Getting it down on paper

[mrissa]

I am more a listening Mrissa than a talking Mrissa tonight, and so:

[Poll #557314]

Feel free to tell me about anything else related to writing or sketching "longhand." I'm not talking about lovely flowing prose compositions -- well, okay, I am, but I'm not limiting it to that. If you jot down working notes in a lab notebook, that's of interest, too, especially if you "think on paper."

As for me, I've been keeping a journal since February of 1997, when I started a creative writing class in college. It was the best thing to come out of that class for me: the professor was more of a cheerleader than a critic, and I needed a cheerleader at the time. (I should note that she was plenty critical of people who weren't serious about writing, but that's not the same thing.) But I started making notes to myself about stories, going off on tangents, and that way, as sort of a writing log and sort of a talisman and sort of a free zone, it worked for me. I'd never had any success at keeping a diary, because while I can write about my daily life, it varies for the audience, and frankly, I was not sure I wanted to leave written records of all the interesting bits.

So there's a lot that's between the lines in my journals. I will have two title ideas and a first line jotted down, then a two or three day gap, then a note of what I was reading, and maybe a line that things were pretty dire. Reckoning from the data I have about the time frame, I can figure out why they were dire and in what way and with whom, but an external reader couldn't tell whether I meant that my physics homework was particularly grim or whether I feared for one of my friends' sanity or something in the middle. (The marriage of the two -- fearing for a friend's sanity due to grim physics homework -- is not uncommon but also not likely to make the journal.) Every once in awhile I think I should give up my paper journals completely, but I never do. Every once in awhile, I think I should write more in them deliberately, and sometimes I do. The problem is that the brain has been trained. I can no longer freewrite without developing story ideas. If I let my pen wander and leave the monkey brain out of it, very soon I'm either neck deep in a scene of fiction, or else I'm outlining something. Sometimes this is useful, but sometimes not, really, and I've decided not to push it. When it's useful, hurrah; when it's not, oh well. There are other ways to bash my brain to knock things loose.

I finished a paper journal just before I left for England, and I still have to sort through it to get notes on various projects pulled out and put into useful files before I shelve the thing. It was the last of my 8 1/2" x 11" journals for awhile, I think: when I was writing entire novels in these, I needed that space or the scenes would be even more underwritten than my drafts usually are (writers are fruitbats, I know), but that's not a viable mode for my back or my brain now that I have other options, and porphyrin gave me one that's soft, small, blue. Ista keeps trying to chew on the attached bookmark, but this is not the worst problem that ever a paper journal has had.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

So, far, 100% of those who've answered agree with me.

However, the second person may not.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I started a daily journal when I was fourteen.

I'm now 45.

This is scary.

I used to be quite rigid about a page a day. In the last five years or so I will occasionally skip a day.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am kinder to my former self than to my current self when I read back a few years or more. Do you find that to be the case, or no, or would you prefer not to say?

Also, do you ever intend to let your daughters see your journals (now, when they're older, after you've gone), or no, or haven't you decided, or again, prefer not to say? I have long said that children are too close but grandchildren might see them when I'm gone, but as I don't actually have children yet, I don't know if that will change at all.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Rob can see my journals if he survives me. My girls can see my journals after I'm gone, when they're over the age of 21.

But other than that: I dunno. I suppose it might depend on what, if anything happens to the writing career; i.e., if it becomes significant enough that I end up having a literary executor, or interest from, say, deluded graduate students. They might be of interest to a historical society, too.

I'll have to give this some thought.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

gaaldine, herself an English lit grad student, encourages me to think of the English lit grad students, just in case. I'm not likely to orient to making their theoretical future lives easier any time soon, though.

[gaaneden.livejournal.com]

I mostly use paper journals for story ideas and world building.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I've tried keeping a paper journal. I never stick with it.

When I'm somewhere that I may have thinky thoughts, like on vacation, I take a notebook for poems and story ideas.

I think keeping a regular journal was too isolated for me. I've been too much alone in my head for too long. LJ is more like a conversation. My therapy group. *g* Having feedback helps me sort out the healthy thoughts from the unhealthy ones, which a paper journal never did.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can tell in which ways they're the same thing for me and in which ways they're not, because a lot of things -- especially the ones where being alone in my head is not the point -- have filtered out to my online journals. But the paper ones are still around.

[deborahkalin.livejournal.com]

I never stick to a paper journal, although the durations vary from several years to a few months before I wander away. Since I'm at the computer all the time I find an electronic format much easier these days; I keep a journal in KeyNote, which is sometimes metrics and mostly "thinking aloud on the paper". But I do carry around a notebook (lined, A5-size so it can fit in the removable leather cover).

