Noteworthy: Elizabeth Lovatt
Writer Elizabeth Lovatt shares her notewriting secrets
is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and writes the tiny narrative — a semi-regular newsletter of personal despatches for narrative obsessives. She lives in London with her wife and their tiny daschund, Dave. She’s also one of my favourite people, and I’m so excited to see her book come to life.
Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line reimagines the women who both called and volunteered for the Lesbian Line in the 1990s, whilst also tracing Elizabeth’s own journey from accidentally coming out to disastrous dates to finding her chosen family. With callers and agents alike dealing with first crushes and break-ups, sex and marriage, loneliness and illness (or simply the need to know the name of a gay bar on a night out), the book is a celebration of the ordinary lives of queer women. Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line is published (tomorrow!!) on the 6th February by Dialogue Books, and in May in the US. It’s available to order here.
I use a very specific Moleskine notebook. The slim ones that come in three packs and have a kind of rough card cover with plain paper inside. I have had grey, red, blue and green ones over the years but always that exact version. I’m locked into them now as I’ve used them for so long. The first notebook where I was consciously making an effort to keep a journal is from November 2013, so that’s just over 12 years!
When I started using a notebook I was very adamant it wasn’t going to be a ‘boring’ diary and so I actively avoided writing much that would equate to a ‘today I did this and the weather was that.’ Instead, it was supposed to be a journal which I had some pretentious notation was distinct from a diary; that a journal was a more literary form. As such my early notebooks contained book quotes, notes from literary talks, observations from my daily life (that were not a diary!!) alongside drawings and sketches from real life and exhibitions I went to. Over time that rule has relaxed and they are much more a chaotic cross-section of my life: quotes, sketches, diary-like entries about how my day was, notes of all kinds: working through a cryptic crossword clue or a puzzle game, even notes from meetings or plans and to-do lists. I will also sometimes stick in extra paper or ticket from a holiday, that kind of thing. More often than not these go into the back of the envelope that you get in Moleskines. Quite a few are taped together since the back cover tends to crack or I have stickers on the back, just because I didn’t know where else to put them.
I do have a rule for the layout of the entries. They always have a title which I write in all caps and underline and then I add the date. Entries are separated by a line running across the page. Each notebook has a Dymo label sticker showing the month and year I started it and when it was finished.
The act of writing for its own sake is one I find useful in itself.
I have a terrible memory and so some kind of record of things I’ve seen or emotions I’ve experienced are helpful to me. I’m honestly not very good at processing what’s happening in real time and so keeping a record afterwards allows me to work out what I thought or felt about something. I like writing in short bursts or capturing a fleeting moment in time and using my notebook to note something I’ve observed is good practise for this. It’s the reason why my newsletter is called the tiny narrative and why when it came to writing my book Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line I wanted to include short bursts of fiction. Writing privately in a journal is very freeing. No one will likely ever read them or if they do I will be dead so who cares by that point.1 (Incidentally, my mum also keeps a diary, she hardly ever mentions it except to tell me occasionally I can read hers once she’s dead, so that’s… something.) The act of writing for its own sake is one I find useful in itself. It allows you to capture something, no matter how ineptly you write or draw it; just the act of doing so matters to me and how I position myself as a person in the world.
There’s the ceremony of adding the end month and year to the cover of the notebook which I guess I look forward to! I still use the same Dymo sticker maker I got for my fifteenth birthday (wow what a cool teenager) and stamping out each letter to add to the cover is a process that I find very satisfying. After that they go onto a shelf in our spare room/office with the rest of the notebooks and I start a new notebook. I try to carry my notebook with me at all times so ideally by the end of their life they look like they’ve been through it. Very occasionally I will flick through them either in a fit of nostalgia or because I half-remember something useful that I wrote in one that I want to refer to – usually a quote from a book or a talk I went to that I want to use in my ‘proper’ writing.
All sorts of things inspire me. Art, conversations with friends, books of course. I currently have a stack by the side of the bed that is inspiration for something new I want to write. Just having them nearby feels helpful even if I haven’t read them all yet. I love the work of Lydia Davis, Ali Smith, and Kathyrn Scanlan, and although they all write fiction they are able to observe and describe the real world around them in this almost unearthly way that feels more real than real and so, part of the work of my journal, is to practise this kind of close attention to the world. That is a very fancy way of saying what I actually mean, which is I love listening to conversations people have on the bus. I love the real way that people talk to each other. I love the films of Mike Leigh and Kelly Reichardt for the same reason. I can see why Andy Warhol used to record his telephone conversations. The way people speak is fascinating to me. Maybe that’s why I wrote a whole book about telephone conversations.
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While I absolutely agree with this in principle, I will be resurrected via mortification if anyone ever reads mine, so there are strict instructions to chuck them in the furnace with me.