NANDINI NAYAR
May05 Enid Blyton II
Apr05 Enid Blyton I

PENI GRIFFIN

Mar05 Last Column
Feb05 What's In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity IV
Oct04 Creativity III
Sep04 Creativity II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social Angst and All That
May04 Reading In Public
Apr04 Elephant In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary Synchronicity
Feb04 The Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors... They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a concept.'
Sep03 Preaching to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic

on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...

What's In Your Notebook?
by Peni Griffin

I'm not talking about notebook computers, handy as such things may be for many purposes. I have a laptop myself, and it has numerous advantages for producing new copy in a systematic fashion. It also has its downside. When I'm working on my lunch hour, I have to wait for it to boot up, sometimes the battery gives out as soon as I start typing, I had to get a special backpack to carry it in, the keyboard is on the small side and ergonomically wanting, and ohmigawd the touchpad!

The old-fashioned paper notebook, spiral or sewn, lacks all these disadvantages and substitutes its own. The degree to which you can organize them is limited: you can have a different notebook for each purpose, use the divisions provided by the manufacturer, keep one notebook and tear pages out to file, or dot the pages with sticky notes; but most likely you'll just note things down as they occur to you and worry about how to find them later. You won't run out of juice, but forgetting a pen will cut you off as effectively.

And my goodness, the way they deteriorate over time! Even if you don't get them wet, the contents may or may not be legible due to your level of proficiency in penmanship, the quality of your pens, your need to back up and overwrite, and the degree to which what is written on one page presses down onto those below. The pages work loose. You sketch a map for a tourist and then have to tear out a chunk of page so they can find the Alamo. And so on.

But oh, the siren call of those new blank pages! The neatly-ruled paper, so flat and smooth and clean! The lightness, and convenience, and the variety! Shall I be cheap and buy a pack of cardboard spiralbounds (with the metal spiral so invitingly perfect for caching the indispensable pen, and so inclined to work its way out over time, into a dangerous wire whip), or splurge on a blank book with a sewn binding and a collage cover? Shall I get one small enough to fit into my pocket with my bus pass, or a paperback-sized one to carry alongside the current bus-reading book, or a full-sized one in which I can comfortably write long passages? Shall I color code them for different uses - and if I do, do I need colored pens? Top or side bound? Pockets? Dividers?

Notebooks are no good for writing stories in, not real finished polished stories. Drafting is a messy process, involving much crossing out, marking in, going back and fixing, interim passages, alternate versions, and complete re-doing. You want loose paper and/or a nice flexible computer program that caters to your whims, though a notebook is better than nothing for drafting.

The expensive ones are seductive, and if you want to coax a kid into writing, you should give them serious consideration as bait. When I was in middle school, I would make fair copies of poems in blank books, as a signal to myself that they were complete and I shouldn't mess with them any more. If you're into calligraphy and already have a finished story, you could make a sweet little gift book. But for composition, no.

However, if you're self-conscious and blocked and think everything you write is crud (and who isn't in this situation once a year or so?), if the weight of professional behavior has got you down, if you're beginning to forget why you wanted to do this in the first place - ah, then you need a notebook!

Nothing guarantees privacy like illegible handwriting. Who cares if the story sucks? No one but you can read it anyway - and 10 years from now, you may not be able to, either! You can sit down with a conscious mind as blank as the page in front of you, and start playing around without regard for sense or skill or the devil on your shoulder whispering that you suck: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Once upon a time. Bird on one leg in the cypress over there.

I like to list titles, whether I have stories for them or not: Time Gypsies! Isn't that great? Not that I have a plot, but you can try out those in a notebook, too, guiltlessly spinning idea after trite idea, preserving the flicker of fancy for a future day when, flipping idly through old notebooks, you come on The One and freeze in astonishment: That's brilliant! I can write that! You can start a story, stop in the middle, pick up at a different point in a different notebook. I have a bizarre riff on an old roleplaying campaign sprawling across three spiralbounds. I don't expect to finish it, and if I ever did, I wouldn't dare publish it till everyone I played that game with had forgotten I existed (including my husband). But it's fun and keeps the wheels spinning.

This is my single favorite use for a notebook. Like a beach as the tide pulls out or a yard the morning after the snowfall, the unmarked perfection of the page cries out for your personal touch. No writer's block can resist it. Unlike a computer screen, which glows expectantly, can't be doodled on, and is far too easy to erase, the blank paper stimulates. Other uses exist, equally worthy. My husband has a breast-pocket top-opening spiral he calls the "cash accounting book," because he notes all cash purchases down in it during the week, so when he balances the checkbook on Saturday morning he can also figure out where our cash money went. This primary purpose leaves plenty of space for lists of errands, noting phone numbers, taking measurements when we're trying to find furniture that will fit into our rooms, etc. This notebook, his pillow, and some gum were all he asked me to bring him during his recent stay in the hospital. On my research trip to Paleoindian sites, a similar book rode in my breast pocket the whole way, next to my folding money and my bus tickets, ready to accept research notes and birds seen, with emergency and contact numbers, addresses, and directions to sites all together in one place. The mid-sized notebook I carry around to work out ideas in was invaluable in the hospital for collecting phone numbers, names of antibiotics, lists of tests and results, the necessary data for taping TV shows, and so on. I would have been lost without it that week.

