E.M. Forster's advice has been repeated and reflected upon endlessly, but it came to me when I was thinking of the similarities between what I'm trying to do with my course content, my own reading and research, and my Substack. I personally don't love reading excessively-long Substack posts because I typically feel the authors could have made their point in a fraction of the words if they had tried; and I rarely read Medium for the same tl;dr reason. This not to say there aren't some complex issues that don't deserve more — after all, that's what books are for! But I sense there's a bit too much effort to get to 5,000 words where a thousand would have done the job.
This preference of mine could also be a function of having a different goal. I tend to see blog posts (and I suppose I still think of Substack mostly as a blog venue) as being best when they're brief and focus on a single point, rather than being rambling streams of consciousness like some of my Daily Notes in Obsidian. My preference is to ramble in the journal and then excerpt bits of my ramblings into more focused posts. What I actually do is to write in a Daily Note until I’ve uncovered an idea I’m pursuing, and then give it a title and cut/paste it into a note of its own, leaving a link in the Daily Note to that new node. There's some similarity, I think, to the idea I'm trying to implement in my note-making, that a note ought to address a single idea in a somewhat "atomic" way.
In storytelling, I imagine the analogy would be to differentiating between "beats" and the narrative arc. In my course content, the division seems to be between data points (events, facts, people) and the themes I want to explore. As I've been writing my new draft of my US History II text/course, I have been organizing based on the series of things I want to talk about in each decade. For example, in the 1870s, I want to make sure I mention the Failure of Reconstruction, the 15th Amendment, the incorporation of Standard Oil, the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the Panic of 1873, Twain and Warner's book The Gilded Age, Hayes v. Tilden and the “corrupt bargain”, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the beginnings of Farm Movements, Edison's invention of the light bulb and Bell's telephone, Progress and Poverty, and the Battle of Little Big Horn. So I'm writing descriptions of each of these and I'll be adding images and primary sources to flesh out my synopses.
My idea is that I'll be creating a unit of the course for each decade, rather than organizing units around themes like "Labor and Capital" in one chapter covering several decades and then "Rural Life and Populism" in another that covers the same three decades. I think that sort-of contributes to the "siloed" way we typically think of history, where we fail to ask questions like, why weren't industrial workers and unions better able to find common ground with farmers? So I'll be trying to cover the things that happened in the 1870s all together, which will hopefully enable me to suggest there might be some connections we typically don't notice. Or to ask, if there were not, why not?
So I'm imagining this as a kind of constellation of events and data points, which I'll describe on their own and then try to draw into a web of connection. Themes that extend beyond the decade (like the labor and capital issue or rural unrest) will still be important, but they will continue from one unit to the next, which I think approximates the way they operated in actual time. An idea such as Progressivism has some continuity over time. We've been using the word for at least a century now. But it doesn't necessarily mean to us today what it meant to Theodore Roosevelt or Horace Plunkett. And I'm not even sure if, looking back from today, we can really completely understand what they meant by the term, without a fairly significant effort.
But back to the organizational idea. I tend to think of History as an interpretive narrative of the past that connects carefully-curated data-points (people, events, etc.) into a story and analysis that conveys a theme. But I want to be able (and allow my readers or students) to distinguish between the data and the interpretation. Or maybe even suggest that the data, if viewed from a different perspective, could lead to other interpretations. I'm hoping to make this visible in the structure of the content, with more-or-less atomic data-points being connected in ways that allow these themes to emerge. So, the key seems to be designing a way of presenting the information but also implying the narrative and themes via linking.
I'm going to be trying to do this in both my history content and in my Substack itself. Focusing on one thing at a time and then linking to other thoughts that are adjacent. Or previous or next in an argument or interpretation. Or elaborations. This reminds me a lot of zettelkasten and also of the Great Conversation; so I think I'm onto something.