I just counted and it turns out I currently have twenty twenty two notebooks. Five are normal journals where I jot down a few sentences describing each day, nine are for various creative projects, three are little spiral notepads to carry around for whenever I need to write something down quickly, two are for recording my daily word count, one is for daily writing prompts, and two are blank sitting around for the next time I need a new one. As with my post on Dungeons and Dragons, I’m only realizing how strange this habit is now that I’m writing a blog post about it. I’m not a technophobe (I mean, I do sometimes stay up late worrying what makes us special as humans if artificial intelligence might one day replicate our thinking, but in the concrete sense I’ve got nothing against writing on my computer), I’m environmentally conscious enough to know that I probably shouldn’t use so much paper, and my handwriting is so bad that even in college professors sometimes put frowny faces and notes like “work on improving intelligibility” on my handwritten assignments. So why do I stick with notebook writing?
Part of it might be that I think notebooks themselves are cool. I always try to remind myself not to let the aesthetics surrounding writing distract from the writing itself, but it just feels satisfying to write in something bound and hardcover with my initials printed in silver lettering on the front. My favorite is one that my dad got at an underground school supply store in China with a poem printed on the cover: “A good laugh and a long sleep/ Are the best cures in / The doctor’s book and / Love is a carefully designed lie.” I’m not sure if that’s a translation error or if nihilism is just the best way to get Chinese kids excited for schoolwork, but it made me happy to write in something so compelling and deeply weird, even if I never managed to match it with anything on the inside pages.
That was my first notebook. I think my dad intended to keep it for himself, but I had just gotten a note from the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, which I was getting ready to attend in a few weeks, and one of their suggestions was “get a journal, and write in it every day.” That summer, and that journal in particular, marked a critical moment in my writing. It went from a hobby I indulged in whenever the urge struck me to something that I did every night, something that defined me. That’s another reason, I guess. We’re all a little bit attached to the habits we developed when we start out.
I’m home for spring break now, and today I started digging around the old boxes in our basement. They’re filled with relics from our family’s past: models of video game systems my brother made when our parents wouldn’t get us a Gamecube, my mom’s dissertation notes, photos of people I’ve never seen mixed with people I only met years after the photo was taken. In college life moves forward so quickly that you don’t have time to think about what you were doing the week before, so it’s nice to spend my time away from it building static mental pictures of worlds that existed before I did. I know I’m kidding myself if I think anyone will ever read all of my notebooks, but I like to imagine that they’ll end up in a box in a basement someday, and some kid will flip through them and get a picture of my life, or a life I imagined for someone else. You can’t get that when all your writing is locked in a computer with a password that only you know. Though if I do want to reach someone generations later, I really do need to work on my handwriting.
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Also, Inklette issue six is out today! Check it out!
https://inklettemagazine.com/issues/issue-vi/
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