nOTEBOOK PRACTICE

by Annie Kim

EVERYBODY KNOWS that writers work in notebooks, just as artists work in sketchbooks, drawing studies of landscapes or nudes or whatever else they’re trying to create on a larger scale. But artistic practice, like taste, can’t be taught to anyone who isn’t ready to learn. And I wasn’t ready to learn this particular artistic practice—for reasons I’m about to share—until this summer.

If you’re one of those writers who never leaves the house without a Moleskine and pencil in your back pocket, you can skip ahead to the next section. If you’re not (as I wasn’t), bear with me a second.

Poetry, my friends, still smells a lot like Romanticism in this country. As in, we still want it to be a little bit sublime. Whenever a poet says, I worry I’ll never write another poem,

this notion gets reinforced. (Whoever said, by the way, I worry I’ll never write another email?) Whenever someone says in workshop, I ask the poem what it wants to be: ditto. This way of thinking about poetry can discourage us from fully exploring and innovating the processes we use to make it.

As for my process, I didn’t have much of one. I believed in quick insights and shrugged at preparation. I never kept a writer’s notebook. Reading notes, yes, and manuscript-related doodles. But I was the baseball player who stubbornly believed that the only way to improve your pitch was to pitch. When I wrote, I wanted to be hurling balls into the stadium—not doing squat reps or treadmill sprints. What I wrote was always a poem, always on my computer, always with the hope that the draft I was writing could become—albeit with revisions—a wondrous Poem.

Fast forward to this summer. Three years after getting my second book out the door, relieved to have gotten the damned thing done, I found myself alone in the white hot desert of No Direction Now. Yes, I’ve been writing something all along. I have a hundred fragments. But, for the first time as a writer, I’m drowning in content and absolutely unsure where to go next.

I decided to write this essay to see how notebook writing could help me lasso those hundred fragments. To focus, like the visual artists I envy, not just on the finished work but on the practice—whether I’m writing poems or writing this essay. When my new notebooks arrived in the mail, though, I felt a little shaky writing that first line. What should I say? I flipped through a book I’d been reading, Moyra Davey’s Index Cards, and copied down a passage:

Then there is the part of the self that wants to be off the hook. To have once and for all made the thing that will end the need to make things . . . 

I am trying to find a new way to work.

I underlined this phrase because I meant it.
 

Ars Excerpendi

One month into my notebook project, I discover that my newfound interest comes with a smart-sounding Latin label: ars excerpendi.

As Iveta Nakládalová describes in Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, this is the art not just of note taking, but making summaries and annotations of texts for your own use. It’s been around as long as wax tablets and papyrus. But the whole enterprise took off as a cottage industry in the early seventeenth century when the first treatises on ars excerpendi—long ones, full of strong opinions—began appearing, thanks to the rise of the printing press.

Scholars in the seventeenth century were starting to experience what Nakládalová calls “epistemological distress” due to an early case of “information overload.” Yes, it was a thing! Too many books all of a sudden, too little time. The notebook was a way to harness all that new knowledge, to institute a mind outside the mind. How to do it was the question.

Ann Blair, in “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission,” talks about the four basic activities that comprise all note taking, then and now: storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting. Early modern readers did a lot of summarizing by creating paraphrases or synopses, called “epitomes” or “abridgements.” We do a version of that when we’re writing essays to explain things (as I’m trying to do here), though most of us don’t do it just for kicks.

The fourth method Blair describes, though, is about selecting, which we do all the time as writers. These “commonplaces” are note collections in which the reader “select[s] passages of interest for their content or their style, which are copied and sorted under a thematic or topical heading to facilitate retrieval.” Synopses of Shakespeare’s plays, the entirety of Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, the medieval florilegium—these are a few examples. Spend an hour or a lifetime perusing Benjamin’s archive, Leopardi’s Zibaldone, or the papers of any number of great dead writers if you want to steal ideas for your own practice.

