Sans Fig Leaf
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"Paper packrat"
12 July, 2007
I love a good notebook--or notepad, journal, sketchbook. If the paper's nice, the binding and cover interesting, and it's a convenient size, I'm sold. I'll use it for writing scenes, jotting down notes, outlining plans or stories. I'll carry it around (by itself, in my backpack, laptop, you name it). Things will be scribbled in it--many and diverse things.
Unfortunately things will also be scribbled in any of the dozen or more other journals or sketchbooks I have picked up for the same reasons. So when it comes time to transfer those scenes, or finish the plans, or just consolidate the notes, I'll spend more time than I care to admit flipping through all these booklets looking for that one important piece of information.
I keep telling myself I'm going to get organized. Move all the notes already made into a more organizable storage medium, get rid of the superfluous notebooks, and just keep one to use until I fill it up.
But I never do. Sometimes I tell myself: this one will be the notebook I use solely for plotting stories. Or this one will be for a specific story, while this other one will be for everything else. But it never works. I either find an old one I had forgotten and mislaid, or find a new cooler one in a store somewhere, and I'm back to multiple books again.
I'm even worse with pens and pencils. A really good, heavy, firm mechanical pencil, with a comfortable grip and in a pretty color or sleek design? Again, I'm easily sold. The one saving grace with pens and pencils is if I mislay then, I don't lose any information. And since I have a tendency to mislay things (okay, okay, I'll admit it: it is not merely a tendency, it is a major component of my personality), an abundance of writing implements isn't a bad thing.
You can seldom tell how long it has been since I cleaned my desk by looking at the desk itself, because it tends to get messy very quickly after a tidying. But if you check my pencil cup, you can gauge it pretty accurately. If I've cleaned my desk within the last week, the cup is mostly full, with room for only a half dozen pens of pencils to be shoved in. If the pencil cup is half empty, it's been a month since I cleaned my desk.
I've tried to wean myself from the journal and pencil habit. While I love my laptop, and adore word processors, there are many situations where a paper notebook and a pencil are just more convenient. They're also, for me, more conducive to certain types or stages of writing.
I don't doodle in my word processor, for example. On paper, I cross things out, add notes in-between things, and sometimes un-cross bits. I use the spatial relationships between where I write parts of an outline or a plan to record relationships between the ideas. It's seldom conscious at the time, it just happens. There are certainly ways to get the computer to do that sort of thing, but I find myself in a different mode of not just thinking, but also perceiving and being, when I'm sitting in front of a screen. Even if it's smaller and resting on my lap.
I'm not saying the writing I do in the journals is superior to that on the word processor. It's simply that certain mental tasks (for me) flow more easily in the pencil and paper format. Which is why you can sometimes find me with my laptop sitting nearby at the ready, while I'm scribbling madly on a sheet of paper. When I get the bits sorted out that, for me, need to be done on paper, then I pick up the laptop and start writing--sometimes transcribing most of what I scribbled, but more often adding and revising and expanding on the fly.
I don't know why my brain works that way. I've just learned that it does, and I'm okay with it.
I do feel guilty about all those notebooks. Sometimes when I do some cleaning, as we did recently, I'll find several notebooks that have only a fraction of their pages full of notes, the rest blank.
I've once again resolved to be less wasteful. To use the journals and notebooks I already have, and not pick up any new ones until I use several of these up.
Wish me luck.
--Roy Blount Jr.
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