The Notebook Obsession

I love notebooks. I’m obsessed with notebooks. I collect and hoard notebooks and sketchbooks and journals like a squirrel hoards provisions for the winter. I have notebooks of all shapes and sizes and designs. Each time I see notebooks in a stationery shop, I make a bee-line for them. I have so many I forget about them and have been known to buy the same one twice, several months apart, not remembering I already owned it. 

In a way, it’s normal that I should like notebooks. I’m a writer. The notebook and the fountain-pen are the quintessential tools of a writer. Except… except that as my stack of notebooks grew and grew and grew, their pages remained empty. For years and years, I wrote nothing in my dozens of notebooks, or if I did, it was only a few pages before I gave up. And my notes were almost exclusively taken on torn scraps of recycled paper. 

Why? I was always afraid of “spoiling” those nice notebooks which had been chosen and collected with love. I wanted to keep them for special occasions – which never came. 

Was this reaction a derivative of the blank page syndrome? The beautiful emptiness of my notebooks paralysed me (and I’m sure I’m not the only writer suffering from this psychological blockage). 

Anyway, I recently decided it had to stop. If I wanted to go on hoarding notebooks, I actually had to use them. And I did. I was brave. I faced those blank, empty, beautiful pages. I took a pen. And I spoiled them. 

It started with a journal where I wrote down things I knew I’d like to remember in a few years’ time. I’m still keeping this diary of sorts, which has now filled 3 and ½ notebooks. In another, I jotted down observations made on walks in nature. In another, the beginning of a story. Right now, I am writing the first draft of this post in a pretty notebook, the cover of which is adorned with colourful fountain pens (very fitting). 

Now I’m using my notebooks fast, and what better excuse to buy new ones? I’m always finding new things to write (am I not a WRITER after all?) and I even wish I’d started earlier. 

Because writing is one of the best ways I know to crystallise memories and feelings. For instance, I wish I had written down my thoughts when I travelled. Now I still remember, but it’s a bit dimmer. 

I’ve realised that hesitating to “spoil” a nice notebook with random and not always well-expressed thoughts is rather like being afraid of starting a first draft. It’s underestimating yourself. It’s lacking self-confidence. 

Yes, 90% of what I write in my pretty notebooks is uninteresting scribbling, full of spelling and grammar mistakes. There are blots an tears and scratches. The gorgeous covers become a bit battered. The designs and colours fade. The corners show signs of wear. 

But those notebooks, which no longer look like they should be lining the shelves of a stationery shop, have become so much more precious to me. They have lived, and their pages contain part of me. With mistakes, with hesitations. 

I still have empty notebooks. And I still have the compulsion to buy more. Not for the same reasons as before. Not because I dream of writing, or hope to have, one day, something special to fill them with. They have become the means of capturing those important and unimportant moments I want to remember, on a certain moment, in a certain place. They have become the guardians of my journey as a writer and as a person.

The moment when I prefer to write

There is a moment when I love to write: very late in the evening, when everyone else is asleep and only I am awake. When the night is deepening outside and the world is hushed by darkness. 

It is a moment when I love to work on a first draft. And at that moment, working on that first draft becomes almost relaxing: I take a piece of paper and a pen and I write and write, caring only about the story that is slowly taking shape and not asking myself if it is any good. 

When I was a child I invented stories as I lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come. So, in a way, writing at night is a continuation of this childhood habit, especially since it fueled my dreams of becoming a writer and taught me to use my imagination, and to create characters. 

I love that moment when the night and sleep overcome the world around me. A shift in the atmosphere. An owl hoots outside. All is still. The floorboards creak. It is the time when ghosts awake and wander once again through the world they should have left, remembering times, remembering people now lost forever. 

Being alone awake at night is sharing a secret with the house you are in. Sharing a secret as the night breathes a strange new life into it. The house remembers. Previous inhabitants, from centuries past. Sorrows, joys… It remembers and it dreams, as owls hoot outside. 

What better time to stir the imagination than this moment between wakefulness and sleep? What better time to make up stories? What better time to create? In those stolen moments of quietness, as the whole house sleeps. 

I especially love those moments when I am in the countryside. Then, the first hours of the night have a song of their own. The frogs in spring, and their enamoured croaking. Crickets in summer as the nights begin to lengthen again. The rustling of autumn leaves as the winds strengthens and rain threatens. The cold stillness of winter as the smell of frost creeps on the hills. 

All this is what makes this moment magical in my mind. All this is what makes it special. Inspiration grows as the dreams gather, and the story grows with the night itself. 

Of course, there are other moments when I like to write. In the morning, with a steaming cup of black coffee. During the day, in a café maybe, sitting by the window, watching people going to and fro. Those are straightforward moments to write, to edit, to correct. 

But the first hours of the night are shrouded in mystery. And in the stillness that characterizes them, the story you create is a secret, shared with the house, and the darkness, and the moon.