i share with you my shame
I have a lot of writing notebooks. A lot of them. Tom often makes jokes about that crazy dude in the movie "Seven". You know, the murderer. With all the notebooks.
Recently I did an informal count: 20 composition notebooks. About fifteen spiral notebooks. And that's not counting the various cloth-bound books I've favored over the years. The stained purple books are likely the oldest. That was the novel I started writing in 3rd grade. One of my first writing lessons: don't leave your novel-in-progress in your book bag along with a rotting banana. Lesson learned.
Last week I was filled with an uncommon zeal: I'm tired of all of this clutter, I need to clean this stuff out. I rarely refer to any of these notebooks, so why keep them? I certainly don't want anyone else reading my early work: Lots of rhyming poetry. Not to mention the journals from college in which I'm looking at a rose and feeling the world move through me or some such like. So I started parsing through the pile to determine what to shred and what to keep.
Well. I can't get rid of the aforementioned purple books. Or the hardback diaries (pictured, left) which were my diaries throughout high school (sadly this pile is one short, as one diary mysteriously disappeared many years ago…sigh.) Also, the gorgeous gold-stamped volume I took with me to Europe is a keeper, as are all of my college diaries. The writing notebook I started second semester junior year, when I slowly started coming back to myself after Dad died (below, right); that's probably one of the bravest books I own, so there's no parting with it (it also marks my decopage phase).
I poked through the older books and found the poetry of eleven-year-old me, clearly obsessed with Tennyson and Greek Mythology. Other writings I described to Tom as "Lady Poe." As I read, and cringed, and sighed, and laughed, I realized that I'm not ready to part with all of this stuff. So I packed up some boxes for storage in the attic, and another box to remain in the office.
Writers out there: what do you do with your finished notebooks? Do you, too, have shelves like those of a cinematic maniacal killer?
