Writing in Obsidian: A Comprehensive Guide
Everything you need to know — and more.
I can’t imagine writing without Obsidian.
This tool has brought so much joy into my life that I want to share its magic with others. Specifically, writers. This is an in-depth guide on how to use Obsidian to come up with writing topics, connect ideas, synthesize research, outline, draft, edit and more.
I will share the specific approach, mindset and features that keep me a consistent writer in Obsidian and help me save time and effort.
I hope you brought your diving suit because we’re about to go deep.
Before we begin, you might wonder: why Obsidian?
Sure, there are a number of great tools out there that do their job. I’m not trying to paint Obsidian as the Holy Grail of writing apps. Each person must choose the app suitable for their needs. However, I do think it’s an incredible tool if you connect with its spirit, which is linked notes. But more on that later.
And just so we’re clear, when I say “writing,” I’m mostly talking about blog posts, essays, articles, academic papers or other types of non-fiction content. I think Obsidian can support even short fiction. I’ve heard people talk about using it for developing long form fiction (and it might work) but I’m not knowledgeable in that domain and it’s beyond the scope of this article.
But let’s get into the specific reasons why you may want to use it:
- it can act as your personal knowledge management (PKM) system: if writing is a large part of your life, you need a centralized system for it. And no, Google Docs won’t cut it.
- it encourages links between ideas: it’s hard to come up with novel concepts, so the majority of innovation happens at the intersection between old ideas, brought together in new ways. Obsidian aids this process.
- it helps you to notice themes, clusters of topics and connections in your notes
- it encourages lateral thinking (as opposed to linear), being a catalyst for creativity.
- workflow: you’ll stop relying on willpower because there will be less friction between your actions and the desired output
- flexibility: you get to personalize your experience in a way that makes sense to you
Here’s how it helped me:
- it made me stay consistent in my writing
- it promoted constant flow of ideas and I never run out of topics to explore
- it deepened my thinking
- I started writing quality articles
- I said goodbye to writer’s block.
Using Obsidian is not rocket science. That being said, to successfully navigate (and more importantly, implement) this guide, you need a few things:
- have a basic understanding of how Obsidian works: markdown notation, links, hotkeys, plugins, templates
- have a structure of folders/hierarchy of notes already established
- know your way around your notes: the ability to search and navigate your notes easily
- have a collection of notes already in your vault, or
- be willing to migrate your notes from the app you’re currently on.
And if all of the above are lacking, but you still want to explore Obsidian, all you need is the willingness to learn, curiosity and patience.
The system components
Here are the elements for a successful writing experience in Obsidian. We’ll explore each in detail below.
- A quick-capture system
- Sorting: linking, categorizing
- Templates: for articles, source material
- Content board (optional)
- Swipe file (optional but recommended)
- Core plugins: Outline, Templates, Random note, File recovery, Workspaces (optional)
- Community plugins (all optional): QuickAdd, Better Word Count, Kanban, Journey, Footnote shortcut, Outliner
How to approach this guide
This guide is not a cookie cutter approach.
My intention isn’t to get you to use the exact methods as me, but to show you the tools available so you make the best decision for you.
Ultimately, I want to instill a passion for learning, writing and thinking that will help you generate the desired output, whatever that might be. That’s why, whenever possible, I’ll share the principles and thought process behind what I’m doing.
The philosophy behind this system is to support your thinking and be a scaffolding on which to build ideas.
Let’s begin.
Quick-capture system
Whenever we sit down to write, the quality of our ideas only rises to the level of our notes.
Before we get to writing we need ideas. You can’t make a meal without the ingredients. You can’t produce a coherent article without preexisting material: such as questions, thoughts, examples, assumptions, experiences, etc.
But how do we introduce a new note to our vault? When there are only a handful of existing ones, it’s a walk in the park. We don’t need to stress too much about where it might fit in and how to connect it to others. (Although we should still do that.) But when our vault is already more mature, things aren’t as simple.
I like to think of adding a new note as an onboarding process. When you join a company, there’s an initial period of adjustment. You get to know the culture and the people. Same with our new note. It needs to get accustomed to its colleagues. Help it make new friends.
So how might we do that?
Personally, I have a note that acts as an Inbox. It’s where I store the links to all the new notes so that I don’t forget about them and I can ensure I find a suitable place for them in my vault. I don’t throw any note “into the deep end” without first anchoring it to something: another note or a hashtag.
