Catching Thoughts, Gathering Ideas
A boy and his notebooks
I can’t say how much I’m enjoying the To a Green Thought Book Club; many thanks to all of you who joined to discuss Han Kang’s We Do Not Part a week or so ago. The next meeting will be Sunday, August 24 at 3pm ET, and we’ll be discussing David Szalay’s Flesh. Meetings are open to all Founding Members of this newsletter; to sign up, just click on the Subscribe button below. I hope you’ll join us. Note: this and future meetings of the book club will not be recorded. I’m sorry if this makes it more difficult for some of you to participate—but I think there’s a value to all of us being in the same (virtual) place at the same time.
Cultured Magazine asked fifteen writers to name their favorite Substacks, and, in the loveliest surprise, the great Katie Kitamura recommends this newsletter: “Garth Greenwell’s To a Green Thought is full of his meticulous and passionate prose—reason enough to subscribe. A Substack of real substance, it contains beautifully argued works of criticism, including close readings of Greenwell’s favorite books and films and generous explorations on literary craft. There are also personal essays on such thorny and difficult subjects as money and writing, and the experience of being reviewed, written with bracing intelligence and disarming honesty; the entire publication is a gift.” I’m very grateful and moved.
I am beyond thrilled that David T. Little’s beautiful operatic adaptation of my first novel, What Belongs to You, was named Best New Opera by the Music Critics Association of North America. The prize jury was made up of Heidi Waleson, George Loomis, Arthur Kaptainis, John Rockwell, and Alex Ross. Huge congrats to David on the immensely deserved honor.
*
One of the most interesting questions I didn’t have time to answer in The Writer’s Life class I taught back in May was about catching and organizing ideas and experiences as they pass. Here’s that question (all the questions were anonymized, so I can’t credit the questioner; but if you’re reading this, thank you):
How do you write from life and get inspired by the events and details of life? Please tell me the way you take notes from daily life. Do you write it down as it happens, eg. at the end of every day, and then revisit it later? Can you be very technical and detailed about breaking this process down step by step: For example, do you first write it in a paper journal? And then do you read through and transcribe it into a word document which is a long journal of each day's events, highlighting the parts you want to use in a book? Do you then select certain scenes and decide to turn it into fiction? Do you write in Microsoft Word/Google docs?
I don’t want to get into the complexities of “writing from life,” and the extent to which I do or don’t identify with that description of my work. But I love questions about process, especially when I’m invited to be “very technical and detailed,” especially when that allows me to talk about my favorite writerly subject: notebooks. I’ve written about notebooks before in this newsletter, especially about my wildly inefficient (anti-efficient?) process for taking notes as I’m reading, and also in a post about struggling to write an essay. But I don’t think I’ve written about my daily practice of keeping a notebook, or various notebooks.
I think every writer should have a notebook with them all the time. I know lots of people use their phones for notetaking, and of course as always I think the only rule for being a writer is whatever works for you. But also I think our phones are the devil and we should avoid them as much as possible. (I’m feeling this especially intensely now because I’ve just finished a very intense month of book promotion in Spain, and part of the general falling-apart I undergo when traveling for a book is the collapse of all my discipline around using my phone—discipline that’s only ever, at the very best of times, fledgling.)
I’ve been carrying a paper notebook around with me everywhere I go since I was 21—ever since my first poetry teacher, James Longenbach, told me that that was what poets did. The danger of a paper notebook is that there’s no cloud to back it up to, and if you lose it, it stays lost. This has only happened to me once, when I was a PhD student, and it was devastating: I lost a couple of years of ideas for poems, stray lines, images. I’m sure some of these stuck, and so found their way into poems—but not all of them. The value of that notebook was flipping through it and seeing things I had forgotten, any of which might prove a starting point for a day’s writing. My notebooks in those years were like compost piles: I threw in lots of little heterogeneous pieces in the hope that through some mysterious process they would turn fertile.
I don’t really catch images and phrases like that anymore, I’m realizing, which makes me a little sad. I used to be on the lookout for images all the time, which I think is a good way to move through the world, with your antennae searching, sensitized: a poet’s way. Narrative doesn’t really come from image for me (I know it does for other writers); now I’m more likely to jot down an idea for a situation, or for a character. My notes are more discursive, they often come in sentences; I don’t note phrases or words just for their charisma, because they seem magnetic to me, interestingly shaped. Again, this makes me sad: I feel like I’ve lost a certain aliveness to the world (the physical world, the world of language)—and maybe I’m wrong to blame it on the shift to narrative; maybe it has more to do with the fact that, a couple of years after I started writing fiction, I got a smartphone. Phones are the devil.
Anyway, notebooks are still central to my writing, and to my life in general. Below are the three I use on a daily-ish basis.