More Notebook Notes

You may recall a month ago or so  I mentioned that Kay Ryan doesn't carry a notebook around, while other writers (I cited Will Self) find  constant access to a notebook to be a necessary part of their writing process.

Now Charles Simic has weighed in on the notebook issue at the New York Times Review of Books blog. However, Simic is more interested in the place of actual paper pads in this age of digital notebooks and phones that record any information we want to keep.

Simic writes: "...on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil."

Like Simic, I am a big fan of notebooks. I always have one in my bag, and  I shop for those based on durability, since they get banged up quite a bit on my travels and outings. Then I have a notebook at home for my poems, and another notebook for any commercial writing ideas that I have, and a notebook for notes on novels I have partially written. And I have all my notebooks going back to college, one a year or so. I have lugged these overseas a number of times, stored them at actual expense, and now have them under my bed. Why? I don't know. Every once in a while I think about tossing them out; I hardly refer to them ever. I fully intend to have them all destroyed before I die, so why do I hang onto them now? I couldn't say, but I suspect Charles Simic would understand my inclination.

How about you? Do you use notebooks, or have you gone completely digital? Do you store old notebooks or do you jettison them eventually? Thoughts on notebooks welcome.

One for the Notebook (One Against)

I subscribe on Twitter to AdviceToWriters, which generally yields several pieces of "advice" per day. Today they provided this quotation from Will Self (really, there's a person named Will Self? yes, just Googled him, he's a British novelist):

"Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever."


Which immediately reminded me of the following quote from Kay Ryan:

"I do not carry a notebook in my pocket. That would be the ruination of me because it would make my two worlds connect. I can’t say it strongly enough."


There is no right way to be a writer. There is only the way that works for you for now, which may not be the way that works for you later (see post on Troy Jollimore).

This is, like all the best things, both a blessing and a curse. As is, apparently, a notebook.