Keeping Your Notebook
By Barbara O'Neal | April 6, 2021 |
The writer’s notebook is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself as a writer. It is personal, private, intimate, and real—pretty much the opposite of what social media asks of us.
That constant curated stream of social media prevents deep thought. Whether your poison is Instagram or SnapChat, Twitter or Pinterest or Facebook, the point is to create a clever or beautiful stream that shows how smart or tasteful we are.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m as addicted to social media as the next person. My particular downfalls are Instagram and Facebook, but I’ve been known to get lost in Pinterest, too. I love food photography and will scurry down that rabbit hole for hours. It’s relaxing, peaceful, restorative.
But only when used in small doses. More and more, I think of social media like wine. It’s great for a glass or two, but it’s less productive when you’re drinking a bottle over dinner and wishing for a little more as a nightcap.
The danger to writers is in the shallow nature of social media. That very shallowness is what makes it relaxing. The curated nature—the need to make things beautiful or smart or amazing to please a body of viewers—it what makes it dangerous to writers who need to pay attention to everything, good and bad, ugly and sweet and even politically incorrect. A writer writes best when she knows her own mind and viewpoint, and social media doesn’t facilitate that journey.
What does? A writer’s notebook. This is a notebook that a writer carries much the same way as an artist carries a sketchbook. It’s not meant for public consumption, only for capturing ideas, thoughts, titles, hopes, plot snippets, descriptions of landscapes, descriptions of people, overheard snatches of dialogue…any and everything.
A writer’s notebook is one of the cornerstones of good writerly habits, which I will discuss in another post. As creative people, we need habits and routines a little more than other people, and this is the place to start.
How do you begin with your notebook? Easy. Find something you like to write in. Maybe it’s a Moleskine, which come in a zillion varieties and have great paper. Maybe you just like a good spiral notebook, or a tiny Field Notes notebook that will fit easily in your pocket or purse. Choose something that’s easy to carry around, something you like to write in, and if the first one doesn’t work, find another one.
You need something to write with, of course. A good pen, one that moves easily on the page. When I was a girl, I had to have blue Bic pens, the thick lined ones with a crystal barrel, not the fine-lined, more expensive ones. These days, I like fountain pens or a good solid Pilot gel pen, but I’m not as picky now as I was then. What do you like to make notes with? Pencil? That works, too.
The one thing you cannot do is make this about a keyboard. It has to be an actual, analogue notebook, with paper, and a pen or pencil. No electronic note taking for this particular exercise.
The single most important thing to remember is that notebooks are personal, private, intimate, and real. You are never going to share it with anyone. That gives you the freedom to write clearly about your world.
Get in the habit of carrying the notebook with you, and then use it. Instead of taking out your phone when you stop in a coffeehouse, sip your coffee and notice what’s happening in the room around you. What does it sound like? Who is there with you? Can you overhear a conversation? What is the person at the next table wearing, top to bottom.
Try to be objective and just observe for now.
Maybe every morning or every evening, or at lunch at your day job, you can take out your notebook and write:
“In the moment, I am….”
And write for a couple of minutes on whatever is going on.
In the moment, I am sitting on my couch with a cat curled up on my left shoulder. My coffee has gone cold and I’d love another cup, but the cat would be disturbed and I don’t want to do it. There are lots of flies today—sprung up after the rain, I suppose, but they’re very noisy and irritating. My feet are bare, but in deference to October, I’m wearing long yoga pants to be warmer.
Go, get yourself a notebook and a good writing utensil and write a daily paragraph. Start getting used to always having the notebook in reach.
And remember: personal, private, intimate, and real. Just you and the page, nothing else.
We’ve talked about this before, but what is your favorite writing notebook? Do you carry one?
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
Love your post, Barbara.
I can see you perfectly. From the couch in my room, on Vancouver Island, it’s raining, so there’s rain pounding the windows.
I already have the ‘cat that must not be moved’ and now, yoga pants are on my shopping list.
May I add… when you find that great notebook, return to the store and buy a dozen.
I can see you, too. Such a gorgeous world you live in.
I do buy my notebooks by the dozen, both for BUJOs and my journals. I like Leuchtturm 1917 for bullet journals and Moleskine lined 8×11 (ish) for journals. For sketching, I have a bunch of handbooks in various sizes. The watercolor paper holds up to anything I want to do.
