by Tia DeShong

On Keeping a Notebook

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

-Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

I began writing in my first extant journal when I was in middle school. There had been diaries before that, computer files full of my musings, and certainly loose notes kept tucked in between pages of textbooks and in piles on my bedroom shelf, but the first notebook that was to serve as the catalyst for my lifelong career as a keeper of notebooks didn’t arrive until I was barely in my teens. An English teacher, suspecting promise, had given me a slender, ruled notebook with a floral cover, sewn binding, and a navy blue ribbon to mark the page. I would chew on the thin, satin ribbon when I sat hunched over the notebook, rereading what I had already written and making annotations in the margins and appendixes at the back of the volume. Even at a young age, I took seriously the business of writing things down. 

Over the years, I’ve put pen to page in dozens of notebooks. My highschool notebook, which I used primarily to complain about the Bush administration in true punk-teen fashion, was thick and fire engine red; I used a Sharpie to scrawl, in homage to Woodie Gutherie’s guitar, “this machine kills fascists” across the cover in uneven text. During a brief period in college, compelled mostly by being desperately poor, I bought the journal inserts that Barnes and Noble sold to go with their expensive leather diary covers, and used those small, naked pages to lament that I had to read and comment on a  20+ page piece of genre fiction some guy had written for my creative writing class. When I was 25, I bought my first Moleskine, an immaculately white volume that I immediately christened “The White Album” in homage to both The Beatles and Joan Didion, fellow keeper of notebooks. I threw one notebook into a river in high school in a fit of melodramatic artistic suicide, but beyond that, I’ve held on to all of my notebooks and the words that I’ve compiled over the past seventeen years. At this point in my life, I’ve been keeping a notebook for longer than I have not. 

On Notebooks as a Writing Tool 

When I was a freshman in college, I had a fiction writing professor who insisted that we all keep notebooks, but that they not be diaries. “I don’t want to know what’s going on in your life,” she told us flatly. “I want to know that when inspiration strikes, you have a pen and paper.” We were to submit the journals biweekly, for a grade, and she wanted to see evidence of our developing our journal entries into the longer pieces we submitted for review. 

The pressure of it all nearly incapacitated me. 

At that point, I had been keeping a notebook for years, but I hadn’t thought much about the purpose of my notebooks, which is to say that I had never bothered to delineate whether I was keeping a diary (a record of daily events), a journal (thoughts and musings), or a writer’s notebook (something akin to a visual artist’s sketchbook). For me, my notebooks had always been all three. And more. I wrote my own poems in my journals, but I also copied others that I liked. I took pieces and details of my life and blended them into stories, weaving the stories with the factual events of my own life and produced what we writers love to derisively call “thinly-veiled memoir.” I wrote about what I thought about life and philosophy and politics and I wrote about my frustrations of trying to make it to the grocery store after my work shift but before my evening classes. 

I spent the early weeks of the class writing my longer pieces and then backtracking, inventing fake writing sessions and brainstorming prompts in the journal I had to submit. I received the obligatory passing marks and no one was the wiser, but before long the process became increasingly difficult to maintain. I settled on keeping my existing notebooks in the manner I preferred, but followed up by dissecting pieces of them to transfer to the notebook I submitted for grades in a fashion akin to an organ transplant. It further fragmented my notebooks  — long descriptions of a fight with my roommate are interspersed with “story about woman who awakens one day to discover her boyfriend has a terrible odor only she can detect. Make it Kafkaesque!” — but it had the intended effect on my writing. Once I began to consciously make an effort to write all of my ideas and creative fragments in the same place, I found my writing output (and, perhaps more importantly, inspiration) grew drastically. 

On Notebooks for Posterity 

For a while after I began keeping a notebook, I agonized over what sort of things I should write. Pop culture had presented me with a tailor-made image of what a thirteen-year-old girl with a blank book should look like — I should keep a diary and I should write about my deepest secrets, all of which should be about boys, because what else was there for a young girl to say? But I didn’t have deep secrets — not really — and, young though I was, I sensed that no one else, including imaginary readers, cared much about the middle school boys that occasionally caught my eye. 

