Noteworthy: An Introduction
A series where writers share their notewriting secrets - I'll go first.
When I was younger, and my mum would take us to the big library after school, I was obsessed with a copy of Ossie Clark’s diaries they had, and I borrowed it more than any other book. Mostly, I was definitely too young to be reading the diaries of a 1970s fashion designer, but it had full-colour inserts of Clark’s actual diary entries, with his writing swirling all over the pages in different colours, and I loved it. Years and years later, as a person with their own stack of notebooks, there are still very few things that I love as much as seeing inside other people’s notebooks. It’s such an insight into how a persons mind works, how they make order of things and what they think is worth recording.
I thought it would be fun to see if anyone would want to share their notebook-keeping practices with me, to see how commonplace books or diaries or scribbling in a moleskine helped them to turn their ideas into *real* writing (maybe the diary-writing is the realest? Idk).
I feel like it’s only fair that I go first, so…
I’ve been a “serious” notebooker for twenty years, with many many dated diaries started in well-intentioned Januarys before that. They more or less all petered out by my birthday at the end of March, and it was only really when I stopped having a diary and had just notebooks instead that I really wrote in them with any regularity. Looking back through them, some years are much more diary-leaning, with pages and pages of black biro scrawling, some are more journal-y, with cinema tickets and flight bookings and exhibition booklets tucked into them, and some are a bigger mixture of the two, with some office-job-notebook pages appearing in between. There are two full journals I can’t re-read ever again, and one that has a chunk of pages stapled shut. There are bits of poetry, starts of short story ideas, tarot reads, morning pages, ideas for Cursive Knives courses, plans for the poetry collection (and the short story collection, but she’s currently on pause), actual diary-writing, shopping lists, recipes for chocolate cookies... I used to keep my notebooks more separate, but
convinced me that carrying one around at a time was much easier. (He was right.)All of my journals are roughly a5 - there are some different brands at the beginning, a chunk of Paperchase (RIP) fabric wrapped ones and a few TKMaxx bargains, a jump to Moleskine (they really might be the best), a brief foray to Leuchtturm (better colour options but they get too bulky), and I’m currently going with a lime-green Moleskine with my initials foil-stamped on the front - a first wedding anniversary present from my mummy.
Stickers go in the front inside cover, and little booklets, tickets that don’t fit, and bits of ephemera (lol) go in the back pocket. When I’ve had journals without a back pocket, I glue an envelope to the inside back cover. Since covid-era Penpalooza (and because I realised it was just much easier to have everything all together), addresses get written in the back.
Sometimes when I look back over old notebooks, I’ll see early ideas for things starting to form before I noticed them - that’s quite a nice thing, to know that my ideas are ticking away before I’ve really recognised that they even are actual ideas.
I like having something that’s so completely analogue, when so much of what I do day-to-day is online - on socials, or sitting in google docs, or on zoom calls. It’s nice to have a physical thing, and to actually write things out by hand. I think it’s better from my brain, too - I can tell from the handwriting what sort of mood I was in.
Here’s a little bit of insight into how the scribbles kind of eventually turn into something less scribbly - I test out all of my writing prompts to see if they work, but if I’m doing a writing workshop or course, I keep all of my notes in my journals (when I say everything goes in here, I really do mean it - there’s zero separation between course notes, recipes for making flatbreads, corporate zoom meeting notes and to-do lists).
This was really much longer than I intended it to be, so congrats if you made it all the way to the end.
If you’d like to take part, please get in touch! You can reply here, or DM me on insta. I would love more people to be part of it. If you’ve already sent me a reply, I’ll be getting back to you soon.
I wonder what was written on that chunk of pages that had to be stapled shut?
I love this!! 😍 nice to read about your journaling practice evolving over time :)