Barbara Hepworth’s stone collection

The sculptor, Margaret Hepworth, was born and grew up in my home town, Wakefield, West Yorkshire. I have always been drawn to her beautiful work, which reconnects me with the landscapes of my childhood – the moors, the undulating hills, which have always felt to me like gigantic bodies, holding my own smaller one.

‘I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.’

Barbara Hepworth, 1971. A Pictorial Autobiography

On this visit, I was fascinated all over again by Hepworth’s personal collection of pebbles, stones and artefacts. Their influence on her later work is so clear: pebbles ringed with lines; carved and etched figurines; shapes smoothed by weather and time.

‘Many people select a stone or pebble to carry for the day,’ she wrote. ‘The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force. The beautifully shaped stone, washed up by the sea, is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.’

Perhaps this is true of a poem or a piece of writing – or even a single word. We carry it with us. We hold it and are simultaneously held by it.

Here are some of the ‘scrying stones’ that I’ve collected over the years, stones worn through by wind and sea, making holes to peer through, into the future and the past, as well as the present moment. Sometimes, I like to hold them when I write.

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Your notebook as a private space

I shared this page from my notebook over on Instagram recently and it seemed to resonate with people.

It sometimes feels as if we all need to talk publicly about everything. But as writers and artists - actually, as human beings - it’s so important to have a private space where we can say anything, make mistakes or, as Keats wrote, be ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.

When we write with sharing in mind (on social media, for example) we tend to edit, craft and shape. We feel that we need to know things, or at least have a more fully-formed opinion.

When we write privately, we can write to find out what we’re thinking and what we’re afraid of. We are more likely to find out what we don’t know yet.

Many of my students - and not just those signed-up for writing courses - tell me that they have found their writing practice transformed when they allow themselves this private, secret space.

The irony of this blog post is not lost on me. I hesitated before sharing this particular page because, when I wrote it, it was just me talking to myself. I think if I’d written it with the aim of sharing it on Instagram, I’d have written it differently.

I love to see other people’s notebooks. I think most of us find it fascinating.

But write for you first.

You can craft and shape it later. You can decide what to share and when and with whom.

Writing and editing are not the same thing.

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.

Using writing as a way to calm anxiety

People often ask me if there are some simple writing techniques that they can begin to use to calm anxiety?

I have two suggestions that can help you to get started, which involve taking two slightly different approaches. I’d recommend experimenting with each of them to find what works best for you.

I don’t believe that there is ever a magical ‘one size fits all’ approach to using writing for your wellbeing. But over time - and often a surprisingly short period of time - you can get a feel for what is most helpful for you in your current circumstances.

Just write
Peter Elbow’s free writing, Julia Cameron’s morning pages, James Pennebaker’s expressive writing, Natalie Goldberg’s ‘keeping the hand moving’… What all these techniques have in common is that the idea of just writing, without pausing, editing or thinking too much, allowing our thoughts to free flow onto the page, can be beneficial to us.

Some people find it useful to set a timer for ten minutes (sometimes called timed free writing). The morning pages approach advocates writing three pages every morning, right after you wake up. Pennebaker’s expressive writing paradigm - currently the most widely researched approach to writing and wellbeing - typically asks people to write for twenty minutes about something that is troubling them.

What are the positive effects of the ‘just write’ approach for our wellbeing?
The ‘just write’ approach can boost our creativity by helping us to bypass those internal critical voices that can keep us stuck. One theory is that just writing, without over-thinking or editing as we go, can help us to find our ‘flow,’ the term coined by psychologist Cszikszentmihalyi to describe that optimum ‘peak’ state or ‘zone’ in which we are fully absorbed in a task that we love.

Many people also find that writing is a helpful way of processing thoughts, feelings and emotions. As Joan Didion once wrote:

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’

– Why I Write (New York Times Book Review, 1976)

How does writing achieve these effects?
After many years of research into Pennebaker’s expressive writing, which does appear to show some positive effects across a range of situations and health challenges, we still can’t say with any certainty why just writing - or more specifically, writing for ten or twenty minutes about something that is troubling us - can be so beneficial for some people.

One theory is that expressive writing is effective because of what Pennebaker calls a ‘disinhibition effect.’ This is the idea that holding difficult experiences inside us demands effort and can create stress and overwhelm; and getting them ‘out there ‘ onto the page might bring ease and a sense of release.

This certainly seems to be the case for many people at certain times in their lives.

Is the ‘just write’ approach appropriate for everyone?
One of my own personal concerns about expressive writing is that the effects on people writing about a traumatic or painful experience are not yet very well understood. If you are suffering from the effects of severe trauma or PTSD, for example, revisiting these kinds of experiences through your own writing could revivify them, exacerbating symptoms such as flashbacks. In this situation, it is advisable to work with someone who is experienced enough to help you to select a particular approach to writing, such as a skilled therapist.

In my experience, even when people are not traumatised, they can be surprised and unsettled by what surfaces in their writing. If this happens for you, it’s important to be able to talk to a friend, therapist or someone you can trust. If you’re feeling anxious or upset and you’re not sure exactly why, writing might help you to uncover or identify the source of that anxiety. But it’s important to then have a way of processing that new information and the associated feelings.

Currently, we know that writing can be a very powerful means of nurturing wellbeing, through exploring and gaining new insights into our thoughts, feelings and experience, getting it ‘out there’ and developing confidence in our creativity. But we don’t really have enough information yet about for whom different approaches to writing might be most effective and when; or, more importantly, the situations where writing could actually make people feel worse rather than better.

Some people may find a more structured approach to writing more beneficial, such as writing techniques designed to create helpful distance from difficult experiences and memories.

Experiment with the ‘just write’ approach if:
You feel that you have enough support around you that you can talk through anything that comes up for you in your writing process.

You feel that your notebook or journal is a safe place to vent, or get your feelings of anxiety out onto the page.

When to avoid ‘just writing’ about difficult feelings
If you’re experiencing severe anxiety or feeling very anxious about something in particular, avoid writing about the thing that is troubling you and try writing about something that will distract you from your feelings instead. That way, you may still get all the benefits of finding ‘flow’ and expressing your creativity, without revisiting any difficult memories or events. When you’re feeling anxious, you might find the ‘writing the moment’ exercise below more helpful than ‘just writing.’

Writing the moment
Some people find that the act of writing can help them to slow down, and take some time out from the pressures of every day life. This can have a calming effect. In this sense, writing might act a little like meditation or mindfulness practice.

You might like to try writing about what you see outside your window right now; or what you notice in your room; or the objects that you see on your desk or from the bus on the way to work.

Begin by describing what you see as clearly as you can. Really look. Bring your full attention to the process of noticing and describing.

Again, don’t think about editing as you go. Simply write. This writing is just for you and it really doesn’t matter if you don’t write perfectly formed sentences.

You could experiment with writing about the view from the same window, or the same spot on your walk in the park every day for a week. What changes? What stays the same?

Tips:
If you can, experiment with using a pen and paper rather than a screen.

Set yourself small goals. Write for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, rather than an hour.

Don’t beat yourself up if some days writing feels easier than others. Let the page be your friend rather than yet another critical voice in your head. Remember too that so many of the benefits of writing derive from the process of writing, rather than what you actually write. Let your messy, imperfect, un thought-through writing emerge.

Think about how you can incorporate some free writing into other practices that support your wellbeing, such as breath work, meditation and mindfulness, gentle exercise and yoga.

Sophie Nicholls is a bestselling author, teacher and writing mentor, researching the connections between writing and wellbeing.

She writes a weekly newsletter at: sophienicholls.substack.com