Most of my creative writing is handwritten. I usually use legal pads, or more preferably wire bound legal pads. It’s easy to write on both sides of them and for some reason the yellow just does it for me. Every once in a while I decide to by a fancy notebook. In the past it was Moleskines, more recently it was ones from etsy made with Tomoe River paper. I have a (cheap) fountain pen, so I figured I’d try some better paper.

The problem I run into is that I never use the fancy notebooks. The paper is better, and the ink flows smoother. It has a better tactile feel to it. But it is a fancy notebook and it should only be used for the good stuff—the stuff I want to look over a decade or two from now and be proud of.

So I’ll be very careful and take my time to write in the best handwriting possible. I’ll last for a few pages before my handwriting gets sloppier, or a have another idea that doesn’t fit, and I abandon that fancy notebook. I go back to the spiral bound legal pads which contain a chaotic jumble of non-linear thoughts. There are notes and poems in the margins, things crossed out all over the place, and handwriting that becomes only legible to me if I squint real hard at it and pick it up from context.

So how do you feel about fancy journals. Are you able to treat them as the paper they are, or do you too put them on a pedestal?

  •  Lucien   ( @lucien@beehaw.org ) English
    8•1 year ago

    I find it helps to intentionally “break it in”. Draw something silly, write a bad poem, write a journal entry upside down, freehand a chart/page layout with bad lines, etc. Do something to make it no longer “perfect” to get yourself out of the mindset that the paper pretty notebook deserves a level of care and attention you find exhausting and ultimately disappointing when you can’t keep an insane standard of care.

    What makes them nice is the experience of writing on them. Not that the writing in them is a certain quality. Do you go back to your spiral bound notebooks? What if that content were in nice notebooks, would that change your behavior? I’ll bet it depends on the content, not the paper it’s written on.

    If you stop writing in them as soon as your writing devolves, let it do that immediately and keep writing. If you want a perfect notebook, the only way to do that is to exhaustively transcribe from another source, and who has the time to do that?

    The point of a notebook is to write on it, fancy or plain. If you enjoy the experience of writing on fancy paper, treat that as the goal instead of creating something worthy of the paper. Paper, even expensive paper, is cheaper than the time you spend writing on it. Ergo, give your writing time the paper it deserves, rather than giving the paper the content it “deserves”.

    TLDR: Immediately “ruining” the paper can free up your mental block on wasting it. You bought nice paper to write on, but paper quality should not dictate the quality of what goes on it. Unused paper is more wasteful than messy writing.