Bottom Line: Keep the pencil moving.

During the pandemic, I joined countless others by signing up for on-line courses. Some of these were on cooking; some on travel. But the one I followed the most religiously, was the classes offered by the high-end, ultrasophisticated operation called Masterclass. Being always and forever interested in writers and the writing process, I zeroed in on the more than a dozen classes offered by very well-known authors. Among the long list, these included classes by novelists like Salman Rushdie, famous feminist writer of the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood; novelists of the dark, Joyce Carol Oates, and the poet laureate who made poetry accessible to me, Billy Collins. Even when I do not like their books (e.g., James Patterson, Dan Brown), I could still pick up some tips about writing and organizing your thoughts. 

To the person, every writer spoke about keeping a notebook. When asked to talk about his notebooks and what role they played in the writing process, some, like Salman Rushdie, likely pulled one out of storage, only to be baffled by how little of what he ultimately wrote in that notebook ended up in the final product. 

The idea of a writer’s notebook is to get ideas flowing without a lot of censorship. It’s like doodling (scribbling absentmindedly is the dictionary definition of that) but in a focused way that circles around a specific topic. This is not entirely a word-oriented process. That is why it doesn’t lend itself to the online environment driven by what can be accomplished through a keyboard.

Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, says the purpose of the notebook is simply to get the hand moving across the page. The goal is to get into the type of liminal space in between the conscious and the subconscious. Gorman maintains that keeping a notebook is an anecdote to writer’s block.

I break out a new, high-end pad of paper from Levinger for each new writing project. Each project has a different colored pad of paper. Each pad contains 50 lined sheets. It takes a few days to see if an idea pans out or if it is off topic . I have taken to using colored pencils, to circle in on ideas. There are a lot of dead ends in these scribbles. A brilliant idea for the first sentence of a paragraph, but no second sentence follows. I often put a big X through a section and write a note to myself: “off-topic.” Some pages are some packed with scribbling that they are indecipherable even to me.

After I have scribbled and doodled my way through 50 pages, I have usually finished my first solid draft of an article or chapter. The half-consciousness involved in keeping a writer’s notebook is why some prolific writers – like Stephen King or the famous biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Bob Carro – chose to write their first draft in long hand, on legal pads. They say they can think better that way.