Have you ever closed a book, only to find its aftertaste lingering days later?
You can't quite explain why. Yet deep inside your mind, something keeps echoing softly.
Today, let's go on a journey to uncover the true source of that feeling.
Usually, people think a novel's thrill comes from cleverly resolving plot twists. But stories that stay with you forever are built differently. In those books, knowledge isn't just decoration—it's part of the narrative engine itself.
Take Umberto Eco's masterpiece, "The Name of the Rose". Set in a 1327 North Italian monastery, a murder occurs right amidst heavy medieval theology and political conflict. Inside the story, there's a blind monk named Jorge. That's a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary author of The Library of Babel. Eco embedded a pioneer who turned knowledge into story directly inside his own tale, making the nested structure itself the theme.
Even more shocking is the murder motive: the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics on comedy. The missing piece of knowledge drives the entire plot. Decoding medieval history becomes solving the mystery. That complete fusion of knowledge and narrative leaves us speechless.
How do you craft a story like that?
I've observed a specific technique that transforms scattered knowledge into a brilliant narrative: the Constellation Method.
By passing knowledge through your own perspective, you output entirely new meaning. That's what makes someone a modern encyclopedist.
The Original Encyclopedists
What were original encyclopedists like? Let's turn back to 18th-century France.
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert created the Encyclopédie—17 text volumes, 11 plate volumes, and 70,000 entries written by over 140 thinkers. D'Alembert categorized knowledge into memory (history), reason (philosophy), and imagination (poetry). Organizing knowledge that way was a direct challenge to religious dogma.
They introduced two groundbreaking inventions. First, cross-referencing (renvoi). By linking entries together, they subtly directed readers from harmless topics to dangerous ideas, bypassing censors. It was the direct ancestor of today's hyperlink.
Second, craft illustrations. They elevated practical artisan skills into beautiful, systematic visual guides, merging elite intellect with hands-on wisdom.
You might think of Pliny's Natural History or Athanasius Kircher, whose grand, absurd theories inspired generations of creators. Encyclopedists were people who arranged the world.
In our era of information explosion, no single human can cover everything. In 2012, Encyclopædia Britannica stopped its print editions as Wikipedia and AI took over. Collecting information has been outsourced to machines. Therefore, we can't define a modern encyclopedist simply as a collector of facts.
Defining the Modern Encyclopedist
What does a modern encyclopedist actually do?
A modern encyclopedist doesn't own knowledge; they generate meaning through it.
This process loops through four steps:
- Gather
- Connect
- Discard
- Transform into story
It isn't a linear path. At the core lies your personal obsession or driving question, pulling relevant knowledge toward you like a magnet. Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens started with one core premise—that fiction enabled large-scale human cooperation—and attracted historical data around it.
Editors curate for completeness. Encyclopedists discard 90% of their research to carve out a single, beautiful line.
However, connecting dots without boundaries carries a hidden danger: it shares the exact same logic as conspiracy theories. Eco explored this dark side in Foucault's Pendulum, where three editors playfully connect random fragments of knowledge into a fake secret, only to be hunted down by a real cult. Eco even turned the danger of his own theory into fiction.
Three Types of Encyclopedists
To apply this to creative writing, we can categorize modern encyclopedists into three types:
A | Embedding Knowledge into Fiction
Examples: Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges
This type uses knowledge as fuel for fiction. In Borges's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, entries from a fictional encyclopedia gradually invade and reshape reality itself.
B | Making the Connection Itself the Story
Example: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)
Here, the unexpected connections between historical facts form the primary narrative appeal.
C | The Narrator's Persona as the Story
Example: Bill Bryson
The narrator's voice, curiosity, and worldview become the main attraction.
Why Novelists Should Strive to Be Modern Encyclopedists
There are three key reasons to adopt this mindset:
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It creates an unbeatable barrier against AI. Story structures and plot formulas will eventually be mastered by AI. However, the combination of "what you know" and "how you connect it" is infinite. Your unique blend of knowledge forms a moat no machine can copy.
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Knowledge becomes narrative fuel. Just as the lost manuscript drove The Name of the Rose, knowledge itself generates conflict and moves characters. Decorative facts get cut during editing, but knowledge embedded in the plot engine is impossible to remove.
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It extends your career. Youthful intuition and raw sensibility diminish over time, but accumulated knowledge compounds with age, serving as lifelong creative capital.
Keep one vital rule in mind: showing off knowledge kills a story. Eco admitted the first 100 pages of his novel were intentionally dense as an initiation rite for readers. But if we confuse readers carelessly, they'll drop our book immediately.
Only introduce knowledge when it collides directly with your protagonist's desires.
Conclusion
As flames consume the monastery library at the end of The Name of the Rose, young Adso gathers parchment fragments from the ashes. The book we hold is constructed from those very fragments.
Information may fade over time, but stories woven from it endure. Connecting scattered pieces into a single, meaningful line—that is the essence of living as a modern encyclopedist.
Now it's your turn to create a story with an aftertaste that lasts for days.