Kevin Kelly Writes To Find Out What He Doesn’t Know

Steven Johnson talks with the Wired co-founder and bestselling technology theorist about writing in public and strange power of music on infinite loop.

Profession: Author, most recently The Inevitable

Favorite tools: Evernote, Scrivener, Gregorian chants

Writing time: After dark

Workspace: studio in Pacifica, California

You’ve always been a cataloguer of useful tools — from The Whole Earth Catalog to Cool Tools to Recommendo. What tools are you using now to research and write?

A lot of my reading these days is on the Web, and I use Evernote as a tool to capture that, so I can go back and it’s basically a smaller search pool to look through. For larger projects I use Scrivener to organize; I’m a very organic person — I’m not the sort of person who can outline books before they start. I’m somebody who doesn’t know what the book is about until the book is done. And so I’m constantly changing, and moving stuff around, so having that flexibility is key.

I’m finding now with some of my books — like the one I’m writing now — that there are so many parts that I’m constantly shifting around, that I just can’t keep…