If you don’t enjoy the idea of an Inbox, then you have the option of tagging your notes with a specific tag that lets you know they need to be processed, because they’re orphans, floating around not connected to anything.
Actionable step: Think about how your notes arrive in your system and what you do to make sure you don’t forget you added them. You don’t need to use the “Inbox” method, but there has to be a system in place for “onboarding” a new note, otherwise you’ll end up with a messy pile of uncategorized notes.
Sorting your notes
You’ve added the note to your Inbox or you tagged it accordingly. Now what?
It needs to make friends. And when I say friends I don’t only mean other notes containing similar ideas. It can be things that are related, sure, but also concepts that stand in direct opposition, thoughts that follow from or that lead to your initial idea. Think in 360 degrees.
In case you’re wondering how to choose the folder or exact place for a new idea, there’s 3 questions I ask myself to come up with the answer:
- where do I want to find this in the future?
- what is this related to?
- what will I use this for?
Don’t store it where you might expect to find it, but where you might expect to look for it, which is usually related to its purpose, or the context you will need it in.
Actionable step: Find any notes that are lost, out of place, alone and link them to your other ideas.
Generating ideas
Network of thought: Local Graph view
Obsidian lets you visualize your notes as a graph in 2 ways: Global and Local.
The Global graph view shows you all your notes, while the Local graph view displays only the connections related to the note you’re currently on.
When you have hundreds of notes in your vault, your Global graph will look a bit intimidating (albeit extremely cool). You can use filters to narrow down your search (if you know what you’re looking for) and this can help, but I prefer to work with the Local graph in most cases.
It offers customization too, so you can “choose your own adventure.” Play around with the filters and see what connections you can discover. The “Depth” slider may prove particularly useful. Depending on the value you set it on (1 to 5) it will display notes that are connected to the central note. The higher the value, the more notes, including the more distantly connected ones. I’ve found the sweet spot to be at 2.
Serendipity in one click: Random Note
Random Note is a Core plugin you can activate with a click in the Core plugins settings. As for what it does, the name is pretty self explanatory. On the left hand side of your vault, you’ll get an icon that when clicked, will, you guessed it, open a random note. This feature becomes especially exciting when you’ve already accumulated a substantial body of notes (200+).
It’s always exciting to see which note you’ll be presented with.
Take a digital stroll: Follow links
Some refer to their collection of notes as a garden. I like this comparison. I think it’s a rich metaphor for how we relate to our notes. We plant the seeds, cultivate the ideas, and then collect the fruits. And when we’re in need of inspiration, we can open a Random note (perhaps with the help of the plugin) and start following the links.
Ask: what’s connected to this note? Meaning: which links point back to this note and which links does this note point to? The outgoing links are easy to spot, they’re in your note. To see the backlinks (the ones that point at your note), simply click on the backlinks button in the lower right hand side and they’ll appear in their pane, as in the image below:
Using all these 3 strategies (provided you already have a solid collection of notes) will for sure facilitate new ideas and unexpected associations between them.
Actionable step: Choose one of these idea-generating methods and play around with it, see where it leads you.
Templates
Templates do two things: they save you time and they democratize the note-taking process. Meaning that for notes which serve the same purpose or are in the same category, you have a predefined structure which determines how you capture information. I use 3 templates related specifically to writing.
One is for articles. Each new article that I want to write starts from this template. Over time, I’ve noticed the types of information I want to capture for an article so it made sense to create a template for it. Mine is ridiculously simple. It only has 9 headers and each indicates a stage in the writing process, from the core idea, so I never lose track of what I want to convey, to the tags and headlines I may use. I won’t share exactly what it looks like because the point is to create one that supports your needs, instead of copying mine.
You can find the Templates setting under Settings -> Core plugins.
Actionable step: Create one template for a type of note you know you enter regularly.
Research: collecting supporting sources
Before we even begin this section, let me make it perfectly clear that there’s no way I’m going to cover all the ways in which you can integrate your research into Obsidian. I’ll give a broad overview of how you might want to think about your sources, or at least how I think about mine.
Now, let’s establish the kinds of sources you can have.
- the ones that you look up specifically for a certain article (they aren’t yet in your vault)
- the ones that are already in your collection of notes and can support your argument
Whenever I need a supporting reference, I’m thinking whether it comes from inside or outside my notes.
