The problem of too many notebooks
I promise I won't tell you to stop buying them
Today’s letter is for the people who have a stack of journals and notebooks for different types of writing… and who find themselves not writing.
Before I get into it, I feel compelled to share the poet Nikky Finney’s response to the interview question, “To end on hope: collectively, in what ways do you feel we can effectually repair and improve our humanity?”
Her response:
Make room for each other. I think we live in a world—I don’t think, I know—we live in a world that keeps spaces so narrow, and I think that writing poetry—the arts—is the biggest lane of all. That’s why I love being a poet; that’s why I love being in the arts—it’s because that lane is so wide and so abundant for us all, if we keep the stuff that can grow over our path back and make sure that the work that we each are doing with our stories and our poems and our art includes somebody who doesn’t look like us or who doesn’t sound like us or who doesn’t talk like us. I think the rest of the world counts on us to do that—to make that space, to keep the lane wide and open—because I think that’s what they have come to know as the power of the arts.
Writing is a lot.
Writing urges you to be, in the words of Florida Scott Maxwell, “fierce with reality”. Add to that all of the baggage we carry around writing and creativity… it’s a lot.
When I hold spaces for people to come together to write—people who identify as writers and people who are hesitant to write alike—I always make a point to acknowledge how often writing is coupled with evaluation.
For many of us, our earliest writing experiences happened at school. There was often a right way and wrong way to write. After we made it through that phase of the process, we got to look forward to our writing getting stamped with a grade. The teachers stamping the grade weren’t always the most encouraging or gracious in their feedback. That stays with you.
As adults, we get to make our own rules in the realm of creativity. We get to reclaim the freedom of creativity and write for the joy of writing (this is exactly what we’ll do in the writing gathering in December).
In the process of reclaiming the freedom of creativity through writing as an adult, here’s what I’ve seen: we create different containers to hold different types of writing.
A new project idea or a new year or a newfound desire to write usually leads to the same place: a beautiful new notebook.
(For everyone who writes through typing, this might not feel on the mark for you—what I share below can be extrapolated into digital modes, so stay with me.)
A new notebook is glorious. It beckons. It takes the daunted, dispersed energy that’s so common in practicing writing and it gives it a little home.
And then sometimes, it starts to feel very precious. And you realize, oh, I can’t write about my project in the same journal as my morning pages… I think I need a new notebook.
It feels intuitive to create a system of designated ‘homes’ for different types of writing in different notebooks: one for gratitude, one for that creative project that keeps getting put off, one for tracking the various things we can track in life, one for dreams, one for lists, one for goals, one for a special interest that deserves its own home…
Sometimes, this really works! Sometimes having a notebook that you know is for gratitude, for example, can help to formalize a gratitude practice. A journal dedicated to a project can help to make it feel real, like a pact with yourself, no more waiting, now is the time.
Too often though, this approach runs the risk of making the writing process feel even more daunting and precious. Add to that, having five notebooks on hand is dizzying.
Thoughts and ideas that want to be written usually have lots of energy. Some might spark or buzz in your mind, some might feel like a steady, radiant reverberation. For all of us who love to write, this is when we feel compelled to capture that energy through writing.
When the homes for your writing are pre-defined, that moment of vitality can be interrupted with a decision-point of where should this go?
And it’s frustrating because it seems like it should be obvious: expressions of gratitude go in the gratitude journal.
But what about how writing unfolds? Sometimes we don't know what we're getting at until we've written it out.
Deciding where a thought should go creates a gap of space for doubt to fill: is this actually even worth writing down?
From my own experience, this is often the point when I analyzed my systems and convinced myself that another journal would be the answer. Or, that my system needed redesigning. As I shared in Winking at mystery, “Clarity became perfectionism in a different outfit. Just like perfectionism, the need for clarity before action became my clever, go-to safeguard from feeling shame and rejection.”
And then comes habitual self-evaluation… One I hear just about every week goes like this: “If I was meant to enjoy writing/be a writer/have a writing practice, I wouldn’t be struggling so much.”
One of the un-learnings that I support people through is to experiment with waiting to organize at the writing/pre-writing phase.
Instead of structuring how something is going to be from the start, our creative projects get to communicate how they want to be. They will tell you! By listening to what your process is reflecting back, you gain enormous insight into your personal cadence of creating (and resting) and what works for you and your projects in this season of life.
Instead of starting from imposed structure, we can shift to emergent structure.
