Please keep a notebook!

I wrote a piece for Longreads a few years back that was like inscribing the instructions on the inside of my head. I say that because it was about keeping a notebook.

I keep a notebook. Ernest Hemingway kept a notebook. So did Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso! I think you, too, should keep a notebook (or maybe just notes). I love reading the notebooks other people have kept!

Longreads is in the business of recommending longreads [essays and works of journalism that require time to read and effort to produce] so the piece was a hybrid; it begins with a short personal essay about how I began keeping a notebook and then I segue into recommendations of some stellar reads about the art and craft of recording our thoughts. One writer I cited even quotes a long-ago author who questioned what was lost when we moved from writing everything by hand to typing our thoughts. There is something fundamental about using our hands to record our thoughts (although it's the writing -- the recording -- that counts.)

All of this to say, please keep a notebook! Give it a chance in 2021 (there is so much to say, no?) 

Write in it whenever you have a moment (also, if you can, create a moment to write in it. Maybe Sunday morning at 8 a.m. Or how about Friday evening at 9 p.m.? Discover what works). 

Write whatever you'd like to remember -- even your grocery list. Even a laundry list of ordinary moments that make up your day. Write in it as often as you can -- but DON'T let occasional hiatuses discourage you from maintaining the notebook. In other words, do not hold yourself to some unattainable or as-yet unattainable standard -- such as writing in the notebook every day -- and then abandon the project because you haven't kept up this absurd bargain.

So like I said, write in it when you can. Once a week? Cool. Once a month? It's something. Specifically: something you'll be able to revisit later. Your future self meeting your former self on the page (or screen, if you're keeping a digital diary).

Here's how my piece for Longreads begins -- click the link below to read the whole thing:

(From Longreads)

"On Keeping a Notebook: A Reading List"

“I can feel my brain changing.” Those were the first words I wrote in what would eventually become a continuous journal spanning thousands of pages and dozens of notebooks.

It was the middle of the night, and after I jotted the thought down, I added, “Is it permanent?”

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck, its echo reverberating in my head. We were living in Atlanta then, and our house had one of those oversized master suites, inherited from the previous owner, so once out of bed, I was standing in a small sitting room that adjoined the bedroom. Next to me, a lamp I’d spirited away from my grandfather’s house cast a small glow, easing the insomnia I was experiencing. I kept repeating a phrase to myself, “The rough places made smooth.” I wasn’t sure if it was a biblical quote, or whether I had combined two different sayings (Atlanta is the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had the vague idea that Dr. King had said something to that effect). I only knew I felt relief at committing some of my inner turmoil to paper.

The next night, awake again at 3 a.m., I wrote about what I called “adventures in mind-expansion.” The journaling struck me as unusual. I was a reporter at an NPR station at the time and had been a news journalist for more than a decade. But this was different — akin to the writing I’d done when I was 9 and my teachers predicted I would be a writer.

I can partly chalk it up to something that happened a week later — my son’s birth. When I went into labor and headed off to the hospital that warm July day, I packed a notebook, a practice I’d abandoned years before when my expat days in Italy had concluded. One of the first photos I have with my newborn shows me writing in the maternity ward while nursing him. From there, a notebook became my constant companion. Some days in early motherhood, I couldn’t stop writing. I’d fill notebook pages at different intervals of the day, like an ongoing Twitter thread.

I was preparing for motherhood to change my life; it was the transformation I’d trained my eyes on entirely. But instead a parallel transformation involving writing also emerged.

Writing anchored me through my first year as a working mom. I’d pull off the road to write on my way home from work, or jot a few lines in the daycare parking lot. I found the twister of passing buildings, pedestrians, music on the radio, and the sounds of my son floating up from the backseat inspired me to experience new joys or simply savor old ones from a new vantage point. Sometimes I would even write while leaning the journal against the steering wheel, my eye moving between the page and the road.

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To read the rest, click on this link:

https://longreads.com/2019/07/23/notebook-reading-list

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