I love hearing and reading about how other people write and organize their notebooks — Emerson for example. I was going through my old notes and felt like sharing. There are no right or wrong practices for notebooks and journals. It really depends on who you are and what you’re trying to do. My own habits have changed every year — sometimes every couple of months.
For as long as I can remember I’ve written and drawn ideas on paper. Of my Grade 2 schoolwork that was kept, every page has ”designs” on the back. Anything I did on my own time was thrown out. I’ve always tended to outgrow and disown anything I’d already done. I remember filling pages of ideas for screenplays and stuff when I was in high school; those are gone (with no regrets whatsoever). I don’t think I did much when I was in university. When I graduated in 2000 I started jotting down career ideas and schemes; those are gone too — for the better.
Finally from 2000 to 2001 I started trying to be more systematic, taking “personal education” more seriously. And that’s when I started actually wanting to be a writer — or something like that. But even then, when I tried to write a coherent article or something I always ended up being dissatisfied and throwing it out. All I kept were a few random musings, reflections, insights, and ambitions. I still have a small pile of loose notes, accumulated over the years since then:
It wasn’t until I lived in Vancouver in the summer of 2002 that I started keeping a serious notebook. I lived within a ten minute walk of the beautiful downtown library and found myself there every day (surprisingly, after having only been in the McMaster University libraries a couple dozen occasions the entire time I was there). Page 1, notes from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media:
The vertically-written quote on the inner cover is from A.N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education (Whitehead, Maslow and Nietzsche were the three thinkers who had influenced me before then). Under it I wrote, “Articulating knowledge into Wisdom is like finding constellations; Wisdom is the form of points of knowledge relating to each other.” I guess that’s what managing a set of notebooks is all about. It had dividers for different subjects. I used to flip back and forth, taking notes from different books and different lines of thought on different pages during the same sitting.
As an aside, I forgot about this but notice the mirror-image writing near the bottom on the right. Most of my writing that summer was in a public place (library, Starbucks or Timmies patio, random bench…) and I guess I wasn’t totally comfortable and didn’t want people beside me noticing something dumb I wrote. I haven’t used it at all since then.
After those four months things petered out a little. I added to that notebook occasionally, but for the most part I kept accumulating loose pages (not to mention Post-Its on my desk and the wall beside it) as I scribbled down unexpected thoughts. I don’t know why (there were still plenty of pages left in my first book) but for some reason I bought a graph paper notebook from Zellers. There was something about starting a fresh notebook that generated fresh thinking. I got into a pattern of buying a new quad-ruled notebook every two months or so. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. That rhythm continued from 2004 to 2006.
I usually filled roughly 100 pages front-and-back, writing every day, until I ran out of steam and seemed to have no original thoughts. I’d go two days without interest before deciding that I didn’t care about the intellectual stuff anymore… and virtually as soon as I decided I was done, I’d get a rush of intellectual energy, pick up a new book, and write about the new creative and educational directions I wanted to go in… and then within a few days I’d be going in different directions altogether. I never really knew where I’d end up in a month or two. Meanwhile I still produced more loose pages (mostly at work, grabbing paper out of the printer) and I started keeping little tiny notebooks for different kinds of notes.
So around 2005 I was really spreading myself around. A lot of my notes were business ideas (either entrepreneurial or pertaining to the company I worked for), some of it was speculation about the future (mostly related to the business ideas), a lot of it was ideas for screenplays and stuff. Most of it was word-for-word quotes from books I was reading. That practice started when I was in Vancouver — when I thought I might need a full quote sometime in the future when the book wouldn’t be available to me anymore. Eventually I found that I learned a lot more deeply by doing so.
In 2005 and 2006 I got more heavily into pragmatism and process philosophy — starting with Whitehead (who I mentioned above), Dewey, leading to James, Peirce, and eventually to Ortega – which tends to seem like simple common sense until you actually penetrate it and realize how subtle and complex it really is. I wasn’t “putting it into my own words,” nor was I merely transcribing everything; I was economizing what they’d written, selecting the least I’d need to remember the essential ideas. From there I’d have my own thoughts, and I’d start to engage in almost a kind of dialogue, making their thinking relevant to our own time and bringing up new questions.
Then I wondered why the hell I was switching between graph paper and tiny pages — both really not ideal for what I was using them for. So I switched to the mid-sized Mead Five Star notebooks. Not too big and not too small. They’re not the cheapest notebooks but also far from being the most expensive. Plenty rigid. I don’t need anything like a Moleskin, and even the added features on other Five Stars seem unecessary. Most importantly, the coils are the right size for stowing my pen (writing tools are a whole other topic).
But I went through a super-broke phase a year and a half ago and decided to recycle those old quad-ruled notebooks. Remember I tended to start a new one when I was only half way through the previous. I wanted to go throught them anyways to reminisce and get a sense of how my thinking evolved the way it did. Luckily they already came with three-ring holes punched out. I tore out all the written-on pages and stuck them in one giant binder:
… and put together a very rough table of content summaries (which itself is over 30 pages long) — trying to find shapes of the constellations:
… and proceeded to fill the rest of those old quad-ruled books by sitting for hours-on-end at UWO’s Weldon Library, taking notes from all the professional philosophy and psychology books I’m not allowed to sign out:
Now I haven’t written in a notebook for months… just checked: not since October, and it’s pretty thin going back to September (though there is a lot throughout the summer). I do almost everything online now. This is my notebook. It’s quite a long way from writing backwards with my left hand so Tim Horton’s patrons can’t read over my shoulder. I guess that confidence comes with experience — through a lot of playing and wandering (and wondering), a lot of mistakes, a lot of adaptations, a lot of learning. Finally, I have ideas worth keeping.
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