One Woman's Journaling Life

As a professional writer, Salli has spent a lifetime journaling and this simple past-time has kept her going through thick and thin. In this wonderfully evocative article Salli gives us an insight into her processes.

Keep a Notebook and One Day, (hopefully) it may Keep You

“Keep a notebook, travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than grey matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.”

Jack London, ‘Getting into Print’, The Editor

Writers gather.

We gather words.

We gather newspaper tearings, receipts with snippets of overheard conversation scribbled on the back, images from magazines, flowers to dry, tickets, pamphlets, maps.

We gather ideas.

Lots of them.

Alas, there is not a pocket deep enough for our stash, a chatelaine strong enough to tether it. Stephen King does not advocate the use of a notebook, claiming that the best ideas will always remain and be remembered. Whereas Mr King has lots of fabulous and sage advice in his book, ‘On Writing’, the keeping of a notebook for me is not only a huge joy, it is essential.

The notebook is a place in which to hold and tether the daily snowfall of inspiration we encounter as writers; that quote from your current bedside book you found amusing, beautiful, profound, the description of a mother and child you sat opposite on the train, the way the teapot spout is always stained in your favourite cafe, the time you listened to a couple breaking up in the pub, what it felt like when you burnt your hand on the pan.

Without knowing, I kept writer’s notebooks for many years; I had no specific name for them. Some of them have been organised with indexes or page dividers, perhaps referring to characters or locations, themes or questions. Others were folders stashed with scruffy single pages, cuttings and so on. Another exists in digital form, hasty sentences tapped out into my phone which perhaps make no sense when I reread them, if I ever remember to read them; I find a hard copy of more use when it comes to notes.

Over the years I have established a rough system when it comes to my notebooks.

Quotes taken from published text are written in the back of the book. I always reference thoroughly, citing the author, publication and page number. There is little more exasperating than being unable to trace a quote; well okay, a cat yowling at 3.30 a.m. is a tad more irritating but you catch my drift.
I always date my notes, beginning a new page for each session.
I’ve learnt never to write on the left hand side. This allows for additional information to be added if necessary.
My notebooks may be fairly ordered but they are messy. They are covered in crossings out, arrows, post-its, sellotape, different coloured inks, ripped pages, cut pages. They are working documents. If I was too precious about them then their utility would suffer.
I prefer plain paper, in fact I do not use lined paper at all. If I’m using single sheets, compiling them in a folder, then I use A4 printing paper.

We all have preferences and it’s important to work out what suits your writing habits, your personality and your particular project.

Needless to say I tend to keep several notebooks going at the same time. I would love to claim they are meticulously organised but alas, I cannot. The Kondo of the literary world I am not. There is however, a general orderliness, a rough estimation at regularity…enough to make them indispensable to me.

I find the most creative contribution of keeping notebooks is the role they take in stringing ideas together in an uncommon manner. The very act of writing and thinking, of flicking pages back and forth, of redistributing and partnering information gathered from a myriad of sources offers the opportunity to come up with unique ideas and pairings. This is one of the great joys in maintaining and writing notebooks.

Today I wrote in one of my notebooks about a conversation I had with a couple in a cafe. For an hour and a half before work I go for a pot of tea to write. The couple recalled how, on a walk they saw a cat surrounded by a circle of magpies. The birds were closing in on the terrified animal, cawing and flapping their wings at it. The couple ran towards the strange grouping, scattering the birds and saving the cat. In these few sentences there is the beginning of a novel, a poem, a short story, a song. It's full of gothic menace, it’s full of promise. I only remembered it as I wrote it down, dated it and noted the circumstance of the tale to give it context.

To keep a notebook is a wonderful thing. It can be a thing of beauty no matter how scruffy and dog-eared it becomes for within its pages lies world upon worlds, lives within lives and adventure, intrigue and passion.

How wonderful.