What’s that look like? First, let’s go back to all of the neatly defined writing containers. They often exist like silos:
But thinking and writing is pretty anti-silo. In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski described history as a “a hotchpotch and rich confusion” instead of “vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes”. I couldn’t find better words to explain what’s happening here.
A thought that starts in a gratitude journal might evolve into a project idea or even inspire a new habit. If each thought is confined to a separate container, this unfolding can feel like a problem instead of the whole point.
Trying to manage creative impulse at the early stages so often leads to resentment of ourselves and the process. So much second-guessing and mental chatter…
Instead of organizing at the pre-writing/writing phase, here’s what I’ve found works well for most people who are bogged down with too many writing containers, especially the people who then pile on the judgement for having “too many” ideas or continuing to put off writing no matter what they try:
Smooth out the get-it-down phase through lowering the stakes.
Reduce the friction through less notebooks and decisions. Lower the stakes by using one trusty notebook—one that doesn’t feel too precious (I love the cardboard moleskines and dollar store composition notebooks)—and a pen or pencil that feels pleasurable to write with.
And then you’ll have lots of ideas and thoughts swimming together, and that’s a very good thing. It might feel disorderly, but creativity is disorderly. It’s a vital phase of the process that then leads to the sense-making phase of digesting, sorting, structuring, and refining.
In a simple way, it can look like this:
We start simple with a catch-all container like a commonplace notebook. This can hold the anarchy of creativity. From there, the practice of harvesting offers a systematic approach to sense-making:
Harvesting is a focused practice of gathering insights and wisdom from your personal archives—journals, documents, notes, and more. It's a deliberate process of revisiting and cultivating meaning from your experiences and recorded reflections.
If you want to put this into practice in a silent co-working style gathering this Saturday, here’s where you can save your spot (you’ll get the Harvesting Guide and a spot for a friend when you register).
Notice in the image above that the primary notebook is harvested into secondary writing containers. One idea or one thought might be recorded into three different spots. This way, you can still have all the notebooks and then some, but they are used at different phases in the creative process. And you might find that some of the designated notebooks aren’t all that useful to you.
From there, you can harvest those notebooks back into a main commonplace book (catching undefined insights that feel important to remember) or into another defined notebook.
This is more than just digesting and sorting through your writing. Harvesting is a way of getting to know your creative process and how you naturally think and create so that you can work with your creative disposition, instead of against it.
In the shift from imposed structure to emergent structure, you might have a few ‘primary’ notebooks, like this:
These aren’t based on an ideal or a ‘should’, primary notebooks are based on what actually works for you. In other words: what notebooks don’t have friction?
And then, you once again harvest from these primary notebooks into secondary ones, and back again in an ecstatic symphony of connections:
Digital writers, I’ve not forgotten you! Imagine some of these notebooks are folders or documents on your computer. Your primary notebooks documents might be a commonplace note in Obsidian, for example, that then gets harvested into different Obsidian notes (or even on different platforms).
A word of advice if you’re feeling swamped by having a digital commonplace document: my experience is that it gets way more unwieldy than a commonplace notebook. If possible, I’d recommend having a commonplace notebook in addition to your digital writing system and try to even catch 20% of your thoughts analog as an experiment. Then, you’d harvest the commonplace notebook as shown above but into its digital components.
Everything I shared today doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy that notebook that makes your heart skip a beat. If buying journals and notebooks and pens and paper brings you joy, don’t make it a problem!
Also: forgive yourself for filling three pages of a journal that felt too precious. Forgive yourself for not wanting to ‘mess up’ another, I get it. Just because growing a writing practice is tedious and confronting doesn’t mean it isn’t for you. Writing practices are often tedious and confronting, but also so much more. And: a journal doesn’t need to be finished to be complete.
All that said, if you’re tight on money and thoroughly convinced you need a new notebook to do [insert your desire here], I hope this showed you that you probably don’t. Or maybe you do, I don’t know. But my hope is that the ‘perfect’ system or notebook doesn’t hold you back from embracing the messy, unpredictable magic of creativity.
If you loved this, please let me know by giving it a heart at the top, dropping a comment, or sharing with a friend. Thank you so much.
This is a warm reminder that we meet this Saturday for Harvesting Together.
It’s the first time I’ve offered something like this, and it’s going to be cozy and grounding as we practice harvesting—or journaling—together in silence. Here’s where to register.
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