Recently I’ve been sharing a few artefacts* of the writing life with you and this week’s exhibit is the notebook. No, not the electronic kind, useful though they are, but the good old-fashioned, bound-between-two-covers and maybe-(even)-secured-with-a-fastener kind.

What’s so good or essential about this sort of  notebook you may ask? And wasn’t it covered by the Artefact #1 Pen and Paper entry?

But no, dear readers, in terms of the latter: the reason the notebook is an entry in its own right is because it ensures that the paper on which one is scribbling thoughts or even passages of text remains contained in one place.

Otherwise, if one is a writer like me, with a predilection for backs of envelopes and single pages purloined from one’s printer cassette and other places, then those terribly important thoughts and story episodes can end up, well, anywhere at all…And may never be found! But the notebook, ah the notebook, means that only one item needs to be kept track of—and that, believe me, is a great boon.

The other great thing about the old-fashioned, bound-between-two-covers-and -maybe-(even)-secured-with-a-fastener kind of notebook as opposed to the electronic variety is that it is not and cannot be connected to the internet—which as we all know is the great distractor and dissipater of creative energy, so must be kept within firm bounds if books and poetry are not only to be written, but completed.

The particular notebooks featured actually contains the beginnings of novels, so you see, they really are worth the investment of the writer’s meagre coin. 😉

Handwritten beginnings for “Thornspell”

*Artefact: "a functional or decorative human-made object."