[landofnowhere]

I started a journal when I was 11, and kept it on an almost daily basis from age 11 1/2 to just before leaving college. I've kept it sporadically since, and am always meaning to write more.

[suntyger.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, I had a diary. I wrote in it every day for about a week, and then only wrote in it when Something Huge was happening. I was never really able to get the hang of paper journals.

I have a purple notebook right now, about the size of a half-sheet of paper, with plastic front and back covers to protect the pages. It fits nicely in my purse, and I've been writing in it almost every day for a couple of weeks now--story fragments and worldbuilding notes, mostly. It's on track to be the first notebook I've ever filled completely. I am a paper products whore, and I tend to buy new notebooks when only three pages have been filled in the old ones, rather than face my fear of all those intimidating blank pages.

(Hi, by the way. I've been following your journal for a few days, in the hopes that surrounding myself with successful writers will turn me into one, through some sort of weird LiveJournal osmosis.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've slowed down enough that I'm not buying new notebooks compulsively, but for awhile I lived in terrified memory of the week in college when I ran out of journal and had to write on notebook paper. I lasted, I think, two days before I begged Jen to drive me into Mankato to get a new journal. I didn't want to live through the horror again. O the humanity. Etc.

(And hi! Nice to meet you. I actually find that having other writers on my lj list has been helpful, though sometimes in the "I am not alone in this neurotic reaction" sense.)

[pameladean]

I kept a paper journal for four years, from ninth through twelfth grade. I tried to continue it when I went away to college, and I certainly did kick myself for not having done so when I was writing Tam Lin>/i>, but I really just couldn't do it. It wasn't for lack of time; the conditions for writing a journal just weren't there. No, I don't know what they were.

I reread those journals when I was writing Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. That is where Becky's poems come from. Other than that, I merely make mouths at the invisible event.

P.

Evil brackets!

[pameladean]

Sorry about the wandering italics.

P.

Re: Evil brackets!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It just won't scan to Gilbert and Sullivan, no matter how early it is.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I've kept a diary sporadically since I was about 8 (with several multi-year gaps here and there). I've gotten spottier about it since I started keeping an online journal - now the stuff that goes into it tends to be only the stuff that isn't suitable for online posting for whatever reason. (I still have most of my old diaries. The very early ones are surprisingly boring, with lots of entries like, "It rained today." The one I've reread most often is a diary from when I was about 12-13 years old. It's a really useful reminder that yes, early adolescence really did suck that much. It also contains fabulously detailed plot synopses of every Star Trek and Dr. Who re-run I saw that year.)

I also carry a small portable journal which serves as a cross between a lab notebook and a portable outboard brain. It contains notes on projects I'm working on, to do lists, story ideas, shopping lists, titles of books I want to read, nifty quotes, snarky remarks that I've avoided uttering out loud, and anything else that I need to get out of my head.

I also generally have a pad of loose leaf paper or a sketchpad handy for doodling/brainstorming or scrawling down anything that's ephemeral enough not to go in the journal. It's not clear to me that I'm actually capable of thinking without pen and paper in hand, so I tend to accumulate lots of pens and lots of paper.

In the past couple of years, I've developed a preference for writing on either graph or unruled paper. (Sometimes I turn my notebooks 90 degrees and write sideways.) I like to collect interesting or pretty notebooks, but I still do a lot of writing in cheap spiral bound notebooks.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know how people do without an outboard brain, in either paper or electronic form. I am impressed with those who do.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the outboard brain front. Lists, notes, things I heard on the radio or overheard on the train - anything that comes in or comes out, as it were.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

I don't keep a journal, but I still have the habit of keeping lab notebooks with calculations, sketches, and any number of technical ruminations, which is fairly close. And I'm horribly obsessive about my choices of pens and paper for those.

[deva-fagan.livejournal.com]

Using a paper journal for daily life and philosophizing and feeeeelings has never worked out for me, but I do like them for jotting down brainstorming ideas and character snippets and dreams and so on. Occasionally I will actually try to use them for longer bits of prose, but usually only when away from the PC on vacation. I also have one I to record quotes and poetry (by other people) I find memorable. I have a weakness for pretty blank books that overmatches my ability to use them to the point that I no longer allow myself to go into that corner of the bookstore (especially since someone has put out a series of blank books with Kinuko Craft art on 'em).

