Hello.
Today I’m covering one of my favourite things in the world, which is notebooks.
I’ve written some notes on this, but they don’t really hang together, in my opinion, and I’d like to know what you think needs to be said about notebooks — what they should be like, how you should use them.
So I’m going to read what I’ve written — Notes on Notebooks — and then I’m going to say a few things, some thoughts.
Notebooks are a place you can go. That is the first and most important thing about them. They are a portable workspace or playroom. They allow you to be a writer and do writing just about anywhere, except whilst swimming in a swimming pool or taking mental notes on the gossip in a sauna.
Waterproof paper could, I admit, overcome this, but for me it’s also important to have a few places where I know I can’t physically write, so that I can have a mini holiday.
You have to be prepared to waste pages — a lot of pages — in a notebook, either by leaving them blank or putting down on them something you know you’re never going to use, or that you know you’re going to rip out. Only once or twice, though, have I ever gone at a notebook with scissors, and that was because I knew what I’d written would hurt someone if they ever read it.
Most of the time, “If it comes in the brain, it goes on the page,” as I once heard Hubert Selby Jr. say.
I’m no longer sure notebooks are so obviously linked to writing.
That is, I’m not sure whether you should expect what you write down in a notebook to come out as fiction or as some other form of writing, rather than just staying as a note that turns out to have roots and grow and be interesting in your mind long after you’ve forgotten that you actually wrote it down.
So I’m no longer sure notebook notes are so obviously linked to writing. They are a thing in themselves — gorgeously unformed, embryonic.
Here’s another go.
Notebooks are forests. Notes add to the mulch of leaves, the humus, the rich soil that leaches down to the roots. You need a humus of ideas. You will only ever be slightly better than the best idea you rejected or never got round to writing. A great writer has a great waste-paper bin or junk folder on their PC.
Writing in notebooks teaches you to come at a sentence or statement fearlessly. I can sense anxiety and terror all through my students’ writing because they feel they’re on stage performing, being judged as they bring out every new utterance.
Like a musician practises to get ready for a gig or a concert so they don’t make mistakes, a writer practises so they are prepared for the page. It can feel like nothing but spotlight there. You have to get the sense of working in the dark, and notebooks are the best way of working in the dark because they are unpublic, because they are very small private spaces — small workrooms.
Why doesn’t writing on waste paper and chucking it away amount to the same as writing in a notebook? I don’t know. Perhaps because it doesn’t allow itself to be in any way cumulative. A notebook, although it can be a total mess — you can organise it and index it, but as it comes out it’s a mess — does add page upon page.
Random scraps don’t add to the pressure of being, or appearing to be, semi-permanent between hard covers of some sort.
I use Moleskine notebooks and have for a long, long time. They are 9 by 14 centimetres, the ones I buy, so they fit in a pocket. They tend to be black if I’m getting them new, but most of the time I go onto certain auction sites and see what are the cheapest ones people are selling off — not written in second-hand, but the ones they know they’re never going to use. And I tend to scarf up as many of those as I can, so I have a few in hand if I run out.
I’m going to say a lot more in the coming weeks about different ways of using notes, research, things that can start a story, start a novel, and what form they might take. And very often those are things that are going to first occur in a notebook.
But what do you think I’ve missed out? Help me out. Comments, please.
Tell me what you think needs to be said about how you write in notebooks and what could be shared with other people.
So please like, share and subscribe, and I hope to see you soon.