Not every article or text is going to need the same amount of sources (some may not even need any) and the process can look drastically different, depending on the nature of the text. Is it a blog post on a topic you’re extremely knowledgeable about? Is it an opinion piece exploring a subject that’s of interest to you, but which you need to investigate deeper with the help of primary and secondary sources? Is it an academic paper or a dissertation which requires you to have an extensive pool of material to reference?
If you think a supporting source can be found in your notes, all you need is to search for it and link it to your article.
But what about a new subject that you haven’t explored before which demands you do a bit of investigation? As with most things, there’s no right method or set-in-stone process. Here are a few ideas of how you might approach collecting supporting information. You could:
- create a new note for each source and link it into your article to reference it when you sit down to write
- dump all the references/supporting materials in one note and treat that note as a bibliography, linking it to the main article, of course
- save only the links in a dedicated note, for further reference, if all your sources are online.
A few things to take into consideration might be:
- will you use that data ever again?
- is it something you want/need to keep in your vault?
The answers to these questions may inform how you approach the research process.
Outline like a pro
No matter the type of writing you’re doing, you need an outline.
An outline is the backbone of your article. Depending on the topic, you may be able to have a rough outline before research, or establish the main points and sub-points of your piece after thorough documentation on the topic at hand. Regardless of when you do it, Obsidian can support your outlining needs in a few ways.
Outline plugin
The Outline Core Plugin can be turned on and a new pane (which you can drag and drop wherever you want in the app) will appear, displaying the headers of your note, helping you establish a hierarchy of your points. Not only that, but you can fold the headers that contain other items and also drag them to shuffle their order. This function is helpful because it shows you your main ideas at a glance.
There’s also the option to install the Outliner plugin developed by the community, but I’ll cover it in the Community Plugins section.
Move lines up/down
Obsidian lets you customize countless commands by adding your preferred Hotkeys. Two such helpful hotkeys to add for outlining are the Move Line Up and Move Line Down. These commands allow you to move lines (or even paragraphs, if the text is longer) up or down, without needing to copy and paste. The hotkeys I chose for these actions are: ALT + Page Up and ALT + Page Down.
To customize your hotkeys, go to Settings -> Hotkeys.
Folding headers
In the Editor settings you have the Fold Heading option. If you turn it on, you’ll see an arrow when hovering over a header, which will collapse all the text under the header, including sub headers if there are any. This allows you to hide information that would maybe distract you and focus on a different section of the text.
Actionable step: If you’re unfamiliar with these outline methods, then create a mock file and experiment with them. Set the hotkeys for Moving the lines up/down and enable the Outline core plugin.
Workspaces
You can enable Workspaces in the Core plugin settings. I personally don’t use them but I can see how they can be of value.
Workspaces, as the name suggests, allow you to save a particular setup of your notes so you can access it later in just one click. For example, let’s say you’re working on multiple academic papers and each requires you to have certain notes open (like research and supporting data) arranged in a particular fashion. It would be time consuming to have to configure your workspace every time you need to work on a certain paper, so Workspaces takes care of that. You can have multiple workspaces and switch between them at your heart’s desire.
Actionable step: Decide whether implementing Workspaces may assist you in your workflow.
Swipe File
As I’ve mentioned in another article, I have a note that acts as Swipe file, where I save the bits of content that I find interesting and that I could see myself employing in my own writing. It’s a great source of inspiration and it will enrich your writing on many dimensions.
This tool may not be for everyone, that’s why I categorized it as optional. But I think everyone stands to benefits from a collection of resources they can pull from, from the a novice to the academic writer.
Actionable step: If you don’t have a swipe file yet, create one and start adding to it: content snippets you find online from writers you love or in books you read that will inspire you in your own work. They could be headline formulas that you found interesting, great & witty sentences, or memorable metaphors.
Editing
I find this to be a deeply personal system. Each writer approaches this stage of the process in their own way and suitable to their goals.
We’re here to talk specifically about Obsidian so here’s what you need to know about editing in Obsidian. If you want actionable tips on how to edit your texts in general, check out this article.
Let’s say you have a rough text that’s ready to be polished. Now what?
There are a few routes you can take:
- edit the text in the same note, without making a duplicate. In this case, you lose your previous version(s) of the work. (Actually you don’t, more on that in a bit.)
