megan-zk

faq

Q1. What is the difference between megan zk and your blog, Meg in Progress↗?

megan-zk is a thinking space, while Meg in Progress is a writing space. Not good enough? Fine.

This is a space for me to process whatever is on my mind at the moment, without the need to perfect or polish right away. This space builds upon previous notes to expand my repertoire of knowledge. It allows me to make connections between different thoughts, and process them organically. There’s no “final draft” but everything is constantly in revision mode.

Meg in Progress, on the other hand, is where everything is a final draft. The writings there are planned, outlined, polished, and presented carefully. It’s like the speech you prepare for and give at a high-class event, while mzk is just a low-key informal conversation among friends about whatever comes to mind.

Q2. Seems like megan zk builds off of the work and ideas of others. Do you have original thoughts, even?

Do original thoughts even exist?

Ideas are really just collections of thoughts strewn together in a particular fashion. If you were to break down each and every idea you have had into its most basic, indivisible elements, would we not find that there are only a few basic sparks responsible for every single idea that everyone who has ever lived has ever had? Say you wanted to paint a mural on a wall…surely, you didn’t come up with the concept of a wall, of color and shapes. You didn’t just wake up one day and know what paint was. You didn’t become a master overnight, right?

No, before we can create, we must learn. And learning is just the process of absorbing information that others discovered. And they would never have been able to discover what they did if they hadn’t first learned what others before them discovered. Learning is intake, creation is output. We cannot make anything without first gathering the materials we need.

Above, I called megan zk a thinking space, which it is. But it’s also a gathering space, where I organize the material I’ve scavenged to attempt to make new connections between them. The majority of the notes I house here are not mine. There’s a reason I have more reference notes here than any others. All notes have references. While I may make some stray independent connections in my margin and analysis, the information is still mostly courtesy of the references listed. It is only the concept notes that I can truly call my own, but they would not exist without a solid foundation.

To be clear, I don’t hide my sources. They are listed at the end of every note. I am not trying to pretend to take credit for the knowledge set forth here. It all came from somewhere, and I’ve done my utmost to make sure somewhere is very clear.

Q3. What are notebooks?

Sometimes, when learning on a particular subject, I’ll read through “textbooks” about the topic and take notes as I go. Notebooks compile these notes as I go. It’s kind of like the lecture notes you’d take in school. They compile all of the knowledge I’m gaining about a subject in one place.

Think of a notebook like a binder with tabs. The binder itself is just for one subject. Every tab is for a single source. Within each tabbed section are all my notes from that particularly source.

For example, say I have a notebook called “Shakespeare” in which I’m taking notes over each of Shakespeare’s plays. The notebook itself would be titled “Shakespeare”, while the tabs would be “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” etc…