What’s My Favorite, Favorite Writing Notebook?
Um, I don’t have one. I don’t care if I scribble on a piece of toilet paper or in some fancy goat-skin-lined tome. I’d be as happy tearing the label off your jeans and using it to write on as going out and buying something more grandiose. And save me from some electronic organizer or blackberry or whatever. Paper and pen’s always going to be easier and thus provide less friction between “eureka!” and writing down “eureka!” before it becomes “What the heck was that brilliant phrase I was just thinking of a second ago and now have forgotten?”
On long projects, though, my favorite notebook is actually…a notecard. Notecards are much preferred, with one thought or sequence or phrase per card. Just shove a bunch in your back pocket wherever you go. I guarantee it makes novel writing a lot easier. Nothing’s more annoying than having to take all of your random novel notes in a notebook and put them into sequential order. With notecards, just sequence them in minutes. Voila! Low-tech wins again.
To say nothing of being happily rude whipping them out and scribbling in mid-conversation. A perk of being a writer. You shrug. “What can I do? I’m a writer.”
May 6, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I keep trying, but I just cannot enjoy writing on paper. There’s been a keyboard around so long for me, that it’s the only way I can organize my thoughts. Handwriting feels painfully slow (or produces handwriting that has passed beyond the veil of ‘meaning’ into the realm of ‘random squiggles’). I lose connection to the signified before I construct its signifier, to put it all semiotically. I’ve looked back over prose I wrote by hand and reading it feels like licking roadkill.
I envy being able to do substantive work by hand; the monitor feels perilously close to growing a membrane out to encompass me. Notebooks and notecards and washing-instructions tags are a hell of a lot easier to tote around than laptops or PDAs, and they don’t ever need charging or proper lighting conditions. Plus they’re cheap enough that if they’re lost the physical loss is meaningless, leaving only the oozing hole of ideas that have gone missing.
May 6, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Are you saying you never take notes and don’t write down your stray thoughts/ideas/phrases when they come to you?
May 6, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I do take some forms of notes, mostly research stuff, and I’ve been plotting my novel literally as a graph with extremely simple descriptions of the chain of events.
But ideas and phrases and thoughts go into the big bucket and — so far — very reliably come back out, usually tinkered with by my subconscious to make them better fit with whatever they’re going to go with. I’ve had ideas go in one side of that black box and come out 3-4 years later as whole stories. Others are still knocking around, picking up random bits of other ideas.
The downside of this method (for me) is that I lose things like people’s names, car keys, heads of state, etc. in my head. They probably get cannibalized for story or art fodder.
May 6, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Yeah, but toilet paper is hard to write on. It tears.
May 6, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Hey, don’t knock toilet paper. De Sade wrote Les 120 Journees de Sodome, ou l’Ecole de libertinage on toilet paper!
May 6, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I daresay he used a different brand, to stick with it longer than a sentence.