An ode to notebooks

There’s a special sort of magic that happens in cracking a saddle-stitch spine and choosing – for absolutely no reason – to write halfway down a page.

This is an excerpt from my Substack (named Myriatid), which I update spontaneously and erratically. I'm endeavouring to link this blog and my Substack... but who knows how this is achieved? Certainly not me.

In last week’s post, I wrote about the works of art we stow in our memories for comfort and reflection. This week has brought reflection’s natural by-product: writing.

I’ve been scribbling in all its forms. Erratic phrases. Unbalanced sentences. Lists. Exclamations (!). Questions upon unanswered questions… you name it.

I didn’t type anything. In today’s world, we’ve been conditioned to believe that digital words are in the safest hands. They’ll last forever in cyberspace, stored in a soulless, unimpeachable server. Calibri, Times New Roman, Arial and all: the fonts through which our descendants will one day read our lives.

I disagree. Just this week, my mum’s iphone notes disappeared without a trace. Whoosh! Gone. Shopping lists, plans, thoughts about the future – no more. I googled it and found this is a widespread glitch. Also, my Google Drive is getting full. I’m receiving “pay now or lose everything” notifications. I’ve downloaded my novel drafts just in case.

You know what isn’t stress-messaging me? My notebooks.

When I was a teacher, I had a notebook per school year – I still have each one (black A5 moleskines). Now, as an author, I have a notebook for each novel I write and a “random thoughts” book which I keep with me at all times (currently it’s an aesthetically disappointing A4 black coil bound…soon to be updated). Sure, these can be left on a bus. However, they can’t be whipped away into the digi-aether.

There’s also something numinous about handwriting. This week, I was lucky enough to visit the Royal Academy’s Renaissance Masters exhibition and was enraptured by Leonardo da Vinci’s tiny little sketchpad.

In research for an abandoned novel, I read the published versions of Leonardo’s notebooks (yes, they have survived, unlike my mum’s iphone notes). They take you into his undulating mind, the spur-of-the-moment ideas and thoughts and mistakes and genius.

One moment he is designing machinery and solving equations; the next he is sketching absent-mindedly. This sort of off-the-cuff process can only happen between hand and paper (or papyrus or parchment or, going further back, wax). Word processors encourage structure and forethought.

The experience is heightened when viewing (or reading, depending on how your Renaissance Italian is) these notes in his own handwriting. The V&A holds three volumes of what are called The Codex Forster – bound books – which you can read online here (definitely do this right now). Mysteries present themselves (why does he write right to left?) and insights are gained (I am being presumptuous, but, having pored over these, I’d like to think his sketches come as moments of relief from mathematical formulae).

I will always use my laptop for writing novels – I’m not entirely impractical. However, I’d like to make a case for handwriting and notebooks. There’s a special sort of magic that happens in cracking a saddle-stitch spine and choosing – for absolutely no reason – to write halfway down a page. I also love flicking through old thoughts: something I never do with old computer or phone documents.

If a historian, one thousand years from now (I hope there is still history!), happens upon my odd and scattered notes, I hope they can, at least, find delight in my messy handwriting, my choice of paper, and my lop-sided doodles. Surely, these are worth something?