On (Not) Keeping a Notebook

Why is the idea of a daily diary more appealing than the actual keeping of that diary? Why do I only have Januarys and Julys on record and nothing in between?

The first thing I need to say is thank you. Thank you for so wholeheartedly embracing this newsletter. I posted about its existence on Instagram and Facebook and, two days later, I had more than 1000 subscribers, which is about 999 times more than I was expecting!

And a big, big thank you to those who’ve taken out paid subscriptions. I hadn’t imagined anyone would pay until I’d been doing this for at least a few weeks but you all have more faith in me than I do in myself! I’ll have more information in the next newsletter about what extra benefits you get as a paid subscriber, and what will be available to those who have a free subscription.

And Happy New Year too! New years are always filled with hope and I’d like to think that 2023 is a hopeful year where we wish and dream and perhaps see some of those wishes and dreams come true.

Now, onto the words, which is what you’re all here for!

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Morning pages. Bullet journals. Diaries. Virginia Woolf kept one; so did Susan Sontag. Oscar Wilde absolutely insisted on the practice of journaling, famously saying:

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”

The few scant pages I’ve managed to keep in a diary each year would be better used as sleeping pills for any insomniac train travellers.

I’ve tried to start a diarising habit each year in January. The benefits are reported to be enormous. And I’m a writer, so it makes sense that diaries and I would go together like tonic and gin. But I lose interest by February (in the journal, not the gin!) and I try to reignite the habit mid-year but, once again I fail. I end up with an archive of Januarys, as if I’m an expert only in beginnings – someone who avoids middles and ends.

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One year I even tried the bullet journal.

Instagram is replete with pictures of exquisitely calligraphed bullet journals filled with rainbow colours, pictures of unicorns and more goals than a football field. But my bullet journal had good intentions and poor execution. It was an un-Instagram-worthy mess.

Turns out that untidy handwriting doesn’t look any prettier just because it’s scribbled in a bullet journal instead of a regular diary.

Many, many writers extol the virtues of Julia Cameron’s“Morning Pages”, which are also a kind of journal. But I’ve always known instinctively that the idea of sitting down first thing in the morning and writing is as about as appealing to me as reading anything in the Jane Austen plus zombies subgenre.

The thing is, I do have notebooks. Full notebooks. Lots of them. It’s just that what’s in them isn’t really anything about me. Instead, they contain what Joan Didion, in her famous essay On Keeping a Notebook (whose title I’ve borrowed here), calls:

“bits of the mind’s string, too short to use …”

These bits of string are orphaned sentences that inscribe themselves into my mind when I’m out doing my version of Morning Pages – running. In fact it wasn’t until I re-read Didion’s essay, which I first encountered and adored at university many years ago, that I realised why I don’t like diaries, but that I’ve always had a notebook-habit – one peculiar to me.

I’ve often said that running is part of my writing practice. Being outside, away from everyone and everything except music, motion, sunrise and the occasional dolphin or black swan, is where I have my most creative ideas. As I run, my mind wanders through the collection of junk I keep in my head and pulls out treasures (little bijoux sentences) that I never knew were there.

If I flick through my most recent notebook, the first three sentences I’ve jotted down after returning from my morning runs are:

“She’s like a tragedy you want to turn back the pages of until you reach the place where it all went wrong.”

And:

“In the scene in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, there are echoes of another white dress and another broken heart – in another time.”

And:

“She kept chasing the thing that broke her until I was the one who shattered.”

Each of these sentences – not exactly as they are here, but reshaped and reworked – appear in my next book. I didn’t know who the “she” of the tragedy was when I wrote down the first sentence. I didn’t know what the white dress from the second phrase looked like. Nor what the woman in the third was chasing. It didn’t matter. What mattered was to capture them before they returned to the junkyard of my mind, never to be discovered again.

And then they lurked in my notebook, waiting.

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My copies of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where her essay, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ appears. Yes, I love it so much I have more than one copy!

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest …”

Joan Didion

That’s Joan Didion once more from On Keeping a Notebook. And she’s articulated exactly what it is that I’m doing when I come in from my run and scribble down as fast as I can these haphazard bits of my mind’s string. I never know if I’ll use them. But I keep them more faithfully than I keep almost any other souvenir of my life – and most certainly more faithfully than I’ve ever kept a diary.

What I do know now, for 2023, is that I won’t bother with recording my January, forgetting my February and trying to redeem myself in July. That kind of diary isn’t for me.

What I want – what I need – are the sentences that fill my bankrupt mornings with white dresses and shattered people and tragedies that can perhaps be undone in the press of a letter on my keyboard, in a scene taking shape on the screen in front of me all because as I ran by the river the day before, I heard the echo of a broken heart, saw a girl waiting for a story – and because I wanted to know exactly where was the place it all went wrong for her.

Those kinds of notebooks are worth keeping.

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Over to you …

Are you a diary-keeper? A bullet-journaller? A notebook-lover? None of the above? What ends up in your diaries? Bits of string, reflections or something more substantial?

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