How many notebooks does a writer need? In my case at least three, usually four to five on the go at any one time, which is highly dangerous as I can end up writing anything anywhere and putting it in any one of my book/hand bags.
Consequently I have an ever increasing stack of used notebooks filled with stories, novels in progress, poems – whatever I’m working on, although once deep into a novel I do try to keep these notebooks separate and I try for the most part to keep poetry separate too. It’s just that I’m not always sure what I’m going to write.
Entries also include the random pieces written on the hoof in cafes, gardens, new and old places, lists, notes to myself, blog posts, workshop ideas, doodles and drawings, plans and lists of chapters, word counts, research notes and of course the odd shopping list. Most of these pieces I have transcribed or used in some way but if I take a trawl through any old notebook, I can usually find one or two pieces to take me by surprise. Pieces I might not even remember writing.
Looking for something I do remember but that was written some time ago can be tricky. So I was lucky yesterday, when I went rooting around in my stack of notebooks, to put my hands on the very notebook I was looking for, the one I’d used the last time I was in Agde in the south of France and had drafted a story in. It was a story I hadn’t forgotten, about a strange stone head and a woman and a pharmacist on a feast day, and tomorrow I’ll start on the job of transcribing it.
Soon it will be new notebook time.Now that is exciting!
You can read about my time writing in Agde HERE
Are you a notebook fetishist – I wonder? And what’s in your notebook?
It used to be that, I couldn’t abide notebooks. I think I have some weird form of o.c.d. I know that it’s usually characterized by hoarding, but I go too far in the opposite direction. Once I’ve set upon an idea, at best, the ideas scribbled on scraps about me are consigned to a drawer, out of sight, out of mind. But more often, any ideas that are superfluous to the current project are destroyed so that they cannot distract and demand my attention. However, I began a song writing project at New Year, and have built up lyric ideas in a number of notebooks. Today I wrote a tune, I hunted through my notes for some lyrics and found some lines I’d penned in the wee hours about insomnia which fitted the music perfectly. Have you read Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’? It’s about a writer who orders her life in four notebooks. A notebook fetishist’s dream.
I love that you found some words ‘penned in the wee hours’ for your song – just goes to show that nothing in our notebooks need go to waste. I’m definitely not for destroying things.
I read The Golden Notebook in my youth as lots of women around me at the time did. I admired it but I wasn’t entirely taken with it, for one thing I had difficulty sympathising with the distress of the party members. I knew one or two (my father had been a member) but was not convinced by either their politics or their brand of feminism. So it wasn’t the landmark book for me that I know it was for some. I’ve tried to read it more recently but with less success, for me it seems very much of its time. As to the notebooks it’s interesting to think just how one might divide ones life into notebooks -???
I agree, it is a product of its time. A product I’m happy to leave in the hands of the comparative literature professors. I’m more sympathetic with the politics, but not wholesale, for me they unearth as many questions as they answer. My life in note books would run to 27, an A-Z of misanthropic rants, and an A5 slimline moleskin for the occasional reverie. How about you?