Fritz Zuber Bühler “Distant Thoughts”
Caveat: If you’re looking for truly serious advice about writer’s block, skip the blog and go straight to here.
Otherwise, read on ...
I don’t think I’m alone, as an author, when it comes to having too many notebooks. A couple of days ago I bought another one.
I bought it because I have to have a fresh new notebook for each fresh new ‘thing’.
It doesn’t matter if this new ‘thing’ is almost identical to the previous new thing: the operative word here is ‘almost’, and ‘almost’ suggests different in some way.
Being different, it needs a fresh notebook to distinguish it from other ideas and things. It’s all about nuance, and nuance is the sauce for a rich and interesting life (in an introverted, notebook-buying kind of way).
The notebook I bought was a Clairefontaine. Not a Moleskine. Almost as expensive, but with even more satin-smooth paper that has the additional charm of an icy-cold surface.
Better still, the lines in a Clairefontaine are slightly further apart than in a Moleskine, which means I can write in my normal handwriting without having to cramp my style and focus on staying inside the lines.
I have a horror of not staying inside the lines when it comes to writing. My mother had a book called Ps and Qs, which is an ancient guide to deciphering people’s personalities from the quirks of their handwriting. According to this book, people whose upstrokes and downstrokes stray into the letters of the line above and below will tend to be ‘muddleheaded’. Moleskines, sadly, bring out the muddle-head in me.
Ps and Qs also taught me, at an impressionable age, that sensitive, poetic, cultured people write the letter ‘d’ in a particular way. Of course I immediately cultivated these ‘d’s. Out of interest, the way I write the letters ‘g’ and ‘y’ suggests mathematical proclivity (proclivity yet to materialise).
Back to notebooks, I probably do have too many. Only yesterday I discovered a pristine A4 Clairefontaine notebook identical to the one I’d bought the day before (buff cover and black cloth spine). It was hidden in a stack of academic articles about Proust that I had printed out with the idea of reading them.
I was interested to see that the notes in this book – about 10 pages of them – were about the brain, and not about Proust at all. Clearly, this notebook had been filed during the moment when I discovered an exciting link between Proust and neuroscience. (Much more to be said here, perhaps another day . . . and not just about the Lehrer book, Proust was a neuroscientist.)
I have a further three beautiful black hardback Moleskines that are also dedicated to Proustian thoughts. The Proustian theme of each is slightly different to that of the others. One day, each might be filled with nuanced contemplations. Maybe.
As may the seven or buff paperback Moleskins, the red Moleskines, the small Moleskines, the unlined Moleskines, the three solid foolscap ledger books salvaged from and Department of Education clean-out in the 1990s (they’re to nice to write in), and the teetering stacks of spiral-bound notebooks of all sizes that are for less exalted topics, but are nonetheless each as nuanced as the others.
Some notebooks have optimistic titles, such as NOTEBOOK #1, written in permanent marker on the front cover. Others have those same optimistic titles crossed out, with new ones underneath, suggesting I had given up on listing ‘books I have read’ and segued to gardening.
These converted notebooks are sometimes quite thin, especially when they have three or more revised titles. They are thin because I sometimes refuse to buy a new notebook until I’ve used up the old ones.
But because I can’t bear book-lists to coexist in a notebook about dry-climate garden plants, or with my impressions of reading Proust, followed by rainfall recording on the next page, a switch to mind-maps of how the brain works, then to notes for an academic paper about racism in Shrek (it’s a thing, and I’ll write that paper one day), and then measurements for renovating the tool shed into an outdoor loo, I tear out the old pages, and file them elsewhere, and then to begin anew with the updated theme of the notebook.
So the other day I bought a new notebook.
It is dedicated to free-form, flow-of-consciousness thoughts for blog entries, because when it comes to writing blogs, I get blogger’s block. Having a pristine notebook with silky paper is my way of beguiling myself into writing something.
I should mention, I can only write free-form, flow-of-consciousness thoughts if I have the right pen. It has to be a bought-for-purpose, superfine blue ballpoint with an ergonomic grip that isn’t too chunky. Nothing fancy (my mother’s Mont Blanc stays in a drawer), but nothing else will do.
My (not-exactly serious but actually quite serious) tips for overcoming writer’s block:
1. Absolutely start with a fresh new notebook
2. Absolutely get a fresh new pen (having to go and buy new pen and notebook in an excellent procrastination device, by the way)
3. Delight in the smooth finish of the paper
4. Stroke the clean, unsullied pages
5. If you need to procrastinate further, rule some nice red margins for a few (or all) pages
6. For ultimate procrastination, number the pages throughout the entire notebook
7. Eventually start to write at the top of the first (or second) page with your best-ever handwriting (for the first few lines, at least)
8. And now for the serious tips:
Write without worrying about what anyone will think.
Write for yourself, from yourself, and by yourself.
You’ve heard it said before: no one else can be you, so you be you.
This are the exact steps I took (minus margins and page numbers), and this blog is the result.
Eleven-hundred words without even crying.
I’m especially not worrying what anyone will think. Ish.
Do you have plotter’s block?
So much for blogger’s block: do you have plotter’s block?
If so, you, too, probably have multiple notebooks.
You may even be looking for an excuse to buy another one, so why not do exactly that, and then have a go at Seven Steps to Story, which is a guide to plotting for people with plotter’s block.
News flash: Seven Steps to Story has been UPDATED! We realised the beautiful original design might not be ideal for printing out and using, so now it works better for printing, and it has also been editorially tweaked.
You can get your quite affordable copy here.