The Best Way to Keep a Writer’s Notebook
Why you may be doing it all wrong.
I have little notebooks everywhere. In my bag, in my car, on my desks. Several are on my desks. Most of them are inside a little writing shed on my property but others are kept at my college office. I do not just keep one. And I do not consider it necessary to write in them, any of them, every day. None of them would be considered a journal or a strict daily diary. No, they are notebooks. Meant for notes. Fleeting thoughts of greatness and nothingness. Bursts of creativity and banal crap. And if you are keeping a notebook and not doing it in this scattered, haphazard way, I contend you may be doing it all wrong.
Notebooks have been part of the writing life forever. They have come in many forms from Virginia Woolf’s diary to Ernest Hemingway’s ever-present notebook, the one he wrote about in A Moveable Feast.
“I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” —Ernest Hemingway.
Mark Twain used his notebook to brainstorm. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled more than a dozen volumes with observations that were the foundations of bigger works. And John Steinbeck kept a diary of his writing progress while he worked on The Grapes of Wrath.
