How To Get The Lightning Into The Bottle
Or, Picking A Good Bottle
Capturing Ideas
Lightning strikes. You’re at coffee with a friend, or at home on the couch, or out on a walk. It might be a great story idea, a piece of dialogue, a solution to a problem, or it could be something you want to try, to read, to listen to. You know if you don’t record this information somewhere, and fast, it will be gone as fast as it came. Sure, sometimes they’ll resurface, but even if they do it tends to be much later, oftentimes when it’s no longer relevant. What do you do?
I’ve gone through a long list of capturing methods, all with pros and cons. However, the thing that I find most gets in my way? Actually recording the damn thing. That one little step of pulling out a notebook, writing a note on my phone, recording a voice memo… sometimes that one little step seems impossible.
This is something that I’m still working on. The stopping everything to record a thought. I’m not a stopper. I’m a goer. And once I’m going, it’s so hard for me to interrupt the flow of the moment to capture something.
I’m working on this and have more thoughts about it that I might explore in another post. However here, here I want to focus on the beauty of…
The Notebook
This is a long excerpt from Joan Didion’s essay titled, “On Keeping a Notebook”. I tried to cut it down more but this is as lean as I could get it. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a good piece:
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.[…]
The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.[…]
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’);[…]
Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.)
My History With Personal Record Keeping
Diaries
I’ve kept notebooks off and on most of my life. When I was very little, they were half-hearted and quickly abandoned ‘diaries’ because that’s what I thought the purpose of a notebook was. Especially as a young girl, I was given the impression that if I didn’t have secrets worthy of lock and key then maybe I wasn’t doing life right. More specifically, maybe I was a loser. But the thing was, I didn’t have any secrets really and trying to fill up those pages with tantalizing nuggets of my fifth grade life proved too difficult, and frankly, too depressing. How many times could I write down that I went to school, came home, watched TV and went to bed before I would abandon all hope for a life of adventure and creativity?
Sketchbook
As I got older, I moved from diary to sketchbook. I would draw things I would see, or doodle, or whatever. If anything ended up really ugly, though, I would rip it out. Just like the diary, there was always this thought that this little collection of pages, it wasn’t just for me. Someday, someone would see it and either see I was boring from my diary or a bad artist from my sketchbook.
This always made the process of it all difficult. Not being able to shake the feeling that I didn’t want to ‘mess it up.’
Notebook
Somewhere in high school, I added a crappy spiral bound lined notebook into the mix. The kind that you would use to take notes in class (back in the day). Instead of taking notes, however, mine became more filled with doodles and bad poetry and squiggles and phone numbers than dates of Pearl Harbor or the Civil War.
I have always been a horribly disorganized person. In my mind’s eye I always picture myself as a walking tornado like Pig Pen from Peanuts. Before college, when I wanted to remember to do something, I would write it on my hand with Sharpie. There were days where my arms were just covered in marker. It wasn’t the most efficient system.
Once I hit college, I had too much to keep track of to keep writing it down on my body. So, I started writing it down in my sketchbook. My sketchbook started to morph into more of a notebook. A place where I wrote down things to remember, made lists, and also doodled. This method lasted a very long time. It got the job done, for the most part. It was still horribly disorganized, I mean, I could flip through it for an hour before I might find the piece of information I was looking for, but at least it was there. Story ideas were right next to email addresses which were written on top of the name of a restaurant I wanted to try which was overlapping my next assignment for my screenwriting class.
Apps
Then came the iPhone. Reminders. Google Calendar. Voice memos. This upped my game in a lot of ways, especially the calendar. But… after many many years of keeping track of things digitally, about a year ago I went back to a notebook. This time, however, employing an organizational system. I went with the basic fundamentals of Bullet Journaling.
My handwriting, which I could never read in my previous notebooks (so many ideas and important things lost to my unintelligible scrawl), I forced to be in all-caps. Writing in all-caps was slower. Slower meant I had to pay attention. Slower meant the letters looked like letters. I started dating the pages. I started creating areas for lists separate from areas for events. I didn’t doodle on the same page as something that already had writing so I wouldn’t end up obliterating some key piece of information.
Last, I added a second separate notebook for sketches. This is where I’m at now.
FYI - If you like visual journals I highly recommend checking out this woman’s Substack:
I still download just about EVERY productivity app that comes out and give it a whirl, but even when I come across some very good ones that incorporate all the elements I want, I have a hard time consistently using them.
The biggest change, however, is now, finally, I feel like my notebooks are for me. I no longer consider what someone might think if they peered inside.
The Notebook vs The Phone
Notebooks can be difficult for recording things on the go. When I was in college or grad school, I usually had a big bag with me so it was easy to always have it on hand. When I started using purses, this became more difficult. Also, I would try to keep a pen with the notebook, hooked on the spirals or the elastic band, but they would inevitably get lost and that was annoying.
What notebooks are great for is exploring. Digging deeper into the what, why and how of something. Channeling your feelings. Unlocking something inside. Recording a significant event in your life.
Phones are annoying to type anything long into. Voice to text has gotten way better and I’m using this more and more when I want to record something in the moment, however it’s still not the same as writing. I don’t organize my thoughts as well when I’m just rambling into a microphone.
What phones are great for is getting something down in the moment. Who doesn’t have their phone on them at all times?
The phone is where I catalog 90% of the spontaneous ideas I get.
Famous People And Their Cool Notebooks
I love looking at other people’s notebooks. It feels like you’re peaking into someone’s brain. I find them exceptionally inspirational for some reason. It makes me want to go write things down. Here are a bunch of notebooks from famous people that I found particularly fun to look at:
So cool. Thank you for putting these together and sharing.
The almighty, old-school notebook is the way!