As a Way to Focus Thinking and Develop Ideas
Poets, writers, and painters often keep a process-oriented journal that records ideas as they evolve. Authors keep a notebook to jot down ideas and focus attention. Picking up the notebook each morning is a type of mindfulness. It’s a meditation but one whose attention is to channel ideas by jotting down words and phrases in an unfiltered form.
I usually have at least three colored, lined, 8 x 10 notepads from Levenger going at one time. Each project is associated with a different colored notepad. I find that in general, I am about done drafting a manuscript by the time I have filled up a notepad. I use them mostly as a warm-up activity to writing. It’s a to concentrate attention and think. They can keep a train of thought going despite distractions that keep you from getting the ideas down in a more developed form.
As useful as they are in the process of producing, I find that the pages are often such of scramble of words and arrows that they are hard to decipher in retrospect. Occasionally the pages will help me go backward in time to see how an idea developed or, on the other hand, went off track. I consult them as a write, but it is not that they are not rought drafts.
I keep the filled notebooks for awhile, but generally I find they are almost indecipherable to me at a later date.
The act of jotting down ideas in a notebook is similar to a member of an orchestra tuning up an instrument prior to a performance. It’s a way to snag those half-thought ideas that are circling around somewhere at the back of your head to see if they spool out. Reading entries in a notebook can spark new ideas for a later date.
Some writers are not concerned if notebook entries are illegible or hard to decipher in retrospect. A notebook is not a journal. Nor is its primary purpose to serve as record to be preserved for some later date. A writer’s notebook is thinking manifest, liberated by the very fact that no one is meant to read it.