The notebook I mean is not a journal and not a planner. It is smaller than both, slightly stained, and always a little behind. It lives in a jacket that is too warm for the season you are actually in.
People ask what I write in it, which is a polite way of asking whether the habit is serious. The honest answer is: lists of birds I cannot name, the price of soup, a sentence overheard on a train that will never become a story. The notebook is a place for things that do not yet deserve a home.
That is the point. The moment you decide a thought must be good enough to keep, you stop having the thought.
The rule
One rule only: write it down before you improve it. Improvement is a later animal. It eats the first, true version and leaves a more presentable bone.
I have lost more ideas to the belief that I would remember them than to any fire or flood. Memory is loyal to feeling and careless with wording. The notebook is the opposite.
- Date the page, even if you will never look back.
- Leave the ugly handwriting.
- Do not buy a better notebook until this one is full.
A full cheap notebook is a life. An empty leather one is a piece of furniture.
When I reread old pages I am rarely impressed. I am, occasionally, returned to a Tuesday I would have otherwise misplaced — the coffee ring, the rain, the name of a street I stood on for no reason. That is more than enough work for a pocket of paper.