I am planning to write, and the squares, which show three lines inside, are a card that I can create. Here I use it to write down what I want to happen, which characters have to be present in the scene, as well as in what location the scene happens (I had to zoom out too far, so you can’t see the text right now, but if you zoom in a little, you could see it). I can then connect the scene with arrows. I could also add notes that I have created before.
The icon on the far left is to add a card, the one in the middle to add an existing note, and the one on the right to add an image.
If you click on a card you can also decide if you want to want to have another color for it. I, for example, always use red for the cards if I still have to go back to work further on.
This feature is something I greatly enjoy while planning out my story, but I have to confess that I sometimes spend more time on making these notes pretty than I spend on actually writing on them (oops haha).
6. Turning Your Vault into Your Own Work Space
This is another thing I like a lot about Obsidian: you have so many options to turn this vault into your very own work space. You can add many plug-ins that are perfect for your personal needs, you can change the design of your vault through different themes and accent colors and you can change the font.
When you click on “settings“ and then “appearance“ you can chose from many different themes that completely change the look of your vault. Most of these themes can also be used in dark and light mode.
Ah, and the best thing about Obsidian which I haven’t told you, yet: it is free! You can pay for certain features, but I honestly didn’t have to, yet. So if you’re interested in using Obsidian as your new note taking tool, it’s definitely worth checking out!
There is a lot to discover in Obsidian, so I will write another post about more features you can use on this great app! Follow me on Pinterest for more writing advice and check out my Patreon for even more content! If you want to check out other recommendations I have for the writing process, go to my Benable profile and browse through the lists. Maybe you’ll find something!
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