How I used Obsidian to custom roll my own writing environment/app

Several years ago I became entranced by the idea of a Zetelkasten, a method for linking notes together to create a sort of second brain. I’ve given presentations on how I used an app called Obsidian to create a group of ideas, research, and snippets that allowed me to continue writing stories in the middle of the worst of Long Covid’s brain fog.

But all that time, I was still using an app called Ulysses to write fiction in.

Until the CEO of the app wrote a long blog post admiring Trump and stanning hard for him as a ‘business man’ and I was so disgusted I quit the app and cut the monthly fee.

Which got me thinking, why was I renting my software? Somewhere along the line I just kept going for convenience, and wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. And then a writer I follow on BlueSky mentioned using Obsidian to write fiction…

…and it was like a ‘no duh’ moment.

Obsidian keeps notes in Markdown format, so they’re accessible by *any* text reader, and when I switched to Ulysses I got used to Markdown. I was halfway there. And when I showed people Obsidian, I would say “if there’s something you want in the app, there’s probably a community plugin that does it.” So what did I need for a writing app?

This is Obsidian out of the box, and you can see, like Scrivener or Ulysses, it has a left pane with files, and a right hand area you write in. So it could work…

I wanted the source documents to be kept in Markdown. Scivener kept files in a custom format, and even Ulysses had its own modified Markdown, but I wanted my files to be future proofed if a better Markdown program appeared.

I wanted a word counter.

I wanted full screen writing with no distraction via a key combo.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could use some of Obsidian’s features to create things for my novel that I usually put in a spreadsheet.

Many, many years ago, Scott Westerfeld posted how he used Scivener to create ‘pace charts’ for his book, something that really resonated with me and that I did then on paper, and then Excel, but moved to imitating using Scrivener the same way Scott did. Here is the picture Scott has on his blog post about this:

In addition to these items, I also generally keep a half sentence of info about how the chapter starts, and how it ends, as that is information I think important to the structure.

Each chapter gets information, which is technically what comp/sci folk call ‘metadata’ (data about data). Each chapter has data associated with it, whether notes on paper, in one’s head, that I keep somewhere, what if I could keep it in Obsidian?

Obsidian notes can have “YAML” code hidden on the page, anything before – – – in Obsidian can be hidden at the top of the page, so at the top of each chapter, it looks like this as I write:

Invisible unless I click (or type a command quick, which is something else cool I’ll get to) is the data about each chapter hidden away for me:

So expanding on Westerfeld’s pace chart idea, I keep track of some things that I like having notes on. Who is the PoV character? Where is this chapter mainly taking place? Who all is in this scene? What timeline? A summary. How the chapter opens. How it closes. Any stakes? And, because this is a complicated, huge rewrite, is the chapter done, partially has pieces from the earlier draft of some years ago, or do I need to write one from scratch?

I tend to keep the info visible in a small pane open that shows me the hidden metadata in a corner of the program:

So the day to day, it looks like this:

That data allows me to quickly write a small piece of code that generates a really neat outline view that is totally within my control (what shows, what I want out of it). Here’s an overview of another pane I often have open when looking at structural issues in the book. I have here links to each chapter, the PoV is color coded to help me spot clumping and patterns of PoV shifts, locations are tagged, progress ont he chapter is also visible, a quick summary, and timeline and other characters involved are all visible at a quick glance.

This has helped me as I created the structure for the new draft, as I totally rearranged everything in the book to be told chronologically from the set of flashbacks the first draft favored (and sadly didn’t work, creating an immense project in the process. I should drop this book as it’s a monster of a project, but, I can’t get the world and these characters to leave me alone):

So pulling it all together, here is my working environment for the novel In Empire’s Shadow:

The glossary is like a wiki, every new fact I add to the book gets put in the glossary. There’s a map in the lower left, I click on the image and a larger map jumps out to look up stuff.

The chapters I’m working on are in the top middle area, I keep 3-4 chapters open in the left, and the current chapter in the right. The panel in the upper right is a word count plugin for Obsidian. The outline is at the bottom, but often I will open another chapter or scratch pad down there while writing.

To the lower right, a chapter word count log that monitors the words per finished chapter and provides an estimate of the book’s final count (I said it was a big book).

I can trigger a plugin called “Zen Mode” that does this:

Most of Obsidian can be navigated by key commands, so I don’t have to use the mouse much when in it. And it also has plugins to emulate VI or eMacs, which allow for mouseless text editing; I can ‘grab’ whole lines and delete, copy, move them around, I can move the cursor without a mouse and select text without a mouse.

All of that makes it a Swiss Army knife for writers, I think.

I’ve also moved a lot of my writing administration out of Excel and into a Writing Admin dashboard. It’s still in progress, but I am keeping track of submissions, tasks, and projects for my career in there. The complexity of tracking 150+ stories, over a dozen novels, and six collections, means I needed something to help me out. Obsidian has been my second brain.

I’ve been showing people this on my laptop for a year now, and they’ve begged me to write about it. So I’ve finally sat down to screenshot the process and write it up.

You can find Obsidian here. It’s not open source, but shares a lot of the values. And the files are kept as text, so you control them. Download it and play around. Play with some pretty themes, check out some plugins. It costs nothing to tinker with.

Out of the box, the themes show Markdown, I use a theme to hide the Markdown as I write and display the text like a printed book. It’s very customizable!

Update:

I updated the word count feature and the theme of my Obsidian lately to better match my needs. Here’s what it looks like:

I created a word count feature that is a small python script that monitors a folder for any changes to my fiction folder, and logs them in the backround to a CSV file. I then use Obsidian plugin ‘Dataview’ to create charts of the data. Above, I have Obsidian set up with 8 open tabs arranged to show me:

upper left: a wiki like index to all my notes about the book

lower left: a clickable minimap of the world that leads to a larger map

middle upper left: the latest 4-5 chapters prior to the latest I’m working on

middle upper right: Chapter 11, my latest

lower middle: a dataview that scrapes the metadata to show me the outline so I can quickly scan ahead for content info

upper right side: properties of the file I am currently in (shows me things like what PoV, who’s in the scene, what day it takes place, where it takes place)

middle right: chart of the progress of the book, how many words are in each chapter, final edit chapters in green

lower right: the new daily words on the project chart, just started last night, so only two days info

That’s my dashboard for the current novel.

I’m using Primary as my theme, as I fould that AnuPuccin was glitching with Kanban 2.0, a plugin I use for to-do management in other areas. It slowed my Obsidian down a lot, and when I changed themes, it was back to snappy with Primary and I could use many of the same light mocha color schemes as I had on AnaPuccin.