I’ve absolutely got a problem, and that problem is I love buying notebooks. Pocket-sized notebooks. Large notebooks. Notebooks so big you can use them as makeshift tables. Plain or decorated. Notebooks of sorts.
Don’t even get me started on notebook brands. I’m a reformed Moleskine addict, though I still buy their products from time to time. Targeted ads call out to me, showcasing brands of notebooks I’d previously never heard of and immediately want to try out for myself.
Suffice it to say: I love notebooks, and my collection of various notebooks–many barely filled if used at all–is a testament to this. But what, I recently have wondered, is a notebook for without actually filling it with something? Is it not then just a rectangular footprint of space occupied by so much potential?
These are the thoughts that actually keep me up at night, when I am trying to drown out the world at large.
I have long treated notebooks like sacred objects, only worthy of the perfect notes to be entered into them. Once I commit to cataloguing one idea in a notebook I could not bring myself to shift gears and use it for other things. That would be blasphemy. Instead, I needed another notebook. Let’s not discuss the notebooks I didn’t even use as they were just too nice to deface and defile with thoughts made manifest by way of words in ink.
This past week included organizing, somewhat, a number of these notebooks as well as purchasing the second of three Legend of Zelda Moleskine notebooks. They have Limited Edition nonsense to them, and they are very nice, so naturally I was paralyzed initially as to what I’d use them for other than display purposes.
Over the course of a conversation with a friend on Facebook, it hit me. I had, as Smee once said, an apostrophe. An epiphany. Lightning did, in fact, strike the Notebook Center of my brain.
I would use the Zelda notebooks, all three once I finished the collection, to fully reboot and revamp the Roger & Silence trilogy, a name that makes little sense to many but was a labor of love that I want desperately to revisit. Three very snazzy book ideas deserve three very snazzy looking notebooks, no?
As writers, I think we romanticize notebooks too much. They become these sacred objects instead of empty vessels to be filled with ideas and stories, characters and far-off places poured freely from our hearts and imaginations. They are treated as perfect objects, not to be marred by the words that could easily be kept track of within those pages.
Use the notebooks. Free those thoughts and fill those pages. In doing so, those notebooks are given a soul and a story. One day they will, if nothing else, be a treasure to sift through and a source of warmth on difficult days.
Happy writing, folks.
Phil's Misadventures In Fiction 