The Notebook Tour – What Shows, What’s Hidden

Notebook “tours” have popped up in my email newsletter subscriptions lately, complete with scans of handwritten pages from writers willing to share their doodles, scrawls, sketches, and scribbles. I find these fascinating from two perspectives: in addition to giving us a glimpse into a private space, they reveal something crucial about the creative process. These excerpts show, literally, the bits and pieces of language that might become a poem, essay, or story, or might just stay on that page, complete in themselves.

Handwriting grabs our attention in ways that printed words simply don’t. As I watched the recently released documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, images of Joel’s lyrics, penned on white sheets of paper, spread across the screen: long sentences filled with words and phrases, some crossed out, some traced over and over. Here was evidence of a creative mind at work; Joel’s words were like a sculptor’s fingerprints in clay.

I started keeping a notebook at the age of ten, continued on and off throughout my teens and twenties, and then in earnest in middle age. As I review these pages, what I left out often strikes me more than what I wrote. My earliest notebooks, for example, completely avoid the elephant in the room: my parents’ marriage was falling apart, a fact that haunts those brittle pages like a palimpsest of memory.

Something I find rewarding is a personal notebook tour. I’ll go back through the previous year’s journals, looking for the germ of an idea, the thing that led to a finished piece of writing. The image below shows the beginning of the poem “Butterfly Pose:”

I found the notes that became “Mulch” in the same notebook:

“Un Día Ordinario,” an abecedarian, started as a musing on the word serpenteante, Spanish for “meandering” or “looped:”

But the majority of what’s in my notebooks, random thoughts and impressions that felt important enough to write down, will probably never see the light of day. They are a record of my dreams and wishes, no more, no less.

Some notable journal-keepers: Audre Lorde, Annie Dillard, Anais Nin, C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, and William Faulkner. 

You might also enjoy “Keep, Burn, Curate, or Donate: What to Do With Your Old Journals” from Writers Digest.