use your best notebook

Last week, my sister gave me a beautiful notebook for my birthday. It’s one of those hardcover notebooks that’s too expensive to buy every month. It’s the colour of an evening sky, with an intricate gold design on the front, tiny leaves and flowers. It looks like the kind of notebook that would contain a magic spell. Today, I started a ten-week writing course called The Story Course. It’s all about reconnecting with your writing and it involves a lot of freewriting exercises. I needed a notebook for it.I wanted to use the notebook my sister gave me for my birthday. But it felt too precious, too beautiful.“All the freewriting is going to be messy,” I thought. “I can’t use the new one.”And then I was reminded of something Annie Dillard said:

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

I know Annie Dillard is talking about writing here, but when I read this, I thought about my notebook. The best notebook. The one I was saving for later—for some point in the future when my sentences were perfect and right.I knew the idea of spending it all applied here, too.I opened up the best notebook. I started to write in it. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, use your best notebook. You don’t have to save the best for the future—for when you deserve it. You deserve it right now.