The Curious Power Of Notebooks

Tattoo shops, especially in the 90’s, and most especially street shops, were not the kind of place to bring a laptop into (unless you were willing to fight to the death for it), so I wrote in notebooks. The second draft came when I entered it into the computer at home. A theme developed. Flash forward to my first book, Tattoo Machine, a memoir. At one point I found myself in Santa Monica with absolutely nothing to do, and on a whim I bought a skateboard. Shortly after I picked up a notebook and three mechanical pencils and boom, Tattoo Machine was born. I’d bomb through the streets on a thinking glide and when a passage came to me I’d stop and write at a park bench until the cops chased me away. I filled three notebooks like that, writing under streetlights. A few years later I wrote the first draft of Lucky Supreme on a bench (now in the back yard of a friend’s house) under the awning of a dry goods warehouse by the train tracks. Everything Under The Moon came together at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. So did Deadbomb Bingo Ray. The background was nice, but occasionally valuable as well.

In the last few days, some of the real value of this notebook approach has come to light again. I’m working on a television pilot based on one of my short stories and I have less than three weeks to finish it. In the guest room, my current writing area, there are SIX notebooks, all opened and marked and tagged, with all of the ideas and scribbled passages, valuable musings, snatches of dialogue, and associated ideas I can use for the final push. I can leaf through so many ideas at the same time and flag them, its like having six computer screens. With more than 80 notebooks from just the last few years, I’ve got a treasure trove. The dates cross into saved and archived emails (more than 25,000) to form a strange and valuable (to me) database.

Downside- notebooks are vulnerable. Sometimes you lose them. I once had a guy steal an embarrassing journal entry from a notebook of mine and then show it widely to his friends. He blamed this supremely unsavory act on his girlfriend, which only made it worse. I once spent a week transcribing a giant pile of haiku into a small and fetching notebook, and then I went on to paint pictures in it. I was almost done when I left it in a cab. Six or seven years ago, I lost an entire filing cabinet full of notebooks when I moved. But for all their trouble, I still love writing in notebooks. Give it a try, dear reader. We can all type faster than we can talk. Writing in a notebook slows everything down to the rhythm of speech (I like to think), and that might make a difference. Take the long way to THE END and see if it works.