Writers need notebooks. Especially if you’re a first-draft-longhand writer, and/or a planner, you may well buy a notebook for the early stages (or ongoing, side-car stages) of a specific project. But this post is about what I’ll call your general, all-purpose, always-have-it-with-me writer’s notebook.
This isn’t just about stationery, paper or electronic. ‘I work. I have the habit of art’ says Alan Bennet’s fictional W H Auden in The Habit of Art. That the play is set during Auden’s faintly disgusting, dried-up old age is part of the point. What defines an artist’s nature and existence is that they do their art, and keep doing it: a daily, weekly, monthly habit which both shapes and is shaped by the rest of their life. Whether the product that emerges is great art (or even good art) is not what makes an artist: it is the necessity and process of making it. So shall we call it your habit notebook?
