The Notebooks

I don’t journal, and sometimes I think I’m the only writer around who doesn’t.  But then I remind myself that I blog regularly, which is a version of journaling, I guess.  But is it really, when you’re writing in public?  There’s so much in my life that I would never blog about, so it seems like a bad analogy to journaling for me.

But notebooks- I have scads of those, some from my childhood, lots from now, spanning years and years.  Those notebooks vary– some are hard-backed and cloth covered, some are moleskines, some spiral notebooks– and the content inside is certainly varied.  Jottings, half-starts, finished essays, writings that are poetic but not quite poems, to-do lists, lists of in-progress works, taped-in pages of magazines with contest info or submissions requirements, writing goals by month and year: they’re not quite journals, but I think anyone who actually sat down and went through them would know me perhaps better than most of my friends would.

I can’t imagine being a writer without my notebooks, even though I’m typing this blog on my trusty Mac laptop.  I need my notebooks for the moment at the red light when I jot down a line or sentence, or the time when my students are taking a quiz and I need to start a poem, or when I just need to get my hand moving again to start to feel my writing muscles slowly limber back up.  Today I paged through one I had found in our library and it reminded me of a goal I had scribbled down weeks ago, to get back to a story abandoned earlier this year and begin a whole new revision and drafting process on it.  When I run dry in one medium, I often shift to another, and finding that notebook today helped me shift out of my poetic block and back into short fiction, for which I am actually fresh because I haven’t touched a short story of mine in months.

Tell me about your notebooks– I bet every writer reading this keeps one, whether you blog or not.