The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

Pulling back, we can see that, despite the wide variety of ways that writers used their notebooks, they broadly fall into three modes. Firstly, nearly all authors habitually use notebooks for immediate observation: capturing words, lines, scenes, ideas, transient moments, for later use. Secondly, some – but far from all – use them for drafting and redrafting. Austen, Mary Shelley and Woolf all did so; James Joyce’s notebooks gained blocks of vivid colour, as he used red, blue and green crayons to highlight successive passes through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The distinction between these two modes recalls – yet again – the two-stage process of the Italian bookkeepers, who had used their memoriale to record transactions in the moment, then copied them over to the double-entry giornale or quaderne for analysis and reconciliation. Artists, essayists, scientists had all adopted similar practices: Agatha Christie’s striking-through of ideas that had been employed in a book echoes the bookkeeping practice of striking through matching credits and debits. But writers like James, Highsmith and Christie also used notebooks in a third way, to write about their own writing even as they wrote. With the ever-present blank pages as sounding boards, they could enter into dialogue with their own work, come to considered judgement about it, refine it, and improve the end product. If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.