On Keeping a Notebook

An ode to LIFE

I have been keeping the same notebook for almost ten years. It is a B5 lined notebook from Japanese stationery brand LIFE. On my bookshelves, under my bookshelves, and in my chaotic cabinets of unorganized documents sit little stacks of pale robin’s egg blue. From the front of each notebook I write first drafts of fiction. From the back, daily journal entries.

Some first drafts of Shanghailanders

This winter I finally put away the notebooks that contain the first drafts of Shanghailanders. Since 2020, when I started that project, these LIFEs have been lined up together on my desk shelf, black spines at attention. They continued holding ground through 2023, though I had finished draft work, already sold the book, and moved onto Word docs for revision.

After transposing do I rarely revisit initial drafts. Re-reading past journal entries? Cringe! So why did I keep them there, loitering, all through 2024, post-pub, and as work slowly began on the next project? I think now I understand that their presence there was a necessary comfort, a kind of benediction.

I started writing more seriously when I was in my mid-twenties. I wrote my first book (a memoir), signed with my first agent, and then… received my first publisher rejections. Though no one said to me in so many words that the writing was the problem, surely part of my decision to apply to MFA programs the following year was in response to that disappointment. To take things very much more seriously.

It was around that time, in my late twenties, that I happened upon these LIFE notebooks, probably in a random stationery shop one day (aka, every writer’s kryptonite). I’d started working on a historical fiction novel, and it was sprawling and overwhelming. To counter my anxieties around progress, and in my belief that improvement was necessary, I began setting routines around writing. I assigned myself a minimum of ~500 words a day, which equated to roughly three LIFE notebook pages. I would write in the same cafe every day, around the same time. I discovered, too, how helpful it was to journal before moving into fiction.

I suppose because my daily word count was tied to the dimensions of the notebook pages, and because the line ruling fit my natural scrawl, it made sense to keep buying LIFE. The creamy vanilla paper stock also made the act more pleasurable. Are the notebooks cheap? No, I can’t say they are the cheapest. But I think the act of buying a decent notebook from a specialty shop helped me take myself more seriously. I hadn’t been published. I had no one’s attention. The notebooks were, and have always been, little investments in myself. Small tokens of faith.

I grew exhausted with the historical project, began my MFA, and decided to work on something more contemporary. But I stuck with LIFE, and with many of the same routines. My next book grew into Shanghailanders.

Not infrequently at a cafe would I prepare to write and feel a twinge of embarrassment at the self-important largess of the gold and shining “LIFE,” all-caps, front and center. But alas, so much of my life is contained in these notebooks. My ideas, my trials, self-doubts (so many), joy. I now feel that these blue books are essential to my process. Sometimes, in moments of near paralyzing fear, I consider buying a ten-year supply, in case of discontinuance. It’s the feeling that if these notebooks didn’t exist then I would not exist. More specifically, that if for some reason I could not write, I could not exist. And yet, I still only buy one or two at a time. Maybe the ritual of purchase has become also essential: the paying, the packing, the crackling of cellophane, possession, excitement, hope.

When I now look at that beloved blue (Tiffany, sky, Pacific, ice), when I touch the thick silkiness of a blank page (cream, alabaster, eggshell, rice), I see and feel the ballast of words that came before. Also, the promise of more to come: quotidian, trivial; miraculous, metamorphic. Those seven identical draft notebooks manifested a beautiful dream. I looked at them from time to time in celebration, in awe. But they were also a reminder of the continuum, the daisy chain, the start and end and start and end. To move forward. One by one. In unremarkable, blessed succession. Such is life.

P.S.

H has begun keeping a notebook. At the airport one day, she imprinted, age 5, on the classic hardcover Moleskine. Her tiny journal entries offer sneak peaks into her little world. Her classmate Kyle, apparently, is very naughty.

Feb, Th 21 - Today I ate potato and a kind of rice cake grandma made yummy I went to school Kyle was criticized