I am the keeper of many notebooks. I have one that stays in my purse. It isn’t a Moleskine, but it does the trick. I have notebooks beside my laptop. I have another in my living room, and it’s reserved for poetry. I then usually have one or two on my nightstand; I never know when an idea might visit, and I’ll need to record it.
I could, of course, use an application such as Evernote. I use the application occasionally, but I’ve never grown accustomed to it. I find something more permanent in writing the words on a physical page. I become accountable to an idea found in a notebook in a way I am not to an idea recorded in Evernote.
Why all these notebooks? I suppose I hinted at the reasons in the previous paragraphs. One, I never know when I might stumble across an idea. I need to be able to record it. Two, I need to be able to organize those ideas, hence the different notebooks. Ideas for poems rarely intrude upon ideas for Write Right. The ideas are kept in their own notebooks, which makes them – probably more so me – happy. Three, writing the words by hand has a solidity to it. The idea begins to take shape once actual words are on the page. The words become reminders of an idea for a blog post, a book, or another project. They become the items I must be able to cross off my list at some point.
The notebooks themselves vary in size. I have the small notebook for travel purposes, but I usually prefer one-subject notebooks with college-ruled paper. I don’t feel a hesitation to write in them as I sometimes do with an expensive journal. The expensive ones often are so pretty that I don’t want to record anything in them, or I only use them for a specific purpose or project. Not so with a notebook I purchased for ten cents; I will write and write and write in those.
The point, though, is that I’m recording my ideas. I’m ensuring I follow through with them. It doesn’t matter what notebook or device is used as long as I’m doing that.
Do you use a notebook or note-taking application?
Image: Mike Rohde (CC BY NC 2.0)
Erin Feldman
Erin Feldman is the founder of Write Right. She's a copywriter, editor, poet, and artist. She helps people tell their stories. You can find Erin on Google+.
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