Maxim Monday #8: Sure, Keep a Notebook (But Only If You Promise Not to Use It Correctly)
Glen battles the blather. Then offers some.
I’m going to leave the intro from MM #1 pinned here for new readers. For today’s new post, scroll down below the photo:
By way of user’s guide, I’m reprinting a snippet from a post I put up this past spring about teaching writing:
“All those rules we’ve all read...any maxims we’ve stuck to our workspaces or screened on our mugs or chanted like prayers...they’re exactly as good as the last thing they helped you get done. Many of them are brilliant. A few of them are true. All of them are wrong.”
Which is just to say, take these for what they are: encouragement; company; one long-timer’s half-sketched map to his own Writer Island, where he takes the air and scours the woods and abandoned buildings and works the days away and may or may not discover buried treasure and may or may not recognize it if and when he does. Hope they help you find yours.
(Also just to say that I’ve eaten all the words left in the refrigerator. Delicious, of course, so sweet and so cold. But every time I open that door, there seem to be more in there, so you should go and check…)
Sometimes I’ll be taking on or adding to or denying longstanding writing truisms. Sometimes I’ll be offering my own.
Hope at least a few of these, over the course of the year, inspire or prod or spur or enrage you enough to get you back out there and digging. If you have thoughts, share ‘em!
And if you do find inspiration here, and you want to show support, please invite your friends to stop by. Or click this little purple button, if you’re so inclined. Any financial encouragement is of course also welcome and deeply appreciated…
Maxim Monday #8
Eight years or so ago, one of my most passionately engaged students surprised me with an end-of-term present. A…I mean, “notebook” hardly does it justice.
I swear, this thing purred when you touched it. Your pen didn’t so much scratch across these pages as sink into them. Ripples across pond, that gently settled into the shape of letters. Formed by a hand way too elegant to be mine. Even if it was mine.
Not that I found that out for quite some time. As in, years. I loved this thing, mostly because it was such a thoughtful gift, but also because of the thing itself. Whatever I dropped onto those pages, I wanted it to be worthy. For the first time— not ever, but in a long, long while—I had visions suddenly of a shelf over my desk, lined with beautiful notebooks full of my thoughts and ideas. Maybe even in binders! Carefully indexed (did I mention that this thing comes with a Table of Contents page? And an index at the back, just waiting for me to fill it in? Create cross-indexes (“ghost story…backyard…birch tree…sherbet…see also Notebook IV/pp.81-83…”)?!
And so it sat, unused, on a corner of my desk. Eventually, it moved to the rocking chair where other unused things from my desk gravitate to form nests for the cats.
Until that fateful day…it was an act of desperation, and it embarrasses me, still, and if my student ever reads this, I hope she knows that this doesn’t diminish the meaning of that gift to me even one bit, I will never forget it, but…my wife was on the phone, sounding stressed. She knew I was about to knock off and finally go do the food shopping one of us had intended for over a week. And for once, somehow, I couldn’t find a single sheet or scrap of scratch paper for scribbling, anywhere, because everything within reach was already covered in scrawl.
So I grabbed that purring, perfect thing out from under the cat, flipped it open past the TOC page. Took my pen— not a good pen, just the nearest thing handy— and on that rippling, perfect paper, I wrote:
Carrots.
From that day on, that notebook did indeed become one of my notebooks. A Glen notebook. On its pages are…shopping lists. Reminders to call my aunt or the eyeglasses place. Lots and lots of notes about books or movies or music I’ve heard about or gotten recommended to me somewhere, and that I need to go dig up or check out.
There are a few ideas, somewhere in there. Every now and then, I flip through my notebooks looking for those. Sometimes, I find them. They say things like “Orcas left…tree thing.” Or, “Jeff and the Padre” (which I think was a baseball reference? Maybe? Unless it was the title and concept for a lost Hardy Boys-style series novel?).
More even than on most of these posts, I’m not holding up any of the above as a suggested way of working. If beautiful notebooks (or $.89 specials from your local pharmacy) call out your writing impulse and get you scribbling, then buy in bulk, friends.
