The Joy of Shitty Notebooks

       Years ago, back in the early 80s, I was seriously into Kerouac and Jim Morrison and Patti Smith and Lou Reed and a bunch of other "rebels' that appeal to the faux-anarchic tendencies of suburban white kids who really have no reason to rebel.

And the thing that I really loved finding out about was the publication some of their notebooks.

If you ask any writer who started writing before the advent of storeable data, you'll pretty much find that they wrote their ideas in notebooks, to work through an idea before committing to the work of typing it out.

With the 'greats'(famous writers) these notebooks were a look into the 'rough' work, the stuff that sometimes never made it into their polished drafts

Now, of course, everyone and their brother has a laptop or tablet and the drafts get put into memory somewhere somehow.

And it's shifted the way we write, I think. Instead of distinct drafts of work, we tend to 'over-write' our mistakes, highlighting the passages that don't quite work and then backspacing them into oblivion.

And I think we're losing something by doing that.

Which is why I love paper notebooks.

The cheaper the better.

Crane and moleskin and a host of other makers have lines of notebooks that are works of art and craft. leather binding surrounding rich cream-covered heavy paper...paper that cries out to be written on with a fine three-hundred dollar fountain pen...

But you can't bear to violate that kind of book with mere scribbling...mere "hunches"....

With dollar store notebooks, who cares?
They are designed to be disposable.
Hilroy makes an 80 page spiral notebook that is perfect for writing in and near back to school time, the local chain stores have them on for next to nothing, sometimes literally so... I picked up 50 this year for 5c each.

At that price, who cares if I write stuff that never goes anywhere or takes a while to get there?

But having the freedom to fail lets me try ideas and brainstorm and just follow something I think might work out.... And often it does, if sometimes not in the way I thought.

Heck, I've written stuff for one story, only to have an epiphany that it's perfect for another story.

The more we allow ourselves freedom to not have to write 'good' writing, the more chances we are willing to take.
The more chances we take, the more possibilities there are to create something that surprises us and surprises the reader.