I Would Be Lost As a Writer If It Weren’t For Notebooks

Once, when I was very stuck on a book I was writing, I went shopping for a pair of pants. I didn’t know it, but the store I went to was running a promotion: Buy a pair of pants and get a free notebook. Or maybe it was: Spend a certain amount of money and get a free notebook. Either way, when I went to pay, the woman who rang me up slipped a small white notebook into my bag. I didn’t need the notebook necessarily—I had other notebooks at home, ones I had carefully picked out in gift shops and stationery stores, ones so beautiful or cool that I was afraid to write in any of them—but I needed the pants, so I walked out of the store that day with both. When I got home I put the notebook on my nightstand until I figured out what to do with it. Maybe I would see if my husband wanted it, or I would give it away to a friend. That night, I was lying in bed, thinking about my then novel-in-progress, or novel-in-un-progress, as it were—it was truly going so badly—when a sentence wormed its way into my mind. I sat up, fumbled for a pen, and scribbled the sentence in the notebook that was next to me. Then I lay back down and went to sleep. Sometimes that happens. You have a late-night moment of insight and you write something on whatever’s available. For me, by morning, what I thought was a brilliant moment of insight usually looks more like a moment of delusion. Strike it! Cross it out! Not useful in the least! But that next morning, when I read the sentence I had written, it wasn’t…bad. It was even kind-of good. In fact, it was the first kind-of good thing I had written in months. Instantly I decided: The notebook was magic. Instantly I decided: The notebook was magic. I started carrying that notebook with me everywhere. I sat on airplanes and wrote, I sat in hotel rooms and wrote, I waited in my […]

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