The art of excerpendi comes in formulating a system that will actually work for you. For me, that means keeping two different notebooks. The first, a gray hardcover, for reading notes, quick ideas, lists, and diagrams. The second, a three-ring binder in which I file my typed journal entries, which range from mundane bits to more concentrated meditations. I’ve numbered the pages in each notebook by hand. And, in the spirit of ars excerpendi, I’ve started indexing them. Mind you, this is pretty spotty and haphazard. But there’s a green space in the middle of my gray notebook made of heavy cardstock paper in which I’ve started to build a handwritten index of both notebooks. Using that index recently, along with a keyword search on my computer, I created a giant file of fragments I’d written about my mother—notes, poem drafts, journal jottings. As the fragment collection grew, I could almost watch my epistemological distress levels dip.

Methods (1): Slowly does it

I’m sitting in the massively gilded chamber that is the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, where I’ve come for a few hours to escape the city heat and, hopefully, work on this essay. Laptops dot the clangy tables, backpacks lean, the occasional tour group’s shoes squeak along the parquet floor. I mentally trace the rosettes and palm leaves carved into the ceiling. This is the perfect place to write about notebook writing. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my laptop, just my notebook and pencil. I never draft pieces in longhand, not even poems. But if I’m going to write anything today, I’ll need to do it in the notebook, old school, using an ancient pencil printed, unironically, “Business Source.”

The first thing I notice is that words are coming out of me differently. I’m less worried about whether what I’m writing is exactly on point or in exactly the right order at the exact moment that I write it. I have no confidence that what I’m writing will end up being any good, but I can fill a page. And another. Once I’ve filled one page, I turn it over and don’t look back.

The second thing? Writing is work. Writing by hand is slower than the speed of thought: my letters trail behind like smudgy shadows. My hand starts to cramp. But the materiality of the pencil in my hand, the graphite scratching paper, reassures me that writing is real in the way that driving a yellow backhoe down a ditch is real. That the bodily act of writing leaves a trace.

Some years ago, I met a sculptor at an artists’ colony tucked in the woods of northern Georgia, the Hambidge Center. He was working that summer on large clay sculptures that would be grouped together outdoors. A good chunk of his days he spent just waiting around for pieces to dry (it was humid in those woods!). Or putting one set of pieces into the kiln while applying glaze to another set. If you rushed the work, you’d ruin it. Waiting, then, was part of his practice—one that honored living in time, accepting periods of both productivity and rest, trial and error. As artist William Kentridge puts it, making is an iterative process that asks us to observe a “separation between the making and the looking.”

As I’ve said, I am trying to find a new way to work. Keeping a notebook is helping me shift from thinking of myself as some kind of Industrial Revolution assembly line worker to someone who’s allowed to make things slowly. Take breaks. Watch the pieces grow. There’s no shortcut for this, and even if there was, I wouldn’t really want to take it. I want to emulate the kind of process that the writer Rachel Cohen describes, which inspired me when I first read it this summer: “My material develops slowly in notebooks. . . and this gradually becomes book-length work.”

Slowly. Gradually. Work. How very human.

Methods (2): Study and transfer

Jan van der Heyden was a leading seventeenth century artist of cityscapes and a successful engineer who invented both the first gaslighting system for the city of Amsterdam and the world’s most efficient fire engine. But he wasn’t great at figure drawing. In his sketchbooks, van der Heyden drew careful studies of humans doing lots of things: lifting hoses, bending over to pick up a barrel, milling around. And he carefully transferred these recorded observations into his etchings and paintings. Sometimes wholesale. Sometimes in reverse, or augmented and embellished. He is, of course, just one of many artists who’ve devoted significant time to creating studies for future work as part of his regular process.

For writers, this method that I’m calling “study and transfer” doesn’t feel quite as direct. Sure, there are writers for whom the notebook really does function as a training ground for sharpening observations and descriptive writing, even producing the verbal equivalent of preparatory sketches. Lydia Davis is a good example. In Volume I of her Essays, you can learn about how she re-reads and re-works passages from her notebooks into finished stories. Davis makes a point of polishing even the random journal entry: “I would always revise it in small ways until it was as good as it could be, whatever its value.” Then there are those who, like Joan Didion in her famous “On Keeping a Notebook,” write down all sorts of juicy bits in their notebooks only to realize that they’ll never use those bits again. For them, it's more about connecting to those experiences in the moment of re-reading than directly using what they’ve written.

