Want to be a serious novelist? Get a notebook
“We are workers whose days are never done.” —Rodin
I’ve said this many times, in many fiction workshops, but as writers we should carry notebooks with us everywhere we go.
Yes, everywhere. And yes, a notebook. You know, the type with paper, pages, binding, and no connection to anything other than your hand and your mind.
You might wonder why I insist you should carry this notebook everywhere. If your serious about this life—and I think all of you are—then a notebook is just a tool of the trade. Like the engineer and their T-square, a soldier and their weapon, and artist and their brushes, you, dear writer, must wield the notebook against your messy experience of the world.
You, dear writer, are the eyes and ears of the soul of the world because your job is to notice. The way people walk, stand, sit, rise. The way they talk—or don’t—love (or refuse to), and especially the tiny ways in which people fool themselves to save their egos.
Your notebook, buttery leather cover and all, is the cosmic butterfly net for your observations on how people actually live in the world.
A lot of people swear by their phones as the best way to capture their thoughts. I can understand. Talk to text is convenient. We spend all day with our heads bowed in supplication to that screen anyway. Why not just put our observations down with a rapid dance of our thumbs so that we can copy and paste into our fiction rough drafts?
The problem with phones is the connection. Cheap, thrilling, and easy. When you’re serious about writing, and have taken it as a vocation, your observations of the world draw you into a closer relationship with everything.
Yet, through some mystery that I don’t understand, the disconnection of a notebook—from the internet, text messages, and phone calls—is critical to turn your observations into original thoughts.
It’s almost like we have to get outside to truly go within.
Those original thoughts are the basis for any story you want to write. Make sure you have a notebook, everywhere and all the time, and turn yourself loose on the world.
I’d rather read your insights in a novel than some text messages cluttered up with the latest crying laughing face emoji.
