The Writer's Notebook

Exploring the practice of writing

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In her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in an essay titled ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, journalist, essayist, and novelist Joan Didion tells herself repeatedly to ‘See enough and write it down’.¹  Didion goes on to tell us that her ‘notes’ within this notebook are a constant source of mystery to her.  ‘Why did I write it down?’ She asks about an overheard conversation in a hotel bar one August Monday morning in the ‘60s.  ‘Since the note is in my notebook’, she tells us, ‘it presumably has some meaning to me’.

Ever excavating her notes and ideas as inspiration for her writing, Joan Didion published selections of her notebooks during her lifetime, and specifically discusses the importance of keeping a notebook, it’s significance to enable her to record what she’s thinking and what she sees as she moves about the world day to day.  

But, as she assures us, the importance of keeping a notebook ‘has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking’, going on to suggest that she has never been able to keep a successful diary.

Like many writers or just interested readers, I love to pore over the way a writer works; the way they find ideas and jot them down; details and minutiae of their writing practice.  This, to me, makes up the sort of writer’s notebooks published by Didion.  Noting things down and sketching out ideas is a way for writers to make sense of their ideas; to shape and play with them, and to get them out of their minds and onto the page.

Many writers admit to having some kind of written repository for their ideas, whether this is in the form of index cards, as Anne Lamott uses in her advice on writing book Bird by Bird, or a coveted Moleskine in their coat pocket. 

But Didion’s distinction of the notebook -v- the diary (or journal) made me wonder: is there a difference between the writer’s notebook and their published diaries or journals, as Didion appears to suggest, and if so, what is the difference? 

Modernist writer Virginia Woolf did both.  The British Library holds three volumes of Woolf’s original notebooks, one of which contains the sketching out of one of her most famous books, Mrs Dalloway.  But she was also a prolific journal keeper, leaving 26 volumes on her death in what husband Leonard referred to as ‘a method of practising or trying out the art of writing’.

Following the publication of The Portrait of a Lady, 19th century writer Henry James famously wrote of developing personal rituals around the process of expressing his thoughts, putting pen to paper in order to achieve this.  Unlike Woolf and Plath, however, James burned many of his notebooks, though some of the remaining have been later re-edited, posing the question of whether it is acceptable to publish author’s words without their consent. 

Woolf’s contemporary Katherine Mansfield, for example, did not wish for her journals to be published for the public’s consumption.  Husband John Middleton Murry, however, following his wife’s death in 1923, proceeded to edit and publish her journals in 1927, together with a further ‘definitive collection’ in 1957, which contained further unseen extracts and miscellanea from her 1939 ‘scrapbook’. 

As much as I enjoy poring over the inner-most thoughts of writers I admire, it doesn’t sit well to think that someone can publish your private thoughts without your consent.  However some writers no doubt keep notebooks and journals for posterity: they are looking for their words and ideas to be recorded and remembered after they are gone.  

Modernist writer Patricia Highsmith refused to consent to a biography during her lifetime, however following her death, her editor Anna Von Planta discovered Highsmith’s collection of diaries and notebooks ‘hidden’ inside a closet at her Switzerland home, instructing that these should be read.

Von Planta spent the next few years excavating these to produce a collection of Highsmith’s fascinating insights on gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth century America, including her euphoria at the publication of her novel The Price of Salt, in 1952, which features a lesbian couple, and which Highsmith felt forced to publish under a pseudonym in order to protect her reputation.

Sylvia Plath’s famously comprehensive journals, lovingly and meticulously edited by Karen V Kuhil, span the entirety of her adult life.  Within the passages we find the ideas and life experiences which would go on to inspire her only published novel The Bell Jar, as well as her volumes of poetry.  Her obsessions and ideas around men and sexual relationships, her fears and joys, are all covered within her journals.

Though Plath’s journals appear more confessional and exploratory of her psyche than the writer’s notebook may appear to be, she was also trying out being a writer within these pages.  Snippets of poetry and prose intermingle between the pages of discussion on every day occurrences and her ideas on all manner of subjects.  As with Plath’s many published letters, even in the most mundane of expository journaling, Plath’s use of language and turns of phrase shine as though just waiting for an audience.  

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In Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, the very idea of the writer’s notebook works as a kind of metafiction within the narrative.  Lessing’s remarkable book, which she complained people did not understand due to its many layers and complexities, focuses around Anna Wulf, a novelist who, struggling with writer’s block and various failed relationships, keeps several coloured notebooks for different areas of her life.  These are divided by subject: Black for her writer’s block; Red for her political ideologies (she is an active member of the Communist Party); Yellow for personal stories of her life; and Blue which ‘tries to be a diary’.²  The ‘Golden Notebook’ of the title becomes the repository for her increasing descent into breakdown.

The Golden Notebook was adopted by the feminist movement as an important text for women in its representation of the breakdown and complexities of the woman as artist.  Lessing herself, however, disputed that the book was written as a feminist tract, instead referencing its links to politics, racism, McCarthyism and the Cold War.  I find this interesting as a student of literature: within literary studies, one is encouraged to find themes, tropes, and symbols within literary works.  The adoption of Lessing’s most famous work by the feminist movement shows however that authorial intention and the meanings the audience glean from a text can be something quite separate.  (This is a topic I plan to return to in a later post).

So, in Lessing’s book, the ‘notebooks’ appear to cross the threshold between writer’s notebook and journal, as similarly did Woolf and Plath.  I have heard many times the advice given to new writers to ‘carry a notebook’, and have also seen advice recommending the value of daily journaling, re-vamped in Julia Cameron’s book The Artists Way as ‘Morning Pages’. 

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Throughout my own forays into writing over the years I have dabbled in most of these practices.  I have tried Cameron’s Morning Pages – basically a system where you write three pages freehand as soon as you wake up – as well as keeping a notebook in my bag for when ideas hit, to more general journaling.  I have found merit from all of these methods at one time or another, though feel constrained when I try to make any of them a regular habit. 

I think one reason for this is that it can become a writing exercise in and of itself, meaning that the editor in me tries too hard to capture the perfect sentence or idea, and gets frustrated when it makes no sense later.  As we saw from Didion’s puzzlement of why she had chosen to record a specific overhead conversation back in the ‘60’s, however, even great writers have to allow themselves to be imperfect. 

But I think what she (and the other writers mentioned here) have often managed to do is to recognise the value of recording everyday life, which in the end feeds into everything we think and do – and crucially, write about.

As Didion tells us within ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, the point of her note taking of what she sees, feels, and thinks about the world is to ‘Remember what it was to be me’. 

Clearly, that was enough to enable her to create the articulate, razor-sharp narrative journalism for which she was famous.

Postscript: I would love to hear about what other Substack writers think about keeping a notebook/journal or other ways of capturing ideas and thoughts.  Do you return to these for ideas, or are they just a way to empty out the detritus of the mind? 

1. Joan Didion, all quotes taken from ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968.

2. Taken from Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 1962.