Write On Wednesday: The Nuts and Bolts of Notebooking

...the practice within the practice of keeping a notebook

Photo by Paico Oficial on Unsplash

Virginia Woolf wrote hers with a fountain pen on blank sheets, bound between boards covered with patterned Italian paper. Dani Shapiro is “a little bit obsessive” about writing in a spiral notebook with the “brand of prep-school I did not attend emblazoned on the cover.” Suleika Jaouad likes to “personalize the covers” of her notebooks, or “write myself a creative contract on the flyleaf, or tuck a photograph into the opening pages.”

Me? I like a simple spiral notebook and a slender blue Papermate Ink Joy pen. I prefer to write first thing in the morning, sitting in bed propped up by an elaborate arrangement of pillows, fresh coffee at hand and my dog still sleeping at my feet. Having this thoughtful quiet time in the morning, along with the cup of coffee that is the lifeblood to start my day, allows me to be consistent and fold the writing time into the days natural rhythm. I can often spend thirty minutes to an hour writing each morning - it’s a gift of being a morning person (and a retired one at that.)

I write nearly every morning; if I miss a day, my brain feels muddled. I am someone whose mind is often heaped with noise; this daily writing clears out the brain clutter, and, as Woolf says, “sweeps up accidentally several stray matters…which are the diamonds of the dustheap.”

I often start each day’s writing with a few paragraphs about life in general. Lately, I’ve been recording how I slept, since I’m constantly trying to sleep better.

But always I read as I write in the morning, because reading someone else’s words invokes something new and unexpected in me. As author and artist Suleika Jaouad discovered: “Someone else’s words awaken a different train of thought, a new energy. A synapse fires that, moments earlier, was dead asleep. Sometimes I respond to an insight, an image, a turn of phrase. Sometimes it’s the fact that the person’s experience feels so familiar. Other times, the writer’s perspective is so unlike my own that I’m completely bewildered by it, and I write into that bewilderment.”

There is a sense of sacredness around this daily writing; a ritual, a sense of practice within the practice – the physicality of time and place, the commitment to a routine, the tools that feel right. This is the physical work of preparing to make something, and writers do this just as artists, chefs, builders, surgeons do. And it all works together to open the mind and the heart so words can flow.

I think building a writing practice is extremely individual, something no one can teach, but only encourage. You don’t need to be, or even think of yourself as a “writer.” The practice that feels “just right” for you is the one that you create, the one you can commit to and return to every day. And as life changes, it can change with you. It can be whatever you want it to be.

You already have everything you need to construct one that will last a lifetime.

If you already have a writing practice (or any kind of creative practice) in your life, I’d love to hear more about the nuts and bolts of it.

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A regular writing practice can take your messiest thoughts, your most outrageous emotions, your deepest secrets and darkest shame, and alchemize them all into something cohesive, strong, and healing. It can help you discover your own authentic self and lead you on a path of living from that space. It can help you shape the way you see the world and how you respond in light of what you’ve seen.

Sometimes, it can even help others shape the way they see and respond to the world as well. Next week I want to tell you about a published diary I’ve been traveling with over the past seven months, and how it’s challenged me to do just that.