Noteables: Take notes, make meaning
“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks, Boy Breaking Glass
If you’ve done Friday’s prompt 005 already, you may be newly aware of the delights and generative potential of note-taking! (And please share in comments any surprising features of humanness you found!)
Today I want to share some notes about note-taking—why this part of your practice matters, and how to do it.
some of my note-books
Why take notes?
Note-taking helps us practice key writer’s skills: attention, curiosity, focus, judgment, and perspective. But most importantly and most firstly, attention. Note-taking can lift the veils of boredom and dissatisfaction that you’ve come to assume are correct responses to your known environment. Note-taking wakes you up to what is. Note-taking provides a place for restlessness to run around and get out some kicks. Note-taking helps you isolate ideas to write about and record details to help bring those ideas to life. Note-taking helps you not lose your whole life to the passage of time.
Taking notes creates an endless series of departure points from which to write. As your note-taking tendency develops, the volume of inspiration to be found in the dailiness of life and in the contours of your own experience will astound you. As William Zinsser put it in On Writing Well, “Who could invent all the astonishing things that really happen?”
It can also help you become a believer—to believe that your observations, thoughts, and fragments of ideas will add up to something that will mean something to someone. If you want to write a book and that’s what your note-taking purpose is, you have to believe that the book exists within these notes before, during, and after taking them—the book is coming, and notes are the road it rolls in on. Taking notes defines and continually affirms your belief in this project.
Note-taking can help you become a believer in your own life, too, the antidote to the questions we all ask sometimes, or are always asking: ‘Is this even real?’ and ‘What makes this real?’ Your note-book is a lens through which the rich detail of your life can be seen—the details that make an idea (“I am alive”) a reality (“I am living”).
What take notes?
If your mind is doing all this work to have thoughts and ideas for you, the least you can do is write them down! If your body is doing all this work to have experiences for you, the least you can do is record some of it, as it’s happening. Because that stuff will just fade away.
But it’s not hard! Simply:
Take notes on the thoughts and observations you don’t want to forget, and make them as quick as you can. Quick in its two senses of ‘fast’ and ‘alive.’
Fast: Find a system (symbols, shorthand, sketches) and add as many options as you need to be able to quickly record and move on in different settings—when reading, on the go, at work, etc.
Alive: Develop your judgment of what needs to be noted to keep the past present. What kinds of details do you write down in order to remember a whole event later on? How do you record observations about a person when you only have a minute in front of them? This will come naturally (at some point you will know ‘that’s a great detail!’ or ‘what a great line!’), and never completely—there will always be some mystery in what notes will ‘matter’ later.
When you’re starting out, don’t worry about ‘judging what’s notable’—anything that’s interesting may be noted (attuning attention to interest being part of the project…). But, be warned that purpose-less notes are not what we’re after here ultimately.
Here’s a short excerpt from Vanishing Point, a novel by David Markson about a man driven insane by his too-many notes, h/t kevin canty like nine years ago.
You can for sure go ahead and take free-wheeling notes that aren’t ‘designated’ in any way but follow a simple rule of ‘interesting’ or ‘curious’ or ‘huh’; a higher standard like ‘wow’; or specific thoughts and observations that follow a specific form like ‘I wonder.’ Here are a few different species and sub-species of notes that might inspire you further:
Notes of Attention are observational notes that comes through the senses. They’re fragments or sketches of things you spot or overhear or wonder that are interesting or surprising but you don’t know why or what for yet!
These kinds of notes—what you might keep in a pocket note-book or your notes app—can be surprisingly revealing. What do you find yourself interested in repeatedly in your environment? When you travel? What you overhear people say, what people wear or how they move, something in the natural world, something inside? Seeing over time where your interest tends to be drawn will tell you a lot about yourself and your style. Most of my note-taking life has been non-directed notes of interest that become like the nails of the house of my work.
Notes of Support have a specific purpose for an essay, story, or book you’re working on, or to something else you’re building, like a course or company, or to an idea you’re developing.
May include notes on descriptions of a problem, solutions to a problem, directions an idea might go, stories you can use to explain the idea, and questions related to the idea. Any of these pop into your head day and night!
Observational notes (using the senses) can help you come up with great metaphors and other ways to explain or translate your ideas.
Discovery notes are a kind of note-of-support taken during reading, research, or work, to help you record key findings, questions that come up, things you don’t want to forget or want to look up or revisit later. (Discovery notes might appear in your margins, but you may want a specific Discovery note-book.)
