How I Write My Books with Jorge Arango - Sketch Your Mind Conference, 2025

Jorge Arango’s writing method for non-fiction rests on a single, practical claim: people don’t write by “going from research to a blinking cursor.” They write by thinking with tools—shifting environments on purpose—so each stage of the work gets its own workflow. The payoff is less overwhelm, clearer structure, and fewer dead ends when drafting.

Arango frames writing as three distinct stages: research/incubation, structuring, and the actual writing. Treating these as one continuous process—especially by jumping straight into a word processor—creates a familiar jigsaw-puzzle problem: ideas pile up, but the picture of the book stays out of reach. His alternative starts with the idea that thinking extends beyond the brain. Notes, diagrams, and external artifacts act like “prosthetic memory,” and mind maps or drawings create feedback loops that help ideas gel. That broader philosophy becomes a workflow principle: configure the environment so it supports the kind of thinking required at each step.

In the research/incubation phase, Arango emphasizes fast capture and easy recall. Paper notebooks work well for jotting down learning with no friction, but bound notebooks make random access difficult, forcing an index or other workaround. Digital note systems solve that access problem when paired with deliberate organization such as bottom-up tagging and linking. He points to tools like Obsidian (his primary system) and other PKM platforms as ways to retrieve scattered insights quickly when it’s time to build the book.

The structuring phase is where most writers get stuck, and where Arango’s approach is most distinctive. Instead of drafting prose, he uses an “infinite canvas” to cluster ideas visually—like sticky notes on a wall—so the book’s shape becomes legible. He describes using Tinderbox for this stage: each note can carry metadata, tags, and links, letting him group individual ideas into clusters and map them to emerging chapter groupings. The result is a bird’s-eye view that supports two critical tasks: (1) locating where specific anecdotes belong (for example, assigning material to a particular chapter), and (2) spotting gaps—such as chapters with fewer notes that signal missing research or unresolved positioning.

After that, he still doesn’t move directly into prose. He iterates the layout again using a more accessible infinite-canvas tool (Freeform on Apple devices), especially once a first draft exists and a second draft needs refinement. This board organizes chapters into “beats” with different note colors: framing questions to set reader expectations, story openings to make each chapter engaging, key ideas to elaborate, and exercises aligned with the book’s practical focus on using Obsidian. Empty sticky notes act as placeholders, preventing the “blank screen” paralysis by ensuring there is always something to write next.

Only then does Arango draft in a writing tool designed for authoring at section granularity. He names Scrivener and Ulyses, with Ulyses standing out for native Markdown support and for making word-count targets visible per section—circles that show whether each chapter is on track. He also argues that switching modalities can unlock new thinking even late in the process.

In Q&A, Arango adds that AI can help with tasks like identifying missing elements or generating candidate focusing questions, but he doesn’t recommend letting AI write the book for you; writing is thinking, and dry summarization can undermine voice. He also warns that tool exploration can become “meta work” that steals time from actual drafting. The core message remains: design the structure first, keep the stages separate, and let the right external tools do the heavy lifting so the writing phase becomes a continuation—not a rescue mission.