Dear Reader,
A milestone: I finished a notebook!
My writing notebook is one of my most important tools—and the one most often lost. I typically have three or four going at one time, most of which will never make it to the halfway mark. Whether I leave them in airports or bring them out in the rain or just straight up forget they exist, most of them are not long for this world. But this notebook and I crossed the finish line together!
I have shared glimpses into my notebook before. Jillian Hess, whose Substack catalogues “tips from the world’s best notetakers,” inspired me with her post on some of her favorite notebooks. I am definitively not one of the world’s best notetakers. My notebook is as scattered as my brain. But it’s where I exercise my ideas—and learn not to treat them too preciously.
I got this notebook—charmed by its whimsical, Where the Wild Things Are-esque cover—for the first creative writing workshop of my freshman year of college. (The nostalgia factor is strong.) One of the oldest entries, dated August 21, 2019, outlines a short story I was planning to write for the class about an octopus who finds itself magically transported to the mountains (a literal fish-out-of-water story that definitely didn’t have anything to do with what I was going through at the time).
The octopus outline is the first and last dated entry. From there, the notebook (d)evolves into complete chaos—effectively a bound pile of scrap paper. I stopped using it just for class notes and started jotting stuff down whenever I felt like it: notes, sure, but also random ideas, bits of first drafts, snatches of poems I admired, and even the occasional grocery list.
I realized pretty quickly that if I was going to devote myself to becoming a better writer, I would need a place where my writing didn’t have to be perfect—or even good. Ideas should not be treated like gold, as tempting as that can be. They are a renewable resource: the more you have, the more there are. It’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised. Most of them never leave the notebooks. A lot of them are functionally useless, so messily scrawled and bled-through that even I can’t read them. And a few of them—like the page below where I was brainstorming names for a fantasy story—look, as my workshop friends affectionately tell me, like they were written by a crazy person.
Not all of the pages are so unwieldy. Some of them, like those pictured below, are even semi-coherent. This, if I remember right, is from when I felt stuck drafting a short story and decided to switch from screen to paper. This short story is actually still in the works—a reminder that though the notebook may be finished, the projects inside it are not.
The beauty of the notebook lies in its disposability. Unlike a computer, it is decomposable. It can get wet. It cannot be Control-F-ed. Finding something in it requires time and patience. I usually don’t bother. But in this case, disposability equals creativity. It eliminates perfectionism and provides a safe space for the words to hide, even from myself.
That’s not to say that I won’t hang onto this notebook. I’ll keep this one for the archives for sure. It serves as a kind of time capsule for my past self—what she was thinking, feeling and writing for the past five years or so. Oddly, I don’t find her as inscrutable as I might have imagined. Even when the words themselves are inaccessible—such as on this next page, where I purposefully wrote in layers, codes, and letters too tiny to read—I can remember and even re-experience the intentions behind them.
Maybe I’ll be more organized and aesthetically pleasing in my next notebook, taking my lead from Hess’s featured writers. Maybe. I tend to doubt it. More often than not, the quagmire of half-formed ideas and unfinished thoughts is exactly what my brain needs. Chaos in the notebook, order in the computer.
Farewell, Wild Things Notebook! It’s been real. To honor the end of your journey, I want to share my favorite thing I found: a truly inspired Venn diagram (in oversize and in miniature) that served as the building blocks for a poem I wrote—one that’s being published this spring!1
Onto the next notebook!
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Jane
More on that later . . .