Note-taking: a book and an exhibition
I have had note-taking on my mind: the process, the materials, the aesthetics – and the magic of how thoughts and ideas build up, through drafts, layers, and discarded scribbles. Appropriately enough, my reading and thinking about notes has been building up into new insights and ideas.
In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen traces the origins and development of the notebook, and how keeping notebooks of all kinds has transformed the way we organise, manage, reflect and create. His survey covers everything from bookkeeping – a crucial step in the history of notebooks - to bullet journaling, while taking us on travels across Europe and over oceans.
The book is a wonderful collection of stories, about famous notebook keepers, global exploration, scientific discovery, and more. But what struck me most about it was the different kinds and uses of notebooks that have emerged over the centuries – idiosyncratic practices and commercial trends alike.
Studious common-place books, erasable table-books, the first diaries known as datebooks… the specific names and formats may have evolved but the variety of uses persists. It made me want to invent my own systems and create new notebook formats to house them in. Maybe I need to start a notebook for my thoughts on the design of notebooks…
Christina Rossetti’s notebook at the Write, Cut, Rewrite exhibition, Weston Library
As a perfect complement to reading this book, I recently visited Write Cut Rewrite at Oxford’s Weston Library. This exhibition explores how writers edit their work, taking notes to draw on later, cutting out passages, revising proofs, drawing on each other’s words.
There is much there for devotees of the individual authors featured, but for me it was a feast of inspiration in two distinct but complementary ways. There was the visual appeal of the objects on display: notebooks and books of different formats, and handwriting in layers, the beauty of lines correcting, adding and subtracting. And beyond this, there was what this process reveals about the creativity in any discipline, and about the nature of storytelling.
Collecting ideas, thoughts and quotes can be the starting point for a novel, or for a life project, or reveal new ways to understand who we are and what we might be doing next. Our life stories, really, are just as incrementally cobbled together as any fictional version, crossing-outs and revisions included.
The notebooks I think are the most fascinating are those that mix a little of everything: shopping lists and psychological insights, quotes and project ideas, appointment reminders, names and addresses, sketches, improvised maps and drawings. That kind of notebook is the most truly personal one, where the story of a life and the character of its protagonist can reveal themselves.
Because, ultimately, we all create our lives one scribbled note at a time.
