The Notebooks

Doodles, Lists, and More

Photography by Jayel Aheram.

If ever a future biog­ra­pher decides to chron­i­cle my life, he will find no source as rich as the many note­books I have filled with doo­dles, to-do lists, opin­ions, and var­i­ous other things that my mind hap­pens upon. As of this writ­ing, I own about twelve dif­fer­ent note­books of vary­ing sizes half-filled or com­pletely filled with writ­ing. It is an impres­sive col­lec­tion of vol­umes rang­ing from a note­book ded­i­cated to mere doo­dles (oh, how I love my Prisma Markers), one with var­i­ous tid­bits of applic­a­ble and not-so applic­a­ble Marine Corps knowl­edge, a pri­vate jour­nal that is updated once every four months, a note­book filled with made-up words com­plete with their own ety­mol­ogy, and a much-abused util­ity note­book that both serves as a daily plan­ner, to-do list, and is home to many drafts of aborted blog posts. With the excep­tion of my util­ity note­book which always within arm’s reach, these note­books have a per­ma­nent home in my shelf, read­ily avail­able for when I am sud­denly stricken with inspiration.

The util­ity note­book, while lack­ing in the focus enjoyed by the other subject-specific note­books, is a con­stant a com­pan­ion to me. It is the medium upon which many of my writ­ing ideas are for­mu­lated. They usu­ally begin with a sim­ple con­cept that some­times becomes the title of the work. There are many blog post­ings in this blog that can trace their begin­nings in the util­ity note­book. It is an essen­tial link in my cre­ative work­flow, from the for­mu­la­tion of an idea, to draft­ing and expand­ing upon it, and then finally publishing.