Two of the notebooks I’m currently writing in – which were presents and really fall into the too gorgeous category (the paper inside is real quality – bliss to write on)
So where do you keep your notebooks? Which notebooks work for you and why – moleskine, plain, lined, squared? I have to admit to a weakness for squared, though I mainly buy Ryman’s soft backs. Can a notebook be just too beautiful to write in? In my case yes. I sometimes find it hard to get going in a notebook which is really only fit to be left lolling about on the table or desk looking gorgeous.
How about keeping different notebooks for different projects? It’s certainly always my intention to do this but one project invariably leaches into another and often, what’s written where, depends on whichever notebook I happen to have taken out with me that day. As a rule, because otherwise it makes thing so hard to find, I try to stick to two notebooks at a time. I am currently writing in four!
So what’s in your notebook? In the notebook in front of me now, where I began drafting this post, are: several drafts of a poem about my room, a list of answers to the question, what is it that only you can write about? Notes from of walk in the snow, the record of a dream, dates for a series of exhibition visits, single lines taken from a Spring journal I kept last year, the best part of a short story about two women and a quilt, a list of possible books for a Reader’s Lives column I’m writing ( for the Journal Culture Mag) and some notes I made listening to the radio.
It was Warren who got me thinking about notebooks by sending me to the link to Ian Sansom’s A Scribbled Aside Radio 4. If you’re a notebook fetishist like me and you’ve 15 mins to spare you’ll enjoy this. I did.
Thanks Warren.
I relinquish any pretense at being a shabby bohemian type with half of one’s mind scattered between a number of clutter-some notebooks. I can’t do it- my god- I open one of them and read a sentence- and them I’m thinking, must do something with that right now! And then I open another and feel the same impulse until I’ve got about five novels and ten short stories on the go simultaneously. Just had a purge of the dreaded things-thank god. One novel on the go kept on hard drive and backed up on memory stick-that’s me done! Although, still taking a leaf from Rankin’s method in that doc, I’ll at least allow the electronic copy to get very fulsome and messy, and resist the urge to tidy it up too soon.
That’s the beauty of notebooks – they can be as ‘fulsome and messy’ as one likes but I’m with you on trying to keep a handle on things especially when you’ve got a novel on the go – one notebook only, until its finished, is really the rule. But of course pages can be torn from one notebook and pasted into another – I can see I’m getting too messy for you already.
Perhaps the key difference here is that I mainly like to write longhand first, as I know Wendy does, and then transfer to the computer – I find it liberates me to just WRITE and not worry about editing until later – so in my writing world notebooks are essential.
My existential nightmare is, to open the curtains and find the trees adorned with ink scribbled pages from notebooks instead of leaves. One notebook, really to posit questions I need to answer in the novel, and one notebook for my songs kept out of sight in my guitar case so never the two can meet and cross pollinate- And now for the Valium . . . .
As you know we’re on the same page about the magic of the notebook. More functional for me than any screen. W
Just listened. Quite lovely. Thank you to Warren at second hand W.
Isn’t that just the wonder of Radio – od Radio 4 – full of gems!
Such fun to read here Avril. My notebooks are a mess, a delicious abundance of ingredients waiting to be folded in somewhere…I too record my fascination or frustration with radio tidbits here across the ocean.
I love your existential dream of paper leaves on a tree outside your window…wonderful.