Will they flip through them and start to piece together the chapters of an unpublished novel? Will they find a drawing that is so brilliant that it will sell for six figures, then be traded amongst collectors for decades, and then land in an art museum somewhere? Maybe the preliminary sketches and calculations for an invention that could change the world? When I die, someone will find my notebooks. It’s like a sink of dirty dishes, or a pile of unread books, or an overflowing trash can that you’re going to get around to emptying sometime, maybe today. When you do this exact same thing, and you get home with your fancy new notebook, you know what I’d advise you to do? Don’t look at all the other fancy notebooks that you’ve bought that have nary a fucking chicken scratch of writing in their pages. It was not the lack of an idea, or the dozens of hours of mulling it over in your head and molding it into something that actually makes sense, or the hundreds of hours sitting down and actually making the thing-no, it was the lack of a notebook. Because obviously the main obstacle to you creating that masterpiece was not having *just* the right notebook. And then you see the spinning rack of $18.99 notebooks and you’re like Shit Yeah, that’s where all these great ideas started-a notebook.Īnd then suddenly, you are at the cash register, with one or two great books under your arm, and a fancy-ass notebook, on the pages of which you will no doubt write the novel of the century or something like that. You walk around, staring up at hundreds of great ideas on the shelves, perhaps pulling a few out and reading the front and back covers, oh wow, apparently millions of people thought this one was great, and then this one was said to be great by another famous author, and this one has been around for 75 years and this bookstore still has eight copies of it on the shelves so they must sell a hundred copies of it every year, geez there are so many good ideas in this building. You know where they really get you? Bookstores. I am on the Field Notes email list, and every time I receive an email announcing a new series of pocket notebooks, my subconscious quietly whispers, “Maybe this will be THE ONE.” I buy pocket notebooks for doodles and quick journaling of brilliant ideas or pithy snippets of life, notebooks slightly bigger than pocket notebooks that are arguably big enough for writing a scene from a novel while sitting in a coffee shop and gazing out the window, large sketch pads big enough to spread out on a table and draw visual representations of ideas that will surely set the world on fire. Perhaps you know someone like me, a person who cannot resist buying notebooks of all sizes.
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