In Praise of Half-Filled Notebooks
In the Great Long Ago, no one had GPS. Voice-directed driving instructions came from someone at the desired destination or a friendly soul stopped in the general area of where a person wanted to arrive. Wrong turns, U-turns, three-point turns made for part of getting anywhere. Getting anywhere also carried a higher risk of getting lost.
Lost was less a failure and more an opportunity to find exactly where one stood, which occasionally proved far more interesting than the place one had expected to be. Lost turned out to be the way we learned the world.
That hasn’t changed. Our definition of “the world” evolves in a way that requires leaving off the old ways in search of the new. To forget the old, however, is to lose the story of getting here.
That’s why I have so many half-filled notebooks.
Whether as notes for a larger project, observations during travel, journaling, or otherwise, when I start a new notebook, it’s the beginning of a journey. All those empty pages. All the potential ideas and discoveries. The feeling is always one of optimism and promise. Then I start writing—where am I going?
I leave my notebook behind then, half-filled, unreadable, and follow my sense of direction onto the uncharted territory of the formal page.
Having started out already lost, I pretend confidence in my meager navigation skills with careful lettering in straight margins. Soon these become higgledy-piggledy sentence fragments that will be illegible to me five minutes further on. As the ideas begin to present themselves (“Let’s try this way?”), the deterioration only worsens.
Yet, in all the back-and-forth on roads that go nowhere, a sense of There begins to pull itself into being. Not on the notebook’s pages, but in my sternum. I start to feel where I need to go.
I leave my notebook behind then, half-filled, unreadable, and follow my sense of direction onto the uncharted territory of the formal page. But what to do with the notebook? Perfectly good pages remain but that notebook belongs to this journey.
I love these scribbled pages for their patience with being lost long enough to discover where I needed to end up. To use it for another project would feel like jumping from certainty of place, say, in Peoria and finding myself of a sudden in Tuscany. Tuscany would be a grand place to get lost but that’s a different journey.
My half-filled notebook is lodged on a shelf in my bookcase in good company with the rest of them, each sacred in its own right. Fresh supplies of notebooks arrive on the regular. When a person writes, they find themselves fortunately gifted with blank books, often so lovely that the thought of marring them with pen brings on stage fright (page fright?).
I have marked each of my half-filled notebooks at the place the blank pages begin. The marker is not the point where I lost need of the process. The marker locates the precise location where I found my way.
Writing Exercise
An ode is a statement of wondering adoration or praise for a person or an object. Write an ode, in verse or prose, to an essential aspect of your creative process. No aspect is too small or insignificant. Anything from a lap top to a paperclip will work. What matters is how you value its presence in your work. See the greatness in small things? This is why the details are so important. Bonus Points: Try your hand at the same exercise for some reality outside your realm of experience. Say, walking on the moon or climbing Everest. How was it to imagine the details for what you have not done?
Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash