https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ease-into-writing/
This is the process which will help you write a complete first draft in no time:
- Get an overview of your knowledge.
- Create a first outline to plan the writing project.
- Attach notes from your archive to the outline’s items.
- Fill in the gaps with more research. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you’re satisfied.
- Copy and paste note contents into a document according to the outline.
- Re-write the manuscript.
The majority of the writing is done in advance and it’s done in manageable parts. You won’t get stuck second-guessing your writing progress since you don’t actually write a lot. Your task is to plan the text as an outline instead.
To see with clarity if your research backs up your text’s structure sufficiently, the next step is to assign notes from your Zettelkasten to the items of your outline. When an item of your outline seems to be neglected because you don’t have enough notes that fit, you can continue your research, focusing on the missing pieces. As soon as you’re confident you got enough coverage for a start, you string the notes’s contents together according to the outline. Thus you create the very first draft.
Get the first draft finished as quickly as possible. For the sake of your sanity, you should defer editing to the point when you completed a full draft: switching between the modes of writing creatively and editing sentences will exhaust you quickly and get in your way.
You can focus on research since you know there’s a trustworthy archive which will store your knowledge in the shape of notes.
Remember that processing your reading notes implies you create connections between them and older notes in your archive. You need links between notes to create an extension to your mind.