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I addressed each journal (the physical object) on its own terms. My first one was flowery and cloth-bound, and I intended to be the next Anne Frank (with little to no success, I might add). That covered ages 9-11; when I turned 12, I started another one, which I wrote in much more seriously and with less interesting tidbits. Moved on to a new one at 13--which is the only one I completely filled.

After that I sort of kept diary papers, like the Brontes--random biographical notes on bits of paper, no more notebooks until I turned 17, when I kept one a year or every two years again--until I met the internet, which is when paper journals became sporadic affairs for me. Now my paper journal would be incoherent unless you read it threaded with my online journals, I suspect. I specifically keep a writing journal in which I work through random bits of craft ("why does this character do that?" and "I shall finish this story this week" sort of notes to myself). The latter is something I instituted so I could flip through it, and to slow my thoughts down; I don't tend to look back over my online archives except to tsk at myself for being an idiot.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think we are all grateful that the Nazis did not come for you.

As I said in a comment above to pegkerr, I am a good deal kinder to my former self than to my current self, and I'm sorry it doesn't work that way for you with your online archives.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Yes, actually, I was sort of intrigued when you said you were kinder to your younger selves. I thought, "I wonder what that's like..."

But, it's a habit from way back. I remember lying in bed at the age of 14 before going to sleep at night, and dwelling on mistakes I'd made at age 7 with embarrassment. Perhaps this is why I'm always so hopeful for the future...

re: the Nazis--well, I mostly meant by lack of success that I've not written an enduring testament to our times. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I was 7, I made mistakes, but as I'm more distant from them now, it's easier for me to see all the gaps in what I knew and understood. And I don't think it's embarrassing for a 7-year-old not to know/understand everything unless you're currently the 7-year-old. If I hadn't learned anything since then, that would be embarrassing.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I've been keeping a paper journal pretty steadily since 1987, and have about 128 books on the shelves where it lives. I like narrow-ruled books, with paper that's thick enough to take fountain pen ink (I've only used ballpoint pens in one book), and will allow me to print rubber stamps on the page. Lately, I've found Japanese notebooks to be close to ideal (and another jaunt to the local store is in order, I think).

Let me see if I can find old posts here about my journals, because I can blithely go on about my rituals and ways of preparing the books for pages.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hate ballpoint pens. Haaaaate. I use them on grocery lists, but only because the grocery list pens tend to migrate. (Only the ballpoint ones don't, because no one else in the house likes them, either, so we always have a pen available by the grocery list, which is a very good thing.)

[ellarien]

I used to keep those tiny little pocket diaries as a teen, but I was dreadful about updating them and often tried to reconstruct whole months in retrospect. Later on I had hardcovered notebooks that I wrote screeds in when I felt like it -- mostly during my last undergraduate and first postgrad year, when life was more harrowing than usual. I was never sure it was good for me, though; I was introspective enough as it was. Poetry, when I was doing that, had its own notebooks, and I didn't start writing down writing ideas -- as opposed to just plunging in and starting stories -- until I was thoroughly computerized.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I started keeping a paper journal when I was about twelve. It was never anything I wrote in daily; I used it as a place to vent emotions after starting to be a witness to my parents' marriage breaking down. I continued to sporadically keep it (including a slightly hilarious entry after I had sex for the first time) but was lured into the Diaryland world by friends on a mailing list. I just shut down my Diaryland journal because I started feeling inhibited about putting up short or fluffy entries (no idea why, as plenty of other people do).

I don't consider myself to be keeping the paper journal anymore, but I do keep a paper reading journal, and I also have a big sketch book that I write, sketch, assemble collages, and occasionally paint it. Cutting and pasting things seems to soothe me.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Every once in a while, I used to try to keep a journal. (This was before there were really any options other than paper). It just didn't work for me--I would feel compulsive about writing something Every Day, and I didn't have an internal off switch, so I always felt like I was Leaving Something Out.

I save virtually all correspondence, though, and that's my documentation. And posterity's documentation, too, should posterity wish to have any.

I'm right now trying to figure out how to take notes and keep track of research ideas in a constructive way, and that could well end up being a journalish sort of thing.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

I kept a sporadic journal from elementary school on, containing a combination of snippets of fiction and poetry, notes about people I had crushes on, what I got for Christmas, all that sort of thing. I still have them, and occasionally review them for amusement value. I had the "blank book" style - mostly (although not exclusively) hardcover, lined & bound. I had a handful of the faux-parchment ones too, although they tended to get used for quotes and poetry more than journalling.