Favortite tools; A lined spiral notebook (sizes may vary) and a black Flair marker. I remember sitting int he Expresso Cafe in Woodstock, NY, (ahem, won’t name the year) scribbling observations in my notebook. A guy came up to me and asked me if I was a writer. I didn’t think of myself writer back then. I was an art student, writing down my observations. And if that Woodstock stay produced a sketch or two, it also resulted in a handful of essays informed by those observations. The smells, the sounds, the snippets of conversation. Just sitting in a place and letting it soak into you is a wonderful practice. Thank you for the reminder, Barbara
Susan, I imagine that the act of writing in that journal in Woodstock made the memory stick even more deeply. That’s the amazing thing about notebooks, though I don’t pretend to know why.
Barb, I love this post. Writing helps me to clarify what I’m thinking. And I totally get not disturbing peacefully sleeping cats even when the tea has gone cold :) At home I use my fast flowing Mont blanc pen that I bought over 30 yrs ago to write in the college-ruled spiral notebook (I like the 3 subject one with dividers and pockets so that I can have some prayer cards and newspaper clippings, etc. that I want to keep handy. I find I need the space so that my thoughts don’t get cramped. I keep smaller spiral notebooks with hardcovers in my choir bag, Adoration bag and purse so that I’m never without a notebook or pen to write. The only time I don’t carry anything is when I take my dog out for a walk but then must hurry home to capture some of those fleeting thoughts.
Vijaya, I’m curious as to what one keeps in an Adoration bag, if you’re comfortable sharing that.
Deborah, right now I have Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and Stirring Slumbering Souls by Michael Seagriff for when my own thoughts feel too poor, my notebook, a couple of pens, rosary, and veil. I do so love this heart to Heart time.
Weird. My response disappeared. Let me try again. Right now I have Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and Stirring Slumbering Souls by Michael Seagriff for when my own thoughts feel too poor. My notebook, pens, rosary and veil.
testing
There seems to be a bit of delay – my reply to you disappeared for a while too.
I’m slowly reading my way through The Imitation of Christ, but I haven’t come across Seagriff before.
Have you ever read any of the poetry of Malcolm Guite? He writes sonnets circling the canonical year. I find his Good Friday/Resurrection Sunday sequence particularly moving.
I started writing with a pencil in spiral bound notebooks that I kept in a shoulder bag. Easy to write in. The wire binding ended up squashed. The pages shifted against each other smudging the pencil. I’ve switched to a pen in bound notebooks. More permanent.
This is a lovely article, Barbara, and I absolutely love how you capture the intimacy of the writing process, particularly the parts of the process that no one else will ever see.
But I will argue with you on one front: on the notion that this must be written without a keyboard. Since I was a child, I was cursed with utterly horrible penmanship, and to this day I find the physical act of writing on paper to be both mentally and physically frustrating to the point of impossibility. I simply cannot write (or print) legibly by hand, despite hours and years of training and effort. I suspect that if I’d grown up in more illuminated times, I might be diagnosed with some minor disability in that regard. But I’m not looking for sympathy, since I have a perfectly good workaround.
I find a keyboard utterly liberating. It allows me to capture my ideas in a way I can actually READ, with the added bonus of being able to copy, edit and move the words I write – both in their original form, or into other documents and tools. To me, that is freedom, not restriction, and I feel no less connected to the words I type than the words I wish I could write by hand.
Luckily, I have found my own version of your notebook – in my case, a metaphoric one that serves the same functions you describe: simple, portable, and, to your most important point: “personal, private, intimate, and real… you are never going to share it with anyone.”
For me that notebook is an AlphaSmart NEO – a simple word-processing keyboard that allows me to do ONE thing: write. No internet. No email. No puppy photos. Sadly, NEOs (and their various AlphaSmart siblings) are no longer made, but there are still plenty available on Ebay, and I’m aware of a contingent of AlphaSmart and NEO users among our ranks here in the WUverse. The beauty of this particular brand is that there is NO boot-up time: you can literally turn it on and start typing just as quickly as you could open a paper notebook and begin writing. Its batteries last a LONG time, so there’s no need to plug into anything, so for me it’s every bit as useful as the paper notebooks you describe.
I think the key here is to have a tool or resource that allows/forces you to focus solely on writing. In that respect, I would agree with you that a laptop is a bad choice, with so many potential distractions. But I still think that there are options that don’t require paper or pen!