The early pages of my first notebook read like they were written by a writer who wasn’t sure what to say, but who desperately wanted to say something. I approached keeping my notebook timidly at first, self-consciously, with constant worries that what I was writing was boring and a firm insistence on recording my day-to-day as thoroughly as possible. Perhaps I would have continued that way – an anxious diarist constantly suspicious of the craft itself – or, more likely, I would have quit altogether, if another important English teacher hadn’t suggested I read Anne Frank’s diary. 

Thousands have written about World War II and genocide at the hands of the Nazis. Many of the writers were esteemed. Most of the pieces were thought-provoking and important. But none were as good as what Anne wrote. While reading Anne’s diary I sensed, without being told by critics, that I was reading one of the most important books of the century. It was that good. And it was written by a fourteen-year-old-girl. 

And that knowledge liberated my writing. I had not yet studied, critically, that thing we have come to know in academia as “Women’s Writing.” I did not yet know that, in addition to being relegated to the home sphere, women would be consigned to the pages of notebooks or that those private writings would be considered inferior to the public works of their male counterparts. I did not know that an entire field of study would be made by reclaiming the works of women writers — their letters, their personal poetry, and, yes, their private notebooks. Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of that Wordsworth, famously kept a diary that is quite good. You don’t hear about that. Just the damn Ballads. I didn’t know about black literary icon Audre Lorde, whose The Cancer Journals would become the embodiment of the political power of personal writing. I didn’t know any of that then. All I knew was that, like me, Anne Frank was a teenage girl who dared to write about her daily life and about her thoughts on important topics. And those words mattered. Historically. Culturally. Literarily. They mattered a lot. 

Now that I’m older and more smug, I like to think that I live a rather interesting life, and I have no qualms against filling notebook after notebook with the intricacies of my days. Or, perhaps, I realize that every page written eternalizes, at least temporarily, a different writer than the day before. Or the one that comes after. Insisting that these days matter enough to put on a page is a defiant thing to do. Keeping a notebook is not a quaint, schoolgirlish thing to do between trips to the mall. It is a revolutionary act. 

On Notebooks and Truth

There is a journalistic impulse that insists on the purity of the words we put on a diary page, as though journals are always-already historical documents the moment you begin to write under a date header. That impulse has always troubled me, if only because I am so bad at telling the truth 100% of the time in my notebooks. 

That’s not to say that I am a liar. I am, however, suspicious of claims toward factuality in nonfiction, particularly the kind you find in private notebooks, as though there were no-bias-just-fact when we pick up a pen after our work meeting to write and vent. Capital-T-Truth isn’t the point. Goddess of keeping notebooks, Joan Didion, said it best:

“The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” 

Nor is what we write in our notebooks fiction. Not entirely. Not really. Keepers of notebooks occupy a third space — a liminal space — where the words we put on the page are both record and metaphor, practice and end result. 

October 25, 2015, The White Album Journal 

From now on I will tell the story of the October night that I stumbled from my bedroom in the dark, half asleep, and saw through my kitchen window the light on in my neighbor’s kitchen. I will tell how I saw the old man who lives in the house next door sitting at his kitchen table, bathed in fluorescent light — how I heard the man who lives in the too-close house singing a low, melancholic lament. I will tell the story of how I paused, sat down on my kitchen floor, and watched him from my kitchen dark but for the neon “1:24” glowing on my microwave. How with tired eyes and willing ears I listened to the old man sing. 

But that story will be a lie. 

The real story is: I stumbled from my room that night, wide awake and restless, saw the light on in the neighboring kitchen, and looked — no, peered longingly — inside the window, willing myself a companion into existence. The clock on my microwave still declared “1:24” with a brightness that hurt my tired eyes. And I still settled myself down on the cool tile and stared through my window at my too-close neighbor’s kitchen, but the light illuminated only on an empty table. 

And I was alone.

-T.D.