Notebooks

Hey, it’s me, your friend Dave Wielgosz. Let’s level with each other, writer to writer. I assume you have been to Barnes & Noble several times this holiday season and have walked past the Moleskine notebook section, am I right?

Hey, hey, you don’t have to lie to me, it’s like I said…I’m your friend. I get it. They are awesome and well-designed, and they look like what your future book, screenplay, comic book, play, TV pilot, or other kind of written masterpiece should be planned in. But…you have gotten a fancy notebook before with this intention, right?

Then the pages of the notebook go unfilled. Not for lack of having ideas to put in said notebook, but because nothing feels worthy of going in this beautiful book. This notebook is going to be discovered by literary critics years after you are gone, and it’s what they are going to use to confirm your genius. Hell, the people of the future are even going to publish the notebook as a hardcover book, word for word, so future generations of writers can study how you made beautiful art.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!!!

WRITERS! Listen to me loud and clear. No matter how beautifully designed a notebook is, it should not be treated with any level of pretension. It’s your laboratory. It should be the place where you write down ideas that may turn out brilliant or may turn out to be nothing. It’s the place where you can play. You can write lines of dialogue that may never be said by a character in a finished piece, or it’s where you write all the backstories for your future epic that you need to know, and the readers never will. It can also just be a place where you blow off steam and write for yourself.

One of the many things I admire about visual artists is their sketchbooks. If you have a friend who is a visual artist, see if they will show you one of their sketchbooks sometime. Some pages are freeform beauty, some are full of doodles they hate, and some are plans for future brilliant illustrations they conceived of very clearly. But none of the pages…none of them is precious. Because the final product is the thing that you chip away at, rewrite, and make as perfect as you can. NOT your notebook.

Your notebook is a laboratory that you can’t blow up. A playground that no one else can go on. It’s a place for you to collaborate with yourself before you start sharing things with the world.

For years I would get notebooks and not fill them up, I was too intimidated. Then, my cousin started giving me these legal pads full of graph paper that he got at his job, and…they were perfect. I would write ideas on them, draw comic pages on them, make plans on them, and when I was done, I would tear the page off and I would either type it up or throw it away. But I used every single page. My cousin gave me these legal pads for many, many years because they were the only thing I would write with. Then I realized I could buy my graph paper notebooks which I have taken a picture of above. I buy a dozen of these a year and I fill them to the brim, and then I retire them in a corner of my closet. I use them for everything, they are my greatest weapon as a writer.

Find the notebook that you are willing to love, and willing to destroy. For me, I also use graph paper because growing up I had fine motor skill issues, and using paper with more lines helped me focus my handwriting. It strengthens my writing. Why not just type? Well, I like handwriting, despite how hard it was for me growing up. I get to show myself that I don’t care if it’s hard for me sometimes, I’m going to do it anyway. And…the notebook doesn’t lead me to any distractions that are outside of my imagination. Even if I start doing straight-up nonsense in that notebook, that nonsense comes from me, and it might turn into gold somehow.

You can go back to Barnes & Noble and get yourself a Moleskine, but I want you to fill it this year, and then go fill another one, and then another one, and keep doing it because it will only help your writing, your fearlessness, and your creativity.

A short one this week, next week’s will be shorter too. I hope you enjoyed this rant and share it with someone who will understand my madness.

Stay safe!!!

—Dave Wielgosz