The Notebook on my Desk

Claire Messud writes by hand on graph paper. Dani Shapiro once told me that she begins new work longhand because early drafts should not look like finished, polished manuscripts. And Lydia Davis writes every story in a notebook because there, nothing has to be “permanent or good.”

And yes: “You can’t write well — you can’t do anything well — if you feel cornered.”

True.

I was a stutterer as a child, a survivor of well-intentioned perfectionism. I struggled to get the words just right; it was expected in my home, and if I couldn’t unravel what I was trying to say on the watches of the people around me, I was often interrupted and the conversation was over. (Oddly, I still tend to attract chronic but kind-hearted interrupters in my life.) I took early to the practice of keeping a notebook because it was the place where I was able to complete a thought in whatever circuitous route I needed and had to. I also wrote stories and created lists and made feeble attempts at terrible metric poetry. Whatever I was doing in my notebook was my own business: I used it to explain the world around me, and to make sense of it.

To make sense of myself.

Eventually, the black and white hardcover notebooks of my 1970s childhood turned into better quality gray-covered lab notebooks. When I went away to college, I bought a stack of faux leather-bound notebooks at the old Harvard Coop, and wrote in those (one of them is still my kitchen notebook, stuffed since the early nineties with clipped recipes and notes about dinners I cooked for friends in my Manhattan studio apartment). Years later, Moleskines began to spawn around the office where I write and edit full-time now, in the home I share with my wife of twenty years. The most important notebook of them all --- my father’s childhood three-ring binder, pebbled black leather, given to him by his beloved sister when he was a grade school student in the early 1930s --- sits on my desk at all times; I write notes for all of my books in it, in the earliest stages of the process. When the books are published, I clip together the notebook pages and store them together with the manuscript. Not posterity. Just interest in the process: how I got from point A to B, what was going on in my life at the time I was writing, and how it affected my work, my voice, my day-to-day, my hope. The pages are interspersed with marginalia: lists, recipes, music I’m listening to, poetry.

Perhaps this is a fetish understood only by writers and doodlers alike, that we would ascribe such importance to the container for early work in a manner that is as important to us as the finished work itself. An author friend once told me that the novelist Ruth Ozeki introduced her to the concept of keeping a process journal while she’s writing her books. I was mystified. Aren’t all notebooks process journals? Isn’t this why some of us are as compelled by the journals of everyone from Virginia Woolf and DaVinci to Wallace Stegner and Annie Dillard as we are by their actual art? Notebooks contain the stories behind the stories, even when they hold not a shred of evidence to be found in the end result. Notebooks are the viscera and the DNA; they are proof of life and human frailty behind the dodgy attempts at perfection —- that nasty, gnarly thing that Anne Lamott calls the voice of the oppressor.

When I re-created this website, I did so with the plan to have a space for live, organic process: a weekly entry that might replicate what is going on in the notebook(s) living on my desk. Some entries will be specific to the practice and work of writing, some less so. I hope you will read along and share your own thoughts about the creative process.