The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

When studying theatre arts at college, Francis Ford Coppola had learned the importance of a ‘prompt book’, a copy of a play’s script which included all the technical notes that would allow the stage manager to run the show. A copy of the script would be unbound, then remounted page-by-page on loose-leaf sheets into which a window had been razored, allowing both sides to be read. The pages would then be hole-punched and ring-bound, and the script’s new wide borders allowed for scene shifts, lighting cues, actors’ entries and exits and so on to be added as the production developed.

Finally, once you’ve started the day’s work, you should keep control of your agenda by only adding new tasks to the master list, not the daily list.

Pennebaker has written or co-written a huge amount on this subject; the best summaries of his work, and related research, are ‘Expressive Writing in Psychological Science’, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2018): and, with Cindy K. Chung, ‘Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health’, in H. S. Friedman and R. C. Silver (eds), Foundations of Health Psychology (Oxford, 2007).