As an adult, I've switched over to mostly spiral notebooks of the sort one can get anywhere. I remember reading something Natalie Goldberg once wrote about knowing which journals things were in by which sequence of cheap notebooks she was using, and I'm a little that way - I have Star Wars ones and fuzzy critter ones and a whole series that are just plain cardboard covers. I'm not as diligent about writing in them since I started keeping an online journal, but I still write in them occasionally.

I'm not especially fussy about pens although I hate bleed-thru, so these days I mostly use Pilot fine-point ball point or gel pens, usually in black. I'm one of the people who gains a certain emotional satisfaction from the process of pen moving across paper, so I do a lot of thinking-about-writing longhand and then do a first revision pass going from longhand into the computer.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've read that Natalie Goldberg bit, too, and I see why it works for her. It doesn't work for me because the spirals leave little dents in my hand. Silly, isn't it? But true: I don't like the wiring. I also find that the wireless kind tend to fall apart on me.

My first and third journals were lab notebooks, and that worked admirably well, but I haven't gone back to them, probably because I now feel pretty comfortable writing crap in lovely notebooks.

I like the pen over the paper, too, and sometimes I do that sequence going from longhand into the computer. Sometimes not. I have to revise on printouts, though; I've never once been able to do it reasonably on the computer.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

I did lab notebooks for a while, and accounting notebooks, the old blue exam notebooks (gotten for free from my dad), and the really old softcover "copybooks" with the tan covers and the taped spine - if it's paper, I've written on it.

And I can't revise on the computer either, except occasionally to correct spelling.

[jsgbits.livejournal.com]

I used to keep a journal--probably started it in middle school--but stopped in my late 20s. I began with expensive hardbacked books, usually sketch books because the paper was thick and I could use a variety of pens and inks without worrying about bleedthru. As I matured, the books became a dumping ground for everything negative in my life. I never reread those pages. It was cathartic, but expensive, so I switched to cheap spiral bound notebooks, which did not have the same visceral tangible effect I needed.

My writing notebooks are either 5 section spiralbound college ruled or college ruled legal pads. I used to buy fancy notebooks--like the sketchbooks--but then I was intimidated into not using them. I have so many ideas, play around with sentence strucutres for cadence and rhythm, make up names for things, and have too many aborted beginnings that I tend to eat trees at a tremendous rate. When I finally got a decent computer, the days of longhand notetaking and playing around went to an electronic format. I no longer feel guilty about starting and stopping projects. I do have a gazillion files on the hard drive, so it's a good thing I have a Mac and in-house sys admin. :-) I still buy fancy notebooks because I am a paper products junkie.

Pens: I like a bold clean line and smooth ride across the paper. I dislike weak lines (like Bic ballpoints) and gloppy messes (cheap fountain pens) or too much bleed thru (felt tips) and friction (felt tips again). I had a mid-$$ range fountain pen in college, but had to keep refilling the damn thing and afterawhile, it just got to be too much of a hassel. I was always in transit, so it did nothing good for the pen. I lost it in one of my many moves.

[katharine-b.livejournal.com]

I wrote in a paper journal during high school and my first few years of college -- I filled five of them, bound blank books. Then I stopped, partly because of LJ.

I write longhand notes for novels in whatever notebook is handy -- or I did, until this summer, when I bought a little Moleskine, which I love and adore.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

I love the large-size Moleskine notebooks, but economics prevents me from buying as many of those as I'd like. When I can't get those, my next favorite is the marbleback composition books.

I tried keeping a daily journal for a while (having long been in awe of those people who kept a daily journal and wrote for umpteen years without missing a day), and actually managed to keep it up for six months once before losing interest.

Since then, I've found that keeping thematically organized notebooks works best for me, even though it means I end up with a large number of notebooks simultaneously in use. For example, right now I'm using the following:

Large-sized Moleskine:
* Weekly planner (I had wanted the daily planner, but the country was sold out.)

Small Moleskine:
* Book collection organizer (combination of inventory and shopping list)

Marbleback composition books:
* Thought file (combination to-do list and short note jottings)
* Financial planning
* Life List (includes both the life list and progress on the various projects on the list, until projects become paper-intensive enough that they get spun off into their own notebooks)
* Learning German (spun off from Life List)
* Rebuilding a classic car (spun off from Life List)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've never had a Moleskine, though I keep hearing good things of them.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

They're yummy, and they're now more readily available in the US than they used to be. I think I saw them at one of the big chain bookstores fairly recently. They come in a nice range of sizes and the paper is just yummy.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

All the good things are true - Moleskines are the best thing to happen to paper since wood pulp.