Somewhere in between is where the most interesting study and transfer happens, in my opinion. Take the theorist and writer Roland Barthes as an example.

Barthes the thinker was a fussy and meticulous note taker. Barthes the writer often built his books in connected fragments. These are tantalizing party mixes of theory, musing, criticism, and personal anecdotes. As Barthes tells it in his pseudo-autobiography (or anti-autobiography), Roland Barthes, the “germ of the fragment comes to you anywhere . . . then you take out your notebook, to jot down not a ‘thought,’ but something like a strike, what would once have been called a ‘turn.’ ” From that initial notation, then, he’d develop and amplify his ideas in his notebook and eventually, perhaps, incorporate them into a longer work.

I don’t know exactly what happened to Barthes’ notes at the amplification stage. But here’s my guess: that’s where the wild and crazy mixing happened. As Barthes already mentioned in the passage I’ve quoted, the initial germ isn’t so much a thought as a triggering action, a transitive verb waiting for its object, a door waiting to connect two rooms that don’t belong together. This kind of mixing is highly associative and inherently intertextual. It feels a lot like poetry, actually.

Let’s pause here a second. How do you do your wild and crazy mixing? Do you let these strands tumble out organically while drafting the poem or do you encourage it through other means? In my own writing, I tend to lean heavily on intuition. I try to do it all in the act of writing the poem. But there must be other ways.

My first glimpse of this came earlier this summer. I was struggling to find my way into writing poems about my mother (oh, classic tough subject). Though I was taking lots of reading notes and writing journal entries, I was stumped on where to start. Then a few lines emerged for me one afternoon:

She thinks of her mother largely in pictures

(paraphrased line from a poem I’d drafted a year ago)

She was reliable and hardworking and calm

(straight from a recent journal entry I’d just re-read)

The road up is the road down

(paraphrased line by Heraclitus I’d copied in another journal entry)

 
Now here was the possibility of a poem. Unlike my other poems, though, the lines I’d just written were lines I’d previously written—elsewhere. I added to these a section from an older poem draft, about looking at a Cimabue painting, and then some completely new lines. I don’t know where this draft will ultimately go, but the process of writing it feels different. More like collaging pieces than drafting anew. Like I’m a collector strolling through my own, well-stocked store.

Methods (3): “Mistake Paintings”

To keep a notebook is a continuous motion of recovery. Is a generous gesture to the self. Is an engagement of the broader desire (urge? impulse?) to describe,

                                                                   |      |

                                                        (Davey    Felski)

which is distinct from critiquing or interrogating or even transforming, even if the hope is that one day, some of the notes one collects may be transformed—or transferred, lifted, re-homed—into a public and durable form. What we might call the work.

* * *

I wrote this passage in my notebook at the New York Public Library over a month ago, when I first started writing this essay, and typed it here today, verbatim, on my computer. Here is a Tuesday morning, late July, Charlottesville. The house feels like a low-grade sauna because of all the rain we’ve gotten lately. I typed this passage because I wanted to see how my notebook writing might look and feel different from my typed writing.

What pops out immediately is the visual freedom that the physical page permits. I could draw lines to two writers’ names (Moyra Davey again, whose book Index Cards, I was reading; Rita Felski, whose The Limits of Critique I was thinking of). I could emphasize certain words by underscoring, which felt satisfying. But the next section of the notebook essay draft, and the five or six pages after that, feel like duds to me. Dutiful and boring.

But besides the essay draft in the notebook, I also find pages of pure notes. Sometimes they feel more compelling than the draft itself. I place stars or checkmarks by them to come back later. I’ve learned to like this process of reading and re-reading, sorting and selecting. There’s something comforting in knowing that there are many, many words inside each of us. Not all of them need to be interesting or worth preserving.

