Scribbled observations, dinner party conversations, flashes of perception … inspired by Henry James’s jottings, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt and Amit Chaudhuri share their note-taking habits
The mystique of a writer’s notebook seems still to be with us in this digital age. Perhaps it’s because a handwritten original is unhackable – other than by traditional means, such as burglary. But it’s no doubt a matter too of the way notebooks seem to offer access to hidden origins, and to the creative processes by which works we value come into being. Notebooks record early versions and impulses, and though sometimes the writer has an eye to posterity, the privacy of self-communing allows things that can’t be shared with others to be said, within what Coleridge, one of the great notebook-keepers, called in 1808 a “Dear Book! Sole Confidant of a breaking Heart”. For Virginia Woolf, her notebook helped to “discover real things beneath the show”; flashes of perception, phrases, half-formed and potential ideas – and of course stray bare thoughts (see Kafka: “Never again psychology!”; or Mark Twain: “Wife perfect but blamed if she suits me!”).
Jotting things down in a notebook is one way writers shape and discipline the unpredictable flow of ideas. For Henry James, in 1881, just after publishing The Portrait of a Lady, it was already a matter of regret that he had “lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit”. But he would make up for it over the next 30 years by filling innumerable pages with his records of story ideas, anecdotes from dinner parties and newspapers, things noticed on his travels. He developed personal rituals around the process of expressing his thoughts, through the pressure of pen on paper.
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