On Being Discouraged

Writing is really hard

I write all my creative work longhand, and for essays I like to write in large-format Moleskin dotted notebooks. I started using dotted notebooks three or four years ago, and now I use them for everything, in various formats and brands. I’m not a BuJo person exactly—bullet journaling seems to be all about maximizing efficiency, and the kind of writing I do by hand (not these Substacks, which I write on the computer, though screens are death) is all about minimizing efficiency: I like writing by hand because it slows me down, and I like what happens to thinking when you slow it down. I mean, to a point. I like dotted notebooks because they leave the formatting of the page up to me, and so I can use them for keeping a schedule and to-do lists, for recording how I structure my working day, for outlining essays, for taking notes; it feels like a little workshop for thinking. Maybe I am a BuJo person, I don’t know.

I’m working on a book of essays (under contract, very late), and research-heavy essays each get their own notebook, which I fill first with reading notes, then with outlines, then with drafts. (Usually there are several false starts; once I get a full draft I type it up, then edit on print-outs.) For drafting I write on the right-hand side of the notebook, where I draw a pretty wide margin down the right side of the page and another at the top. I leave the verso of every page blank; it tends to fill up with insertions, reminders for revision, little outlines of the next steps of an argument. It starts to look something like this: