In praise of the notebook

Virtually every advice guide for the novice writer will tell you to keep a notebook with you at all times for that moment when you have a brilliant idea and if you don’t write it down straight away you’ll lose it for ever. Sound enough advice but pretty obvious. I find a notebook useful for far more than that.

I’m the sort of person who fantasises about running off to a little cabin in the woods and living off the land, a la Henry David Thoreau in Walden. I have, in fact, just started to write the story of a couple who build their own eco home – with the design including plenty of kink opportunities, of course. One of the things this means is that I like to know, for psychological reasons rather than out of necessity, that I can work without an electricity supply. So scribbling in a notebook goes beyond practicalities and into my personal idyll of self-sufficiency and isolation. Don’t ask me where the Biros are coming from in this fantasy world; I’m not that authentic.

I use a notebook for everything from those first tentative ideas and notes – a plot fragment, a description of something I’ve seen or heard, a spider diagram leading off a submissions theme – to actually writing the stories out in full. I don’t do that all the time, by any means, but sometimes it feels right. It means you can be discreetly productive anywhere – in an idle moment at work with your notebook propped on your knee under the desk, in the car if you arrive somewhere early, in the middle of a walk when you take a break to sit on a rock and admire a view, in the corner of a pub or cafe, at the bus stop, in a tent. It also gives you a break from staring at a screen all the time, which can be an issue if you have a day job at a desk as well as your writing time. And if you go beyond the notes and planning stage and actually write your stories out by hand, when you come to type them up you find yourself automatically doing the first stage of editing and tightening up the prose.

Although we’re all high-tech these days and you will certainly have to type the stories up at some point, I think there’s something about writing by hand that taps into the psyche in a different way than writing at a keyboard. Your handwriting itself is uniquely yours rather than being a neat, uniform image on a computer screen. If you scribble fast for a while, your hand aches in a different way from the RSI-inducing movement of fingers over a keyboard. I’m sure you can still get RSI from handwriting, but as long as you don’t overdo it the feeling is more like the satisfying ache from digging a vegetable patch compared with the pain of a plastic bag full of potatoes from the supermarket cutting into your palm. And if you do it enough, it will leave a physical mark of your craft; I still have the slight callus on my right middle finger from my pre-laptop student days.

Writing by hand can be more flexible in some ways. You can jump around the page, flick back, scribble notes to yourself in the margin, make spider diagrams of ideas, try things out without them feeling as permanent as if you’ve saved them to a computer file. You can pick up your notebook and be scribbling straight away instead of waiting for your computer to get going, then finding the right file. The biggest drawback for me is having to make sure you can actually read your own scrawl, something that can prove challenging!

If you like to ogle wooden cabins - and who doesn't - then check out these photo blogs: cabinporn.com and tinyhouseblog.com. This image is of a hikers' hut in Kungsleden, Sweden, from cabinporn.com.