The Tools Creative People Actually Use

David Lynch wrote feature films on 3-by-5 index cards ¹. Brian Eno kept a studio notebook that became a deck of cards used by David Bowie and Coldplay ². John Carmack published a daily work log for fourteen years ³. The tools creative people actually use are not exotic. They are cards, notebooks, and plain text files.

This roundup profiles five working creatives across five disciplines — film, music, code, comics, and design — and the exact tools each used to catch ideas. Every quote below is verified against a primary source: a book the person wrote, an interview they gave, an archive of their own files. Nothing comes from a quote aggregator. The disciplines could not be further apart. The pattern underneath them is nearly identical: the capture tool is small, fast, and stupid, and the discipline of using it daily is where the work happens.

David Lynch wrote scenes on 3-by-5 cards

David Lynch built feature films out of index cards. He learned the method from his teacher Frank Daniel at the American Film Institute, and reduced it to a rule: get ideas for seventy scenes, write each on a 3-by-5 card, and once you have seventy cards you have a film ¹. The card was the unit. The order came later.

Lynch described Frank Daniel's method as straightforward: get ideas for seventy scenes, put each on a 3-by-5 card, and when you have seventy cards you have a film ¹. Each card held one scene, which meant the film could be reordered on a table without rewriting a word — the same restacking logic Lynch and his editor used on Wild at Heart ⁴.

The cards depended on a prior step: catching the idea at all. In his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch wrote the metaphor that names the book: "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure" ⁵. The card is where the caught fish lands. The two halves of the method depend on each other: the fishing is useless without somewhere to put the catch, and an empty deck of cards is useless without the patience to go deep for ideas worth writing down. The index card is small precisely so that landing a fish costs almost nothing — you do not pause to evaluate it, you just write the one scene and reach for the next card ¹.

Steal this: Write one idea per card. A film, an essay, or a talk is a sortable deck, not a document that must be correct on the first pass. Reorder the cards before you write the prose.

Brian Eno turned a studio notebook into Oblique Strategies

Brian Eno kept a notebook of working principles he discovered in the studio, and in 1975 that notebook was published as a deck called Oblique Strategies ². Each card carries one terse prompt — "Use an old idea," "Honor thy error as a hidden intention" — meant to break a deadlock when studio panic narrows your thinking ².

Eno explained the origin in a 1980 interview with Charles Amirkhanian at KPFA: "The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation — particularly in studios — tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach" ². He had been writing those observations down for years before they became cards.

The deck has been reissued across six editions since 1975, ranging from roughly 100 to 128 cards per edition ⁶. The two streams were separate: Eno had been compiling his own deck since 1974, while the artist Peter Schmidt had kept a parallel set of notes about painting, "The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts," since 1970 — and the two merged their collections in late 1974, publishing the next year ⁶. Bowie used the cards while recording the Berlin trilogy; Coldplay have used them since ⁶.

Steal this: Keep a running note of the working rules you rediscover the hard way. When you are stuck, you are usually not short of effort — you have forgotten a method you already know. A written prompt returns it to you.

John Carmack kept a public .plan file for fourteen years

John Carmack, the programmer behind Doom and Quake, kept a plain-text file called a .plan and published it openly. From 1996 to 2010 it served as his daily development log — what he fixed, what broke, what he was thinking about next ³. Read over the old finger protocol, it was both a working note and a public broadcast ⁷.

The entries read like a working diary, dated and terse. One from August 1996 records a design decision in progress: "I am considering increasing the default sv_friction value for QuakeWorld from 4 to 6 or 8... If anyone wants to run some experiments with different friction levels on a current Quake server, I would be interested in hearing some feedback" ⁷. The note is the thinking, made public while still wet — a tuning question logged the same way he logged a shipped fix, with no distinction between rough idea and finished decision.

That refusal to separate scratch work from record is what makes the archive useful. The same file that asked a question in August could answer it weeks later, and both entries stayed in one chronological stream a reader could follow. Carmack did not maintain a private notebook and a public changelog as two documents; the .plan was both at once, which meant the act of thinking and the act of publishing cost him the same keystroke. The format never changed across fourteen years: a plain text file, edited daily, no app required ³. The archive of those files spans that whole span and remains one of the most-studied artifacts in game-development history, preserved in multiple public mirrors. The durability is the point — a .plan from 1996 still opens in any text editor in 2026, while the IDEs and chat clients of that decade are gone.

Steal this: Keep one running log in plain text. Date each entry, write what you did and what is still broken, and let the file grow. A flat text log outlives every app you could have stored it in.

Lynda Barry fills composition notebooks every day

Lynda Barry, the cartoonist and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, does her thinking in ordinary composition notebooks and a strict daily diary ⁸. Her method, taught in her book Syllabus, is a timed page: list seven things you did, seven things you saw, one thing you overheard, then draw one image from the "saw" column — all in a few minutes ⁹.

Barry traces the practice to her own teacher. "I began keeping a notebook in a serious way when I met my teacher Marilyn Frasca in 1975 at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington," she has written ¹⁰. The goal was never a finished drawing. It was, in Frasca's phrase that Barry repeats, "being present and seeing what's there" ¹⁰.

Barry's books built a career on the composition notebook as a tool. What It Is (2008) won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, and Syllabus reproduces her actual hand-drawn lesson plans in a book physically shaped like the cheap notebook she asks students to carry ^{8 9}. The format is the argument: the lesson is not held apart from the object that teaches it, so a reader holds the same thing her students hold in class. The MacArthur Foundation, naming her a 2019 Fellow, cited her for "inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making" ⁸.

