How I Write with Obsidian

I’ve now started writing the first words of my fantasy novel, and I’d like to share how I’ve been using Obsidian so far to build my world and organize my thoughts about the plot.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is a program for collecting notes and managing knowledge. The notes are formatted using Markdown. This is a language for formatting text with simple abbreviations or symbols, with the focus on keeping the text readable even in its source code that is, including those symbols.

I only knew Markdown sporadically from my studies, so I read the “Editing and Formatting” section of the help page. These pages also provide very clear guidance through installation, usage and the first plugins.

Obsidian has several general advantages: for example, notes are stored locally and can be read not only by Obsidian itself but also by other programs. It’s also highly extensible and allows you to link notes to each other. Another argument that’s personally very important to me is cross-platform usability. I mainly use Obsidian on Linux, but also on my smartphone for private notes.

You can handle note synchronization yourself, delegate it to a third-party provider, such as Dropbox, or OneDrive, or pay Obsidian to do it.

How Can It Help My Writing Process?

Despite its steep learning curve (I first had to learn Markdown, after all), Obsidian was an option for my writing, even though there are well-known programs specifically designed for this purpose, such as the paid software Scrivener.

When writing and especially during worldbuilding Obsidian is very helpful, as I can link notes together, embed images and graphics meaningfully, and create and view different overviews of my notes.

Another thing I appreciate about Obsidian is the ability to write in a focused environment. I have all my information in one place and don’t need to switch between programs or give in to other digital distractions.

My Setup – A Small Guide

First of all, I created a so-called vault for my writing project. I wanted to separate private journaling from my writing work, so, in simple terms, I created a dedicated Obsidian folder.

Within this empty vault, I first created folders where I would later sort my notes to keep everything organized:

• 01 Plot
• 02 Worldbuilding
• 03 Characters
• 04 Research
• 05 Resources
• 06 Templates

Outside of these folders, there are only two notes: “Collection of Brain Pop-Ups,” where I quickly jot down all new ideas without much structure, and the note “Story Hub,” which serves as my homepage when opening this vault.

The Hub

My Story Hub is a slightly more elaborate note where I collect everything I need for writing. In my case, this includes a reminder that I’m allowed to write badly just to get started (perfection can really slow you down) as well as a link to a YouTube video that plays typewriter sounds and music from the Wednesday series for an hour.

In my Story Hub, I also have a section that links my most important overview notes, as well as a list of my to-dos. This is done using Dataview, a small database-like query language available in Obsidian. In short, this script scans all pages and checks how they’ve been tagged. More on that in the section My Routine.

```dataview
TABLE file.link, file.tags AS "Tags"
FROM #status
WHERE !contains(file.tags, "#status/done")
SORT status ASC
```

This small snippet produces the following result: all notes are clickable and easily accessible in this overview.

Plugins

The section above already requires several plugins to work and look the way it does in the screenshots. I try to keep things simple and only installed what I really need. In the bottom-left corner next to the vault name, there’s a small gear icon that opens the settings. Under “Community Plugins,” you can search for, add, and activate plugins.

In my case, these are:

• Advanced Tables – to generate clean tables and navigate them intuitively
• Colored Tags – to highlight my tags with colors
• Dataview – to generate the to-do overview mentioned above
• Excalidraw – to create drawings (with pen input)
• Multi-Column Markdown – to create multi-column notes, since Markdown doesn’t support this natively
• Tag Wrangler – to enable tag hierarchies and better filtering

My Routine

The most important thing when creating notes for my book project is consistency. As mentioned earlier, I use the Tag Wrangler and Colored Tags plugins. At the beginning of each note, you can add properties, either manually or via a shortcut. You can view this by pressing Ctrl + P and searching for “Add file property.” Alternatively, you can find and modify it in the settings under “Hotkeys.”

Each of my notes receives tags that represent specific file properties. On the one hand, there are status tags, which are divided into “done,” “doing,” “todo,” and “revise.” On the other hand, there are tags that relate to the content itself, such as world/society, plot, pov/remenike, or type/god.

Using tags makes working much easier when searching or filtering for specific topics. They also help identify to-dos and display them on my Story Hub page, as described above.

Worldbuilding

Before you can really get started, you need to research or look up certain topics. I collected my research results in a separate folder, but also incorporated a lot directly into my worldbuilding folder, for example, information about boats (as someone from southern Germany, I’m a real landlubber).

My fictional world differs from the real world in many ways, so I had to document both the differences and similarities. It’s important to create a separate note for each idea and link them diligently. An example can be seen below. Links can easily be created by placing double square brackets around a word or phrase, e.g., [[Bücher]].

Creating Characters – Templates

The next major topic is the characters that appear in the book. Since many questions repeat for characters such as appearance, inner conflicts, and motivations I created a template for this.

A template is a structure you can insert repeatedly. Before creating my characters, I thought about what information I wanted to record for each one. That’s how my template came about.

The only thing that might seem unusual to Obsidian beginners is the first line after the file properties: {{title}}. This command ensures that the document’s heading is automatically taken from the file name. So if I name my note “Alex” and then insert the template, “Alex” will automatically appear as the heading. The following lines have no special function, they are simply copied into the note.

---
tags:
  - type/char
  - status/todo
---

# {{title}}

## Grundlegende Informationen

Name:
Pronomen:
Geschlecht:
Alter:
Beruf:
Familie:

## Äußerlichkeiten
...

## Portrait
...

## Persönlichkeit und Inneres
...

## Beziehungen
...

To insert this template without using copy and paste, press Ctrl + P and search for “Insert Template.” Then select the desired template. Obsidian will automatically replace placeholders using the template plugin and insert the formatted text.

I’d be curious to know: what do readers of my blog consider important when it comes to characters in books? What makes them interesting, and which details are essential?

Writing

The hardest part about writing is getting started.

And finding the right moment to temporarily wrap up worldbuilding. Details can always change later, and characters tend to remain a work in progress anyway or at least that’s been my experience so far. My main characters are largely defined, but many details only emerge during the writing process.

What helped me was setting my own deadlines and actually starting. It’s easy to get lost in plotting otherwise. My actual writing process in Obsidian works like this: I create one note per scene, assign file properties to track status, and then just start writing.

I’ve read two books on writing, and both emphasized how important revision is and that you shouldn’t let perfectionism block you. The first draft is rarely good, but it often contains the potential for a great text.

My routine now consists of setting aside one hour each day to write. I’ve already completed the overall plot, but I’m curious to see what subplots will develop.

The Feature – Graph View

Finally, I’d like to show a very cool feature of Obsidian: the Graph View. It provides an overview of all notes and how they are interconnected. This is especially helpful for identifying isolated topics or discovering new connections.

Below you can see what this currently looks like for my novel.