When I write for myself, it's all over the place. Mostly it's short phrases, unordered lists and the odd diagram, followed by lines of --- to separate thought arenas. All of these are fragments of ideas that I feel will probably be important to the finished piece. Usually about half of them actually are.
I just continue writing down thoughts as they occur, any time they happen during the day or during periods of concentration on the piece itself. If the current thought is not an extension of the last thing I wrote, I make a new line and start the new thought.
Here's a small section of draft notes for a technical article that I never published:
Streaming only for top level args, not deeply nested.... ?
- With set of files, need lots of streams of data.
-- How to get metadata when ordering not guaranteed?
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Is there a way to evaluate, send data from smallest piece to biggest piece?
- Walk the tree, assign weights to branches?
If a hierarchy contains multiple big data pieces, how to tell the receiving function?
Some method to pump in top level args X items at a time?
- 1 item at a time for non-array, x bytes at a time for array
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Eventually, the summary notes start to feel solid in my mind, at which point I turn them into prose and then start embedding my notes between the paragraphs, turning them into sentences only once I feel I know where they should go in the overall piece. Once the notes finally disappear from the prose, I have my first draft.