Multiple Vaults: Separate PKM from Creative Writing?

Knowledge management
1

I am a long-time Scrivener user but have been looking at using Obsidian to help me develop my creative writing projects (mostly novel writing).

I have a large vault for my personal knowledge management practice. My workflow usually involves highlighting on my Kindle or in an app like Pocket and uses Readwise to bring those notes into an Inbox. From there I process things into atomic notes and add them to my zettelkasten.

I have been playing with a second vault for my fiction. I see a lot of folks advocating “one vault to rule them all,” but I find it mentally useful to “clear the desk,” so to speak, when working on fiction, and having it separate helps me avoid some distractions that comes with seeing my entire vault right in front of me. I also have created a number of templates like beat sheets and character profiles that are specific to my creative writing and it’s nice to have those a bit separate from the templates I use when engaging in other kinds of thinking and writing.

But there are also some drawbacks. I take a lot of inspiration on things I read and notes that are in my main vault. And, further research I might have to do for my novel writing will probably come through my main workflow, as well—I’ll still highlight and process those notes. Sometimes I end up manually copying files from one Vault to the other, which doesn’t seem ideal.

Any suggestions or advice on how other folks have handled this? Should I just re-combine the vaults, or are there better workflows for managing multiple vaults I should know about?

2

I use a primary vault for my consolidated PKM and then individual vaults for projects. For myself, I often only need to reference my PKM data when working on a project vault or copy some specific data into the project vault. This works for me because my project vaults are then “sterile” of unrelated content and I can freely share them as needed with others. Most folks don’t like multiple vaults because it can result in redundant copies, or out-of-sync copies, of data, but it all depends on how you do things. It is an individual choice, with no right or wrong answer…

3

I find it mentally useful to “clear the desk,” so to speak, when working on fiction, and having it separate helps me avoid some distractions that comes with seeing my entire vault right in front of me.

You can get a lot of that separation and focus in a single vault by using separate folders (fold the ones you’re not using and expand your creative writing folders in the File Explorer) and—especially—separate workspaces.

If you want more workspace options than the ones included in vanilla Obsidian, you can add the Workspaces Plus plugin.

1 Like
4

I went through the route you describe (separate vaults) and ended fusing everything together in one big vault. It was too much hassle keeping in sync settings and installed plugins.

Try Folder Focus Mode community plugin. It may help when you jump to “creative writing mode”.

5

You might try merging the vaults for a while, to learn from experience which set of advantages and drawbacks you prefer. If you don’t like it, you can pull the folder back out to be its own vault again.