Simplifying my writing process
Writing everything down, notebooks, slowing down and Neil Gaiman
I always wanted to be a notebook keeper, to write everything down, to be this person who records everything, every thought, every idea, every observation. I wanted to fill pages after pages, notebooks after notebooks. I wanted to have something to look through when I feel stuck. To have something to browse through when looking for something to write about. And still, although I have a lot of notebooks waiting to be filled with words, I’m not doing it that often.
I think that I’ve never trusted that my thoughts or ideas were worth recording, that I could be doing it for the sake of taking notes. I guess I thought that it all needs to be for something, that it needs a purpose. Maybe I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen to have a good reason for filling up those notebooks? Maybe I thought that recording all those ordinary stuff didn't matter? I don't really know why I've never become a note taker, why I wasn't able to give myself permission to write everything down.
Is it because I'm afraid of what is in my head? Is it that I don't trust my ideas? Or do I think that they're small and undeserving to be written down? Sometimes I think that I can't forget something, because it's such a great idea and then it's lost for eternity. We've all been there. I get so angry with myself then. If I only bothered to pick up this damn pen.
I really want to be that person who writes everything down, who has shelves filled with notebooks full of her thoughts, ideas, notes, conversations she overheard, descriptions of people and places. I want to be that person who can open a notebook and leaf through it in search for an idea.
Funnily, everything I write for here, or for my blog, starts in a notebook. I can’t put my thoughts directly onto the screen. I need to see them bleed from my fountain pen first. I need to be able to connect them with arrows and post-it notes. I need to have this physical experience of writing to be able to figure out what I’m actually talking about.
Recently, I took a deep dive on the internet and discovered that my hand written first drafts are not that crazy. Did you know that Neil Gaiman writes almost all his first drafts in a notebook with a fountain pen? This is what he said on Time Ferris Show:
You can just get a sense of are you working, are you making forward progress? What’s actually happening. I also love that because it emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gender, number of a character, you can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft. It is you telling the story to yourself.
And this:
If you’re writing on a computer, you’ll think of the sort of thing that you mean, and then write that down and look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you’re writing in fountain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out, so it’s actually so much easier to just think a little bit more. You slow up a bit, but you’re thinking the sentence through to the end, and then you start writing.
You write that, and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypothesized that I might be writing, and I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s. I thought to do that I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book, so that was how I started writing that. Again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated. Saying, “Ah, I’m not actually making words that are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen.”
And there’s something to it. Writing by hand forces us to slow down, giving us time to think. I’ve never thought about it before in relation to writing a book. But maybe this is exactly what I need. Maybe this is my way to get it done. Because writing it all down in a notebook, in small chunks, sometimes just a note, maybe a way to make less daunting. And also, as I would never show anyone my handwritten work, it can feel freeing and make censor myself less.
So I’ve picked up a notebook, from the pile of waiting pristine ones, rather small one as not to scare myself with the amount of pages I need to fill and will be carrying it with me at all times and scribbling in some notes and ideas, maybe even whole paragraphs.
I have this dream that at the end of next year I’d filled a multiple notebooks with my writings. I’m not sure if it can be done, but I want to try to become this person I always secretly wanted to be.
Are you a notebook keeper?