Steal this: Run a timed daily page: what you did, what you saw, what you overheard, one quick drawing. Speed defeats the inner editor. The aim is attention, not art — the work is a side effect of showing up.

Aaron Draplin carries a pocket memo book

Aaron Draplin, the designer behind hundreds of logos, co-founded a notebook brand because he could not stop carrying one. Around 2006 he printed about 200 pocket memo books by hand on a small press; in 2007 that became Field Notes, the kraft-cover memo book now carried by designers, tradespeople, and writers ¹¹. The tool he uses is one he made.

The brand's motto, drawn from co-founder Jim Coudal's grandfather, states the whole theory of analog capture in one line: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now" ¹². The act of writing is the point — it fixes the thought in the moment, not in some future filing system.

Draplin frames the notebooks as an act of self-reliance. "I made my own stuff, and skinned it with my graphic arts skills," he has written of the Field Notes origin. "That was an epiphany for me with Field Notes. Turns out, we can make our own stuff" ¹³. The instinct ran backward as well as forward: before he made his own, Draplin spent years collecting the century of agricultural memo books that seed and tractor companies once handed to American farmers, and Field Notes descends directly from that lineage ¹¹. The pocket memo book was never a novelty object to him but a recovered American form — a cheap, durable, sized-for-the-shirt-pocket tool that working people had always carried, restored and put back into daily hands. He did not design a notebook so much as notice one that had quietly disappeared and decide to keep it alive ¹¹.

Steal this: Keep one small capture tool on your body at all times. Draplin printed his first run by hand precisely so it would ride in a shirt pocket, ready when an idea arrives. Write to remember now, not to file for later.

The pattern across all five

Across five disciplines, the capture tool is small, cheap, and dumb — a card, a notebook, a text file — and never the bottleneck. Lynch's cards, Eno's notebook, Carmack's .plan, Barry's composition books, and Draplin's memo book share three traits: a small fixed unit, a daily habit, and a format that outlives any single project ^{5 2 3 9 12}.

Three things repeat. First, the unit is small — one scene per card, one prompt per card, one dated entry, one timed page. A small unit lowers the cost of starting, and starting is the whole game. Second, capture is separated from organization — Lynch sorts cards after he has seventy, Carmack logs first and refactors later. Third, the tool is durable and plain — a 1996 .plan and a 1975 index card both still open today, while the apps of those decades are gone.

The lesson is not "use index cards." It is that creative output depends less on the tool than on a daily ritual of catching ideas in a small, durable unit before they evaporate. The tool should disappear. The habit should not.

How to start your own idea-capture system

Pick one capture tool and one unit, then use it every day for a week before judging it. The five creatives above did not optimize their tools — they committed to a practice. Carmack logged for fourteen years ³; Barry runs the timed page daily ⁹. A digital version keeps plain text's durability with fast search, useful once notes accumulate.

A starting setup, drawn from the patterns above:

1. Choose one unit. One idea per card, one entry per day, or one timed page. Keep it small.
2. Separate capture from sorting. Catch first, organize later. Lynch sorts seventy cards only once he has them.
3. Make it daily. Carmack logged for fourteen years; Barry runs the page every morning. Frequency beats volume.
4. Use a durable format. Plain text and markdown open in any editor, on any device, in any decade.
5. Keep it close. The tool that wins is the one within reach when the idea arrives.

For the writers' end of this lineage, see the companion roundup, how 12 famous writers organize their notes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about how creative people capture ideas, which tools they reach for across film, music, code, comics, and design, and how to start a capture habit of your own. Each answer is drawn from the primary-source profiles above — a book, an interview, or an archive of the person's own files ^{1 3 9}.

What tools do creative people use to take notes?

Working creatives use small, fast capture tools rather than complex apps. David Lynch uses 3-by-5 index cards ¹, Brian Eno kept a studio notebook that became Oblique Strategies cards ², John Carmack used a plain-text .plan file ³, Lynda Barry fills composition notebooks ⁸, and Aaron Draplin carries a Field Notes pocket memo book ¹¹.

Why do filmmakers use index cards?

Filmmakers use index cards because a film is a sequence of scenes that must be reordered. David Lynch learned the method from teacher Frank Daniel: write seventy scenes on 3-by-5 cards, and you have a feature ¹. One scene per card means the story can be restructured on a table without rewriting a single line of script.

What is John Carmack's .plan file?

John Carmack's .plan was a plain-text file he published openly from 1996 to 2010 as a daily development log for Doom, Quake, and other id Software games ³. Readable over the finger protocol, it recorded what he fixed, what broke, and what he was thinking — a public working diary in plain text ⁷.

How do I start an idea-capture habit?

Pick one small unit — a card, a daily entry, or a timed page — and use it every day for a week before judging it. Separate catching ideas from organizing them, as Lynch does by sorting cards only after he has seventy ¹. Use a durable format like plain text so the notes outlast any app.

What is Lynda Barry's daily diary method?

Lynda Barry's daily diary is a timed page in a composition notebook: list seven things you did, seven things you saw, and one thing you overheard in the last 24 hours, then quickly draw one image from the "saw" list ⁹. The whole exercise takes a few minutes. The speed is deliberate — it outruns the inner critic.

Do creative people use digital or paper notes?

Both. Lynda Barry and Aaron Draplin work in paper notebooks ^{8 11}; John Carmack used a plain-text computer file ³; Brian Eno's notebook became printed cards ². The shared trait is not the medium but the format — small units, captured daily, in something durable enough to outlast the project.

The tools change every decade; the habit of catching a small idea in a durable place, every day, does not.

If this resonates, mnmnote.com opens in one browser tab, no account needed, and keeps your notes on your own device.