Seven pieces of advice about notebooks

1. Always carry one. I suppose it’s all right if it’s virtual, although I don’t quite trust electronic notes not to disappear. A tiny (paper) notebook is good if you’re carrying a backpack as well and you need to have paper accessible in a back/shirt/jacket pocket. I usually have an A5 one in my daypack.

2. Alternate between flash notebooks and dead-plain ones. This way you get to use up all the gorgeous journals people tend to give you (or you tend to give yourself) because ‘you’re a writer; I thought you could use it’, but stay in touch with the workaday-ness of making notes.

3. Starting off a gorgeous notebook involves a certain amount of self-delusion. I have to pretend that I’m not really recording any of my own banal thoughts and ideas, and the degree of pretence increases with the degree of gorgeousness. Some hints for the first page, to get over the disappointment of seeing your own crazed, ever-deteriorating handwriting spoiling that nice creamy paper are:

- copy out a quotation from someone else more impressive, or several people more impressive. If I sit down with the Saturday papers with a notebook beside me, I usually find a few odd things worth collecting
- make a list, whether to-do or to-buy or to-read or to-write—a practical thing—or a more creative but less-committal-than-prose type list. You may have to decided to go to a slightly unusual place to do this: somewhere buzzy and distracting is good, but somewhere you just haven’t been for a while will also wake your brain up—a place by the water, a town square, a seat under a good tree

- do a couple of 10-minute blurts of free-writing, using a word or a picture to start you off (if you can cut the picture out and stick it in the book, all the better)

- stick in a picture, one that immediately starts suggesting story possibilities to you. That’s a form of note taking. You can write that story, or you can just let the picture sit there and give off energy.

- find some other evocative thing to stick in: a scrap of newspaper, a leaf, a scrap of cloth.

4. Keep things rough. Don’t worry about ‘making a mess’ in a new or lovely notebook. Nobody need ever see it. Cross things off your lists as you do/read/write/discard them. Comment on ideas you’ve had, notes you’ve made, as you realise new things about them. Use any old pen or pencil to hand; don’t worry about keeping it neat and consistent. You want this notebook habit to feel loose and free, not rule-bound and anally retentive.

5. Step 4 is easier if you only write on one side of the paper. I know, I shouldn’t be recommending wastage of paper or trees, but you need to leave room for afterthoughts and further chewings on ideas you find. If you discover that you never end up using the left/right-hand side of the spread, and you feel guilty about leaving all that blank paper, when you get to the end, turn the book upside down and go back through filling in the blanks. I tend to think, though: So many notebooks, so little time! For stationery addicts, the one-side-of-the-page rule means you get to the next notebook—the 68c exercise book and the marbled-endpaper journal after that—a whole lot faster.

6. Keep this wasteful frame of mind going as you write. Everything is an idea; there are too many story ideas in the world; there are too many glorious projects you could devote your time to. Write stuff down that you have no intention of ever using. Let ideas go if you can’t be stuffed hauling out the notebook one more time and writing them down. Remember, loose and free. The notebook is to keep your brain humming, not to capture fleeting, sneaky, never-to-return ideas before they melt away, abandoning you to lifelong writer’s block and misery.

7. Sometimes you’ll realise that it’s been a week or two since you hit the notebook, and you’re feeling all stale and dry and uninspired. This may be an indicator that you need to kick the ideas-generating part of your brain into gear again. ‘Okay,’ you tell yourself. ‘I’m going to the mall/art gallery/library/ice-rink/coffee-shop, and I’m going to collect ten story ideas, or idea-parts, in this notebook, before I come home.’