Keith I have terrible penmanship too so keep a working document open for having those conversations with myself about the story I’m writing.
Excellent insight. In my classes, I make people use a pen or pencil and write by hand, but have noticed that as time goes by there is more and more resistance.
It’s not so much about distractions with a laptop. I urge people to write by hand because the process of writing by hand accesses a different part of the brain than keyboarding. The Alphasmart is still a keyboard, but I’m not dogmatic. If it works, it works. The overall point is to notice your world and be in the world, of course, so the purpose is well served.
I keep a Pilot Birdie mechanical pencil in my pocket, and when I go out, usually a Moonman Wancai fountain pen as well (it’s 3 1/2 inches long).
But what I don’t have in my pocketses is a notebook! Must fix that. Perhaps a Paperblanks Micro? They’re not cheap, but they’re sturdy enough to cart about everywhere, and the paper is of excellent quality.
I love, love, love this idea! I’m going to adapt it. I have a love/hate relationship with social media and this will help me focus on being in the present and not think about pleasing anyone except myself. Thank you so much for writing this.
I’ve long kept notebooks. Another advantage is doodling. I doodle while thinking and I can’t doodle on a keyboard.
I’ll add one suggestion. Dates. Every entry starts with date. And time, if you wish. And, if I’m elsewhere, the place.
Then, on the cover, goes the month and year begun and ended. Having accumulated dozens upon scores of notebooks over the years, I really do recommend identifying information on the outside.
Absolutely date the entires, and the books themselves.
Love the idea of a wish!
I use LEUCHTTURM1917 lined notebooks. The pages are numbered, and there are Table of Content pages at the front so you can find things more easily. Also a designated place for dates. Nice quality paper. I write with a fountain pen, and there is no bleedthrough. I found out after I started using these notebooks that Neil Gaiman writes his novels in them.
I’m working on a series at the moment, and each series has its own notebook. I also have one for my “prompted” journal.
I can see you, too. Such a gorgeous world you live in.
I do buy my notebooks by the dozen, both for BUJOs and my journals. I like Leuchtturm 1917 for bullet journals and Moleskine lined 8×11 (ish) for journals. For sketching, I have a bunch of handbooks in various sizes. The watercolor paper holds up to anything I want to do.
This is lovely–sharing in my FoxPrint newsletter!
For ideas-on-the-move, I use a 3″ x 5″ lined notebook, the more nondescript the better. At home, I generally grab a Post-It note or recipe card. But then everything gets sorted and typed into a master Scrivener document. I have a file of titles, lots of “what-if” ideas I’ve been noodling on for years. Yet another folder for blog post ideas.
I’ve tried extra-large Moleskines for journaling but now use the dotted ones for my self-constructed week-at-a-glance bullet journals. The journaling itself goes into 300-page spiral-bound Hilroys or comparable–the largest size because I do like the room.
Favorite pens are Papermate InkJoys–I switch between black and blue for fun. (What a rebel, amirite?) Once in a while I go wild and use the blue-black Uni-ball Vision Elite pen. They don’t travel well, though, often exploding midair.
I do need to follow through on your observational prompts. When people are more fascinating than dangerous–i.e. two weeks after my second vaccine–that will become an easier task to accomplish!
PS: Nice to see you around here, Barbara. Hope you are well!
Barbara, you so have hit it on the nail! I’ve got reams of journals, from “cool” to “common.” Everyone to their own, but I’ve walked away from precious to plain. I want to not give a . . . and let it all out, including burning the bleeping thing if I cringe at the thought of someone else reading it. The insights that “come out of nowhere” while tangling with some story element, are jaw dropping.
Sweet! So looking forward to your next post!
What a great post and I highly recommend handwriting for all newbie writers.
I love my 5 x 8 sized 3 (or 7 ) ring binder that uses loose-leaf paper. I like a smooth ballpoint pen or soft (#2) pencil for notes and short story writing. Though I admit suffering with mind dyslexia and old-age arthritis make my writing horrible to read. Been using this sized notebook since childhood. Sadly, when I moved from home I burned all my childhood short stories…HUGE mistake. If you are a young writer never let anyone talk you into destroying your dreams.
I have two AlphaSmarts and I love to use them for outdoor writing or taking notes. Then I download and run the whole document thru spell-check for obvious reasons.