Starting a new notebook

I’ve just cracked open a new notebook, fresh for a period of much longed-for time to write and create.

(And hoping I’m not tempting Fate here.)

Like most writers and creatives, I have a cupboard full of notebooks because keeping a notebook has been a lifelong practice. There are few things as full of promise as smoothing back the cover of a brand new notebook. This summer, mine is this Moleskine. I chose it because it has a whopping 400 pages - plenty to keep me going through July and August.

Like most writers, I am very particular about my notebooks. To be honest, I fell out of love with Moleskine for a few years because I find that the paper, whilst deliciously smooth and the distinctive creamy colour that we all associate with Moleskine, is also a little too thin for me. I don’t like show-through. For a while, I experimented with these from Leuchtturm. The paper is so good, but they are pricey, especially when you go through as many notebooks as I tend to do, and I’m really not a fan of a hard cover. (However, if you like numbered pages, this might be the notebook for you .)

I then stumbled across these by Clairefontaine, the company that supplies the paper for Leuchtturm. They are so much cheaper and generally very good if you like to write with fountain pen or brush pen, or paint with watercolour, or glue things into your notebook. The paper is beautiful and really holds up.

Over the years, I’ve also flirted with dot grid paper, but I’ve concluded that the paper just has to be plain for me. And I can’t abide writing on lined paper.

My other requirement is that the covers of my notebooks are as plain as possible. Perhaps this is a hangover from all those childhood Christmases when kind relatives would buy Sophie-the-budding-writer the most exquisite journals with embellished covers. They would sit on my desk untouched because I could never bring myself to sully their perfection with my messy, unedited words. No, my notebook needs to be a place where I can think out loud, scribble, experiment; a space that can safely contain my unedited self.

I’m in awe of Austin Kleon’s three-notebook system. Inspired by Kleon (because which creative person isn’t?) I did once try to keep a small logbook alongside my notebook - but my mind and my life just don’t work in this way and everything just ended up in the one bigger book.

Something I do have in common with Kleon’s process, though, is that I have a ritual for beginning a new notebook. I like to decide upon something or someone to serve as the notebook’s presiding spirit or inspiration. This summer, it’s a little owl. Owls have always felt significant to me (maybe because of the associations with my name) and I bought this stamp fifteen years ago in Vancouver. It’s made from a design by the artist Ryan Cranmer.

close-up image of printed owl stamp by artist Ryan Cranmer

I often copy out a piece of text or a poem that I’d like to adopt as my guide. Here’s Mary Oliver’s poem ‘In Blackwater Woods’ from Devotion, the new Selected, published at the end of last year.

Image of poem copied into notebook and Mary Oliver’s Devotions.

I also lit my candles and did a reading from the beautiful The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck by Kim Krans.

Notebook sketch of card reading and round cards from The Wild Unknown Archetype deck.

Of course, the most important thing about a notebook for any writer is to use it.

I’m quietly excited at the prospect of a summer of writing and dreaming.

On the value of not throwing your work away

I’m not much of a hoarder. I like to declutter, keep things organised. I binge watched Marie Kondo’s Netflix series and nodded along as she introduced her clients to the transformative power of tidying things up and throwing things out.

But over the last few months, I’ve come to realise that there is value in keeping writing: old first drafts and redrafts, half-finished ideas, notebooks and scrapbooks. My Mum recently gave me all the schoolbooks and snippets of writing she’d saved, beginning when I was younger than my daughter is now. There is something so valuable about looking at this child version of my writer self; something I could never have predicted when I was shown this same stuff in my early twenties. Back then, I cringed at the teen diaries composed in painstaking calligraphy and in a voice that is more Charlotte Bronte than lonely kid growing up in a post-industrial Northern town.

But lately, I’ve been looking back at all these old diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper and I’m so grateful to my Mum for never throwing them out. I feel newly compassionate towards this half-formed, fragile, younger me, already trying to make sense of her life by writing things down. I’ve started to realise that we just can’t know in advance what from our work will be important to us in the future.

This has started me thinking that, in an age of screens, it’s too easy to throw things away. (I had a blog that I’d kept for six years but abandoned completely in 2012, for example.)

In fact, as we write into digital space, it’s actually really hard to hold onto things. Unless we’re very disciplined about version control, we often edit until there’s no remaining trace of our messy first drafts.

I wonder if the writers of our current age will be able to gift their draft manuscripts to Harvard or Oxford in the future? Will scholars and readers be able to study the many versions of a poem or the gradual progress of a novel in manuscript, and see the visible evidence of the writer crafting the work?

And so perhaps notebooks are more important than they’ve ever been. Start them. Keep them - in a box or a cupboard. Even if you don’t revisit them for years, one day they’ll become your treasure.