old notebooks

[zenithblue]

What I really need to do is organize my old notebooks. It's ludicrous. I've tried any number of times to be more disciplined. Use one notebook and only one until the final page. Date them. Yeah, right. I have undergraduate notebooks I later appropriated for fiction notes. I have notebooks devoted half to the old abandoned novel but with scattered short-story notes throughout. Some of my stories have notes in as many as twelve different notebooks. It's a nightmare, especially when one of the stories is still in process and I have to try to find the one note I jotted (I usually remember the geography of where I jotted it, but not the book...like "I was at the Powell's cafe that day but was the notebook black or green?").

This is particularly frustrating right now, with so much of the house still in chaos (various things in various boxes). And particularly frustrating as I'm trying this week to re-focus my writing but every hour or so I have to rip the house apart trying to find where a notebook I can't even visually identify might be nestled.

Really, on the level of minor frustrations this is no big deal, especially not when so many other things are going great. But think how productive I could be if I could organize things a little better? Of course I wonder what I'd lose also. Do these random disorganized pages gain anything interesting by being nestled in next to stories completely unlike them? Is there some strange palimpsest going on? How many times have I rediscovered old ideas while looking for notes on the current one?

Still. Maybe some balance. Maybe I should just go through and make a table of contents for each book or something splendidly OCD like that. Though that sounds suspiciously like procrastination.

Comments

[johnnybrainwash.livejournal.com]

You could tear all the pages out of every notebook, mix them up in a big bin, and draw random pages when you're looking for one.

I mean, it's just a suggestion.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

That would be a splendid suggestions, actually, to combat writers' block. I may adapt the idea for the next time I'm feeling dry. But to find a specific reference...I'd lose my mind.

[johnnybrainwash.livejournal.com]

But clearly, the reference you drew would be the one you really needed. Cosmically, like.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

You have significantly more trust in Eris than I do.

[johnnybrainwash.livejournal.com]

No, just a greater ability to spout new age bullshit with a straight face. Which I gotta admit, Eris digs.

[drawgirl.livejournal.com]

I recommend stickers. It's what I use for my sketchbooks (otherwise it's a question of 'what 9x12 spiral bound black sketchbook is that in?'). The prime Solar game book is covered in Hamtaro stickers, while the Lunars just has the one hammie. Kaigara Spiral has this square star sticker on the front. Really it's quite useful.

Plus you get to use stickers.

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness, I'm completely the same way, except for me everything is written on the backs of used copy paper from my job rather than notebooks. I have piles of them; it's horrible. Some are properly in folders, others are stacked on my desk, riding around with me in my bag for no reason, or even stuck into various other notebooks.

When I despair over my disorganization, though, I take comfort in something my mother once told me. My mother is a painter, and she told me that the period in her life that required the tightest organization for her was when all three of her kids were young and at different stages in school and participating in various activities. She almost entirely stopped painting during this period, and she now thinks that had more to do with the fact that she had to train her brain to move in organized ways than with how busy she was with her kids. So you see, it's not that I'm not capable of organization, it's just that I have to let my brain go free.

In the Lab

[(Anonymous)]

Faggen calls Frost's notebooks--which are neither diaries nor journals but rather workbooks or outlets for thinking--"a chaotic laboratory in which many of his inventions went through constant experimentation and trial."

[te-amo-azul.livejournal.com]

I think of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, which I read a gumpteen million years ago. I don't even know if the image I have when i think of the book is something I got from reading it or if it's a fancy that spun out over the years: life spilling through different prisms, hues separated out and lovingly guarded by covers, and most of all the imagining of a prism's perspective, a geometric omniscience.

[lagizma.livejournal.com]

This is very timely! I keep my notes in a moleskine notebook, and just yesterday, I got all motivated to grab a year's worth of lists and notes (most of which had been accomplished, turned into lj posts, or otherwise "completed) and comb through them to get anything I missed. I tossed it all in a Word document for easy searching and future development.

My task is about 1/100 the size of yours, though.

Good work noticing that this task is both a positive organizational task and a potential procrastination goldmine. Keep it balanced!

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

You are so much more organized than I will ever be.

I am looking forward to a 2AM organization binge, though. My room always got cleaned on deadline nights in college.

[lagizma.livejournal.com]

When I had big high school assignments, I was always extra nice to Madeleine and willing to help her out with school projects. Some of our best sister time was when I was procrastinating.

[helpimarock.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I had/have the same problem with keeping notes in so many different places. The one time I was good about it was when I kept my creative writing notebook in college... the same notebook that got destroyed this past March. Maybe I'm reaching, but I think that almost makes having scattered notes appealing b/c you can't lose a majority of your writings in any single disaster.

Though it does drive me nuts and set of my OCD tendencies like nothing else. Perfect example: just thinking about the fact that I have a todo list on my computer in Notepad and keep a similar todo list in my moleskine and trying to keep them synchronized, that alone makes me nervously chew the inside of my cheek. But I deal with it b/c if I try to actually merge the two, it makes me want to throw shit.