Highly-specialized notebooks, such as printed diaries and day books, don't work well for me. Date books are all the wrong size and the internal divisions don't match my lifestyle. The little spiral books are far more suitable, because they are more flexible, and they fit in my breast pocket. That doesn't mean I'm never tempted by the planners - the ones with the tapestry covers, for instance, are seriously cool. I can see how useful they would be to someone whose life is run off a desk or out of a purse in a sequence of appointments and meetings. It's just that I live a spiralbound lifestyle, not a tapestry cover/calendar/dayplanner lifestyle.

I don't lead a printed page-a-day diary lifestyle, either. I tried that in middle school and it just did not work. Days can go by without my writing in it, and then I'll have a reason to take daily notes, some of which take up multiple pages; not to mention the lists in the back - movies seen, books read, bird species identified. My mother, like her mother before her, is a five-year diarist, noting each day's events on a fifth of a small page, below the events of the same day the year before and above the blank potential of next year. I haven't seen my mother's diary's interior, but I've seen one of my grandmother's, taking her from dating her first husband through the stillbirth of her first child, and to see them all bunched together like that is instructive and fascinating. (Gramma Roberts kept her lists of books read in the back of her household ledger, and made fair copies of her poems in school composition books.)

But my biographer, assuming I ever have one, will not have the benefit of the five-year diary's compression and juxtaposition, because I keep my diary in elegant blank books. People are certain that these hifalutin notebooks, with their sewn bindings and their board covers, are ideal presents for writers; and I guess they're not far wrong. I buy spirals for myself because I'm cheap and know that even the sturdiest sewn book will eventually give way to the rigors of my backpack just like every other kind; but a diary sits on my headboard and only ever travels buried in a suitcase. It can afford to be a little fancy. When I re-read them, I am always surprised - two pages a day for a day or two, then nothing, then a date with a single terse line, something too important to talk about: Today, my cat dropped dead. (There are no entries for my husband's hospitalization; I had to reconstruct a timeline, because some of the dates might be important later, but I could not write except as noted above.) I spend a lot of time being annoyed in my diary; or sick; or worried. And then suddenly, a bizarre atmospheric effect will rate a paragraph, or I'll take a trip and each day will be meticulously recorded in the lonesome discomfort of the motel room, or I'll have insomnia and ramble for awhile.

As if these things weren't enough to drive my theoretical biographer crazy, in some places even I have difficulty reading anything I write by hand. We all type these days, and skill in typing has an inverse relationship to quality of handwriting. Authors are notoriously poor penmen, in any case, the mechanics of forming meticulous letters not being adequate to the demands of the press of ideas. When my handwriting is legible, I'm still working out what I'm saying. When I'm in full flood, I'm not so much making words as mnemonics - thus, lots of abbreviations & deliberate mis-spellings to shorten the time spent before getting on to the next word.

Most of the time it doesn't matter. When I keep a research notebook, I hardly ever refer to it. The act of writing information down has fixed it well enough in the subconscious that I can refer to it for creative purposes without resource to the notes. Prioritized lists of things to do hold no interest past the day on which they occurred 99% of the time. The things that get written in diaries and project notebooks are not ends in themselves, but process-writing. I write about being annoyed so I can stop thinking about being annoyed. I write about the ideas rattling around in my head so I can get a feel for which ones are ready to be written about seriously. Notebook writing is not done for the ages.

Which is precisely why it can be so illuminating years later. My grandmother's five-year diaries and ledgers were not intended for anything beyond keeping track of her life as she lived it; but for her grandchildren, born after her death, they are the only way we can know her directly. Her fair-copied poems are not quite a public face, since she never sought publication, but they are Gramma Roberts dressed up. The diaries and accounts and lists of books are Gramma Roberts as we would have known her on a day-to-day basis.

Similarly, my mother's battered trip ledger is a wholly practical record of trip expenses and stops, with the occasional cryptic note next to a restaurant or hotel, dating back to 1966. Probably this will never become an important historical document, since the 20th century is so well-documented overall; but to members of the family, it's as good as a photo album to flip through it, the raw data of vacations and service-dictated moves; and of Mom's education history in the ministry, which involves lots of traveling to seminars. If we should lose the benefit of her company before my niece grows up enough to know her well, the diaries and the ledger can still make her known to her only grandchild.

I won't have grandchildren, and I may not have a biographer. But I don't throw away old notebooks, any more than I would throw away bits of my subconscious. Notebooks are like tiny exterior brains, bits of myself peeled off and organized, made manageable. Maybe I'll need to understand those old bits again some day, and maybe I won't. They were worth doing, so they were worth keeping. Lots of people, who want to die and be done with it, have their personal papers - their notebooks - destroyed when they die, and I always think that's a shame. Selfish, even. But people are allowed to be selfish; especially people who use the notebooks as exterior storage for their undesirable traits, their shames and irritations and evil impulses, which they wish to keep separate from both their public selves and their interior life. If you write it down, you can stop thinking about it; if you write it down and burn it, can you stop being it?

I doubt it, but it's not for me to say. We all notebook differently, and it is not necessarily true that the bits of self shut up in our notebooks are the important bits. A good, a useful, a happy life - that's the goal. Notebooks are a tool for getting there.

Use yours well.

February 2005 © Peni Griffin

Editor: Michael Thorn
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