At around seven yesterday morning, I grabbed my notebook, went down the stairs, turned around the corner, and tossed it away—without any fuss, or second thoughts, exactly as I had promised myself months ago. In this notebook there were two hundred days worth of thoughts, observations, memories, intentions, and questions, all written in, I hope, coherent and articulate paragraphs.
Normally, as with many people, I save and catalogue and often reference my notes, with my system containing various paper notebooks, each relegated to a different purpose, along with an array of electronic documents—I have a spot and database for quotes, multiple places to put essay outlines, folders for politics and art and criticism and personal stories, one notebook that's solely for metaphors, one that has an endless and haphazard list of fiction ideas, and two separate locations for all the scraps and jottings that have nowhere else to go—the drawer in the kitchen, in some ways, that holds all the stuff that doesn’t have a spot. If there's one thing that I don't have, that truly doesn't exist, it is a method of deletion, a system in which old notes are let go.
Some people collect shoes, other people collect refrigerator magnets, while I seem to collect intriguing quotes from out of print books and endless lists of subjects that I must write about. It is hoarding, in all cases, and perhaps fundamentally human—that desire to retain supplies in case of emergency—although at least my affliction takes up less space.
The notebook that I had promised to myself months ago that I would toss away was light green with a metallic spiral and two hundred pages of college rule lines. Which is, to say, nothing special. Though my general theory for notebooks is that the more special the notebook the less special the words: when you buy the perfect notebook, one that’s handmade, with a nice binding, and with expensive paper, you have a hard time scribbling and experimenting and doing all the stuff that, well, you're supposed to do in notebooks. When the notebook is perfect, you don't want to mess it up with less than perfect work. And because perfection is the enemy of all creative output, the blank page stays blank. So that's why my preferred notebooks are the standard-issue, back-to-school notebooks, found piled in every office supply store, or even on the bottom shelf in some gas stations. The last thing that I need when I’m proceeding gently with some inchoate thought is to hold in my hand a beautifully printed, handcrafted notebook, to which my scribbles will always feel inferior.
If the goal is to practice, or to explore, then you quite obviously need the freedom to make mistakes. You can't be inhibited or hobbled by your assumptions. You need to sketch. To investigate. Or simply to rehearse, just as a musician experiments with chords without expecting the perfection of a performance. And that is why I decided to throw away the green notebook that I started about two hundred days ago, as knowing its eventual destination made the lines feel a little less permanent and a little more forgiving—an especially useful method while I struggled to write in a way that's completely new.
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