- create a new document and open it in a new pane, then have it side by side with the original text. This way, you can write a new piece by copying the parts of the initial text that you find valuable and modifying the rest, by changing the language, adding examples, expanding on points, etc.
If you started to edit a note but soon realized you made a mistake or want to go back to a previous version, you can create a safety net by accessing the File Recovery Core plugin. Insert the amount of time between snapshots (a snapshot is like a version frozen in time of a note) and the amount of time to keep them. I set mine to 10 minutes and 14 days, respectively.
That being said, I think the best course of action is to save your work if you know you want to reference it later. That means you’ll have to create a different note for every significant change you make to a text.
I personally don’t keep drafts of initial versions of my articles, but that’s a choice you’ll have to make for yourself.
If you don’t want to use a spellchecker like Grammarly, you can activate the Spellchecker function in Obsidian under the Editor -> Behavior settings. I always have this off and only turn it on at the end of the editing process to see if I’ve missed any spelling error. Otherwise, I’ll use an app like the Hemingway Editor.
Actionable step: Think about how you usually approach editing, and why. Determine what works and what doesn’t.
Community plugins
I wanted to dedicate a separate section to the Community plugins. I don’t think any of these are mandatory, but they’re definitely nice-to-have. I use them all, the Outliner and Footnote Shortcut.
QuickAdd
I’ve debated whether to include this one, because it’s a bit more advanced.
It’s a powerful and versatile tool, and if you’re an automation junkie, you’ll love this plugin. It’s beyond the scope of this article to expand on the things you can do with QuickAdd, but here are a few writing-related tasks it helps me with:
- add a new note containing the “Article” template in the “Articles” folder with the press of a Hotkey. (It asks me for the title and that’s it — the note is created.)
- add a new note populated with the “Idea” template and store it in my general ideas/concepts folder, with the press of a Hotkey
- capture a task to my Inbox, without needing to open the Inbox note (picture below)
All of these simply save me a few steps and extra clicks and I find them to be super convenient, because I’ve only created commands for actions I do regularly.
Better Word Count
This plugin allows you to see the number of words and characters in the text you select (as opposed to the entire text). Simple but incredibly useful.
Kanban
For a writer, a Kanban board can come in handy as a content organizer. If you’re a writer/content creator working on multiple articles at the same time, you may lose track of which piece of content is in which stage of writing, or what you need to process next.
With a Kanban board, you will never feel overwhelmed again. Each article can be assigned under a specific list and moved around depending on your priorities and workflow. A Kanban board is perfect to help me visualize all my articles and the stages they’re in.
As an alternative, if you still want this kind of organization but don’t want to use a Kanban board, you could either use tags to sort articles, for example #article/research, for all the articles you’re researching. Or, you could put the articles in different folders, to keep them separate.
Journey
This plugin helps you trace the steps from one note to another, allowing you to see the journey between two notes and how they’re connected. If the local graph didn’t offer any clear picture on how your notes are related, the Journey plugin won’t let you down. You can also customize its settings, allowing only backlinks or excluding tags. The possibilities are endless.
Here’s an example of a path between two notes Journey revealed for me.
Footnote Shortcut
If you rely heavily on footnotes, then this plugin is for you. It’s designed to save you time by offering the possibility to quickly jump from the footnote in your text to the footnote detail at the end of the document by pressing a hotkey set by you. Now that’s clever!
Outliner
Compared to the Core plugins version, this one is on steroids.
If you’re familiar with RoamResearch, then you may know you can treat each item in a list as its own point, and “focus” on it. Outliner lets you do that too. You can “zoom in” at any level in your list and not be distracted by the larger hierarchy.
If you write lists with 3, 4 or maybe more level of nested items inside them, then you’ll appreciate this plugin.
Actionable step: Determine which, if any, of these plugins may be beneficial for your writing purposes and being experimenting with them.
Conclusion
I hope you could learn something from this guide that will provide value for your writing. No part of this process should feel cumbersome or distract you in any way from the main activity, which is writing.
If any of these plugins and methods seem new and overwhelming now, don’t jump into all of them at once. It took me over a year to learn how I can work best with Obsidian. Give it time and the results will follow.
Remember:
To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you! I’d love to know how you use Obsidian for writing or what you’re going to take away from this guide. Or if you have any questions/suggestions, lemme know.
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