Notes That Don’t Break Flow
When I’m drafting, I don’t go back.
If I realise I messed something up a paragraph ago, I might fix it. But if it’s more than a page back? I leave it.
Scrolling backward mid-drafting-session is a trap. You go looking for one thing and end up tweaking five others, questioning decisions, deleting good lines. Before you know it, you’ve lost your momentum—and the spark that had you writing in the first place.
I don’t do that anymore. Lessons have been hard-learned.
Instead, I leave markers. Small flags for future-me to find and fix once the draft is done. It keeps me in the moment, keeps me moving forward, and lets me capture those important reminders without sacrificing flow.
Here’s the system I use:
- [*] means “come back and review this”
- [^] means “fix (or review) something earlier in the manuscript” that is contextually linked to something just before this marker.
- [add more detail here] or [rename this character], or whatever more specific note I need to remind of anything that isn’t one of the previous two
I chose square brackets because I never use them for anything else. When it’s time to revise, I just search for [ and walk through every note, one by one.
Is it elegant? Not really.
But it works. And it’s fast.
Doubly fast because I’m enough of a nerd that I have a fancy keyboard that means I can insert these little reminders with a single key-press-and-hold. Long hold (over half a second) on R (for review) gives me a [*], while [^] is under a press-and-hold of S (for Scrollback Prevention).
Most importantly, it keeps me drafting instead of spiralling.
This is my system. You’re welcome to use it exactly as is if you like, or of course, you invent your own. Something that works for your brain—this works for mine.
The goal isn’t to be clever. It’s to protect the state of flow you’re in that lets you tell story. To give yourself enough room to keep going without losing track of what matters.
Leave yourself a trail, but be systematic about it. Be consistent in its use. Build a system that you can trust.
Then, trust that you’ll come back when it’s time.
Until then: keep writing.