Which brings me to Lily van der Stokker, a Dutch artist who was interviewed recently on Talk Art (one of my favorite podcasts). Van der Stokker speaks candidly about her evolving relationship to her less than perfect works. As a younger artist, she had the same reaction that most of us do to our flops: shame, discouragement, self-hatred. Over time, though, she’s become interested in those “failures.” “Ugliness and beauty are so close together,” she points out. As a mature artist, van der Stokker has come to view these “failures” as their own little genre: “mistake paintings.” She not only likes these paintings but shows them publicly, even recreating them at times by blowing them up and re-drawing them. In this way, van der Stokker’s “mistake paintings” become integrated fully into her practice.

My takeaway? If you’re going to keep a steady notebook practice, you’re going to encounter a lot of your own “failures.” Really, if you do any kind of writing frequently enough, whether it’s poetry or prose. Writing the first draft of this essay, I filled 26 pages in my notebook. A few passages made it wholesale into this final version—which I wrote with my notebook propped open beside me—but most of it went into the wood chipper. I’m okay with this. As comedian Jeff Ross pointed out in a recent interview, “There’s no such thing as wasted writing . . . it [all] gets you to the next place.”

Writing this essay was actually a lot like my experience fleshing out the poem I mentioned earlier, which began with three different lines about my mother. After typing these lines, I fished around in my old drafts and my new notebook entries to find more raw material. Once I’d dumped all of that into my file, I had a whole basket of goodies to pick over, change and rearrange, and graft to new material.

And how did these drafting processes feel different from all the others? Strangely communal, I’d say. As if I were conferencing with all the other writing selves and not just the one self sitting on the couch, spitballing her ideas into the lonely present.
 

“From writing to the work” (and back again)

Toward the end of Roland Barthes, Barthes admits something personal about his writing in a section titled “De l’ écriture à l’ oeuvre – From writing to the work”:
 

I delight continuously, endlessly, in writing as in a perpetual production, in an unconditional dispersion, in an energy of seduction which no legal defense of the subject I fling upon the page can any longer halt.

But he shudders at the work: this “oeuvre” that society expects, the finished work that is, in the end, “a piece of merchandise.” In another section (“Plus tard – later”) he fantasizes about all the books he wants to write but never does. Because, of course, he finds himself writing everything except that book, always strapped for time, always occupying himself with lesser, more immediate projects. Diversions that feel like failure. Sound familiar? But here’s what he says afterwards, the reason why I’m returning to him now: “Now let us reverse all this: these dilatory maneuvers, these endlessly receding projects may be writing itself.” (Emphasis mine).

Wait, I want to ask, how could this be? How could we ever let ourselves off the hook, to use Moyra Davey’s phrase? How can we care more about the practice than the work?

I’ll try to answer this as a poet might—which is to say, obliquely. Last month, I came across a sprawling digital archive housed by Wageningen University and Research of over 1,180 plant root system drawings. They were drawn by a pair of botanists over the course of 40 years. They’re scientific, they’re beautiful. Some of the root systems look like mirror images of the trees above ground. Others look like fantasy constructions, nothing like the plants above.

One of my favorites looks like that: Aegopodium podagria. Above ground, this patchy plant resembles nothing so much as poison ivy. Below, the root system is infinitely complex, chatty, interconnected. You’d have no idea from looking at the plant, at its surface simplicity, that such a nuanced network could exist at all beneath the soil. Yet, of course, that’s how it lives. This plant—like the most deeply satisfying writing—is reticular by design. Notebook writing is root writing. Not much of it will ever break through the surface.

So here’s a bit of root writing of my own, from my journal notebook at the end of a long week: “This (too) is writing. I wrote that so I would remember.”

* * *
 

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1977.

Blair, Ann. “Note taking as an art of transmission.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1, 2004, pp. 85-107.

Davey, Moyra. Index Cards: Selected Essays. New Directions, 2020.

Davis, Lydia. Essays: One. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019.

Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Nakládalová, Iveta. “Johann Amos Comenius: Early Modern Metaphysics of Knowledge and ars excerpendi.” Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alberto Cevolini, Brill, 2016, pp. 188-208.

Previous / Table of Contents

Annie Kim is a poet, educator, and local government attorney. Her first collection, Into the Cyclorama (2016), won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and her second collection, Eros, Unbroken (2020), won the Washington Poetry Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. Kim is an assistant professor at her alma mater, the University of Virginia School of Law, where she teaches law students about public interest lawyering.