“Don't take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me. You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to look at later then that's what your first draft was—a shorthand, cryptic, half-baked fragment. When I am working full-time on a piece (story, novel, review—whatever), I find it excruciating to be out somewhere and have some relevant-seeming idea and not be able to add it to the manuscript right away. It is very hard not to reach for the notebook, but the discipline is a great teacher, and it quickly became a kind of game. I would spin out sentences and paragraphs—entire scenes and chapters—in my head, then just let them go. I learned that the important, useful stuff came back when I could sit down for a proper work session, and that what stayed gone was the junk I would have cut anyway. Whether it re-occurred to me or not became the first test of whether the idea was worth exploring. I think I read somewhere that Marilynne Robinson does this too, which, if it's true, is about as solid an endorsement as you could ask for."
—Justin Taylor, author of The Gospel of Anarchy (HarperPerennial, 2011)