On keeping a notebook

Why poems are like mushrooms

Even now there are places where a thought might grow.

Derek Mahon, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’

As a child I was obsessed with stationery, paper, and notebooks. This isn’t unusual in writers - often it turns into a kind of fetish. There is that sense of possibility people talk about. The endless emptiness has some kind of aesthetic pull in its own, too. These days, the blank page (or blank screen) provokes an uh oh as much as a what if? This doesn’t stop me buying new notebooks. The opposite, perhaps: the number I have going at anyone time seems to grow every year, each one bound up with some particular activity.

One result is that almost everything I write starts on paper. I first wrote this in the ‘random thoughts’ book, but I also use a copybook, for quotes/notes, another for planning projects (i.e. drafting articles or making lists of things) and another for poems. When I can, I keep a diary which doubles as a reading diary.

In fact, and despite my best intentions, all of these books have dual purposes. The ‘projects’ book is swiftly becoming another copybook, because the extracts go straight into the projects. The copybook is filling up with clippings and pictures, because they look nice and because my handwriting is illegible. Meanwhile the poems, like weeds, get everywhere.

The result is anarchy: I am always losing track of what I have written and where it is. So, I am always plotting ways to make the system less of a mess and more of a system. Every time I start a new notebook I tell myself I know what it is for. Yet, I know, too, that this is the wrong way around. It is a battle I don’t really want to win. Perhaps the urge to know what kind of writing a piece of writing will be in advance of writing it is a result of internalising the kinds of demands which only exist in relation to publishing: the point at which it will be read by someone else and so needs to be branded in such a way that they know what to do with it.

Writing, at least for me, and at its heart, is necessarily inchoate. Words come out. You work out what to do with them later. Or not, as the case may be. One way of thinking about literary modernism is as a kind of cult of the first draft.¹ Poetry, in particular, seems to grow in the gaps. Poems often appear like changelings in and among other things I thought I was writing. I might work them up in the ‘poetry’ book later, but they rarely start there.

This doesn’t mean they always come out looking like prose. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are trying very hard to get away from the prose around them. I’ve come to think of them a bit like the mushrooms put up by fungi: sometimes they disguise themselves as the detritus they are feeding on, sometimes they look very different indeed. But it’s all one forest.

Without wanting to labour the metaphor, they are also, quite literally, feeding on wood. I’m not sure it would be possible for these different kinds of writing to get tangled up with one another if I was starting everything on a computer. The impact of word processing on writing is rarely discussed, even by writers. Like all technological changes, it is hard to see the scale of change from the inside. But I think the key agent (or villain) is the ‘document’, itself a kind of mini-revolution in writing and reading. Documents on computers, or notes in phones, are separated from one another in the way that pages of a notebook aren’t. They present themselves, on the screen, as something already published. The purpose is fixed from the beginning: there are no cracks left to grow in.

1. See, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s diary.