But I have doubts. And maybe a couple warnings:
If you’re even thinking that you’re writing professionally— meaning, for others, not just for yourself— I suspect you may find less and less use for anything resembling journaling. (I mean, in the first place, you’re going to get nauseous every time someone verbs a noun). But beyond that, if you’re writing fiction, or even creative nonfiction, your brain automatically is going to start translating and transforming thoughts and experiences the second you have them. Noting and collecting the raw material on notebook pages, therefore, might be useful as an act of remembering that something happened. But if that something turns out to be (or turns into) an idea that you’re going to use…chances are, you’re not going to need the notebook to remember it. And if you do, and you go back to what you wrote, what you’re going to find is a petroglyph. A memento of a story someone else— meaning you, then—told. Or almost told.
One of my favorite books of writing exercises I recommend to students at any level is Brian Kiteley’s The Three A.m. Epiphany. What I like about it is the way it organizes its challenges into seemingly distinct categories (“Children and Childhood”, “Thought and Emotion”, “Time”, etc.), but then offers prompts that are deliciously open-ended, and that blur into each other. Like all good writing does. At the back of the book, in an appendix of tips, Kiteley suggests carrying a notebook on your person at all times. But then— like the very fine and real writer he is; I also highly recommend his beautiful Still Life With Insects novel—on the preceding page, he quotes Walter Benjamin’s advice to “keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power.” In other words, don’t write ideas down at the moment you have them. You’ll know you’re having a real idea, Kiteley suggests, “when it follows you down the aisle of the supermarket.” When you don’t have to write it down, in other words. At least not in its raw form.
Meaning…Carrots is the proper use for writer’s notebook pages, after all?
Don’t you have enough in your pockets right now? Phone? Keys? What are you doing about a pencil or pen? And if you’re in the midst of a moment worth living, do you really want to amplify that ingrained writer’s tic of withdrawing even as life is happening in order to observe it?
The irony, of course— okay, let’s call it what it is, the lie— at the heart of this post is that obviously I have notebooks. All over the place. Everywhere I go.
Meaning, scraps and pads of paper. A few of which purr. Hopefully there are writing implements nearby with which to mark them. I have desk drawers full of pads of every size and binding. If you happened to glance at the photo that accompanies these posts…well, Glen, that right there appears to be a notebook. Kind of a pretty one, too. With a loop at the bottom (see how cool that loop is??) for a handy pencil.
I really have carted that pocket-sized beauty with me for the past couple months. I got reminded about how much I love the idea of notebooks full of ideas after reading that beautiful Carl Bernstein memoir I recommended to you earlier this fall. Then I treated myself to this properly sized and inviting little tool.
I’ve even used it. A few times. On the TOC page, I’ve written “Ghost Story Ideas” and then “Not-Ghost Story Ideas.” And also “Springboard moments.” And also “Lyrics or lines.” On page three, there is the phrase "GIANT METAL DOGCAGE!!”
I have no idea what it means.
Only twice have I torn out pages— carefully, you’d almost never know they were there— and scribbled a shopping list on them. Lately, there are a couple running score tallies from Scrabble games, because my son’s here and we’ve been playing a lot, and the pages are kinda the perfect size for that, so…
I guess what I’m saying is, by all means, keep a notebook. Ask for a nice one for a present, even. If you want. Or just some legal pads (those are nice and long, you can get really complete shopping lists on those).
Just don’t fetishize them. Don’t spend too much time jotting down detailed plans for half-formed stories that don’t exist yet, and may never if you insist on forcing them into a shape before they’re ready to hold it.
Don’t even make a habit of looking at your notebooks. Most of the time, that won’t be necessary. And they’re not going to help you (except occasionally, when they do. And as with so many elements in the creative process, that will probably happen only by surprise. Out of order. As in, you may suddenly find yourself with a story you really do want to write about carrots…).
Fall in love with the words, in other words. Not the tools you use to transcribe them.