Notes of Intention are used when you want to observe something specific to get a better understanding of it—“I’m choosing to pay attention to my feelings today and will sketch a note every time I can feel a new feeling.” Or when there’s a phenomenon you want to get a fuller picture of, maybe for a scene you’re writing—eg. notes on weather, notes on food.
Questions, whether recorded in a single Questions Book or just as a kind of note-taking, can be an incredible resource for you! Record your questions as they occur to you, from the mundane (who was that in that movie?) to the profound (what are my values?).
Delights or gratitudes can be recorded in a note-book designated for this purpose. Keep track of things that make you smile, no matter how small (and the smaller the better)!
“Delight” is a word I use a lot. Part of my mission is to help people experience more delight in their lives through writing—writing helps us identify, pay attention to, focus on, and richly describe what makes us happy and brings us joy, giving those things more importance and meaning in our lives.
You can learn so much about yourself by tracking delights through simple note-taking, and become grateful for what you’re surprised to find! Keeping a ‘grateful for’ note-book might be another way to go—all on its own, a designated space.
Ross Gay wrote a whole book this way.
Side-‘note’: For other books that take inspiration from note-taking, I also think of Amy Leach’s remarkable Things That Are, which uses invented language and metaphor to bring us the most observable, real weirdness. Or Joy Williams’ fictional observational note-book 99 Stories of God. Or my maybe number one ‘most important book of all time,’ Why Did I Ever? by Mary Robison, which is written in a note-taking structure. But of course all books are a lesson in the power of note-taking. Like a tree from a seed, no book began without a note!
How take notes?
“I sit at the hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or, if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” —Mitch Hedberg
Last Monday, I wrote about creating and identifying writing rituals to honor and support your work and your writer’s life. Though how and when and why you take notes can definitely be added to your Book of Rites, I want you to think about note-taking less like ritual and more like tendency. It’s one of your writer’s tendencies to ask questions and be curious, and so is writing stuff down so you don’t forget it.
Everyone has a different note-taking style and I won’t get into a ton of detail here—experiment with what works for you. As long as you know what the note says or means, and where to find it, that’s all that matters. Here’s a few things:
Be prepared to take notes. Keep that pen on your side of the room. It’s so easy to drop a voice memo or scribble a line in a pocket note-book or in your notes app—as long as you know where those things are. Avail yourself of all these options as you discover your note-taking style—the pocket-notebook, the voice recorder, and notes app. I and many of my writers use all three of these options and more. I also use post-its and write in the margins of books, using symbols to help me keep track.
Symbols are really helpful in note-taking! You might use a star for notes that feel big, or add a circle next to a note you don’t understand yet, etc. Once you have a process for organizing your notes (see below), create a ‘note key’ of helpful symbols to ‘pre-organize’ your notes as you’re taking them. (I can do a whole post on this if you guys want!)
Your notes might be simple bullet points or scribbles, or take more detail. They might be single words!
You might come up with shorthand so you can scribble faster—certain words I use a lot have abbreviations only I know.
You can take notes on all kinds of different things in a single note-book, or dedicate a note-book or ‘note area’ to a specific kind of note, like ‘book of questions’ or ‘book of gratitude’ or ‘book of book’ (where you record notes for your book).
You might try ‘two-sided notes’, with a main story you’re tracking in one column or half of the page and a ‘side story’ on the other. This might be useful when taking notes while reading or interviewing someone or in a meeting, or while doing intentional observation—there’s the main stuff and then the other stuff, which might become the main stuff later on. I love two-sided notes! (I can write more about this in the future and give examples!)
Important! Your notes might include visual representations of your thinking or observation, from doodles to sketches to diagrams.
Like I said, if you’re taking notes on a specific project or idea, you might take down all those notes together in one pen you can root around in later. When this isn’t possible because you’ve taken a bunch of notes in different places (phone, voice memos, journal, margins), create a space for your project notes to live and regularly move your notes into this space.
This is really key. You don’t want to let all your notes stay in their little areas, all unfulfilled potential and too-little light. If you’ve taken notes on a specific project, like ideas for your book or essay, you should have an ‘idea tracker’ or document where you can put those notes, elaborating on them a little when you make the transfer. This is where ‘taking notes’ becomes ‘making notes.’ (And now you’re on your way to drafting.)
For more detail on note-taking and idea tracking for your book project specifically, tune in next week! I’ll share my first steps for getting started on your book, from ‘what is my book?’ to outlining. If any of you are in the ‘just thinking!’ stage, or if you’ve had trouble moving on from that stage, I’ll see you back here next time.
