What Hemingway's notebooks can teach us in keeping our own
The lure of a new notebook. What do we fill it with, and why? How can we start and what will we discover?
“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”
Ernst Hemingway
If you want to start your own notebook and have been floundering at where to start, let Hemingway inspire you.
We fear marking the new notebook. We worry about what that first mark must be to achieve our perfect notebook. If we stop ourselves there and question what on earth we are trying to perfect with a personal notebook, we can break down this barrier and begin. This modern crisis of perfection that has arisen with social media is the kryptonite to our creativity and, in turn, a detriment to our personal growth. We cannot and must not in the efforts of personal notebooks expect to start with some preconceived idea of the end result. In doing so, we miss out on the entire journey, the life we are here to live. We forget that joys are found in missteps and discoveries that fork off from them.
In the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library archives, you will find the Hemingway collection under expected categories such as Manuscripts and Letters. Yet Hemingway wasn’t so tidy or perfect in his keeping. He kept a lot of miscellaneous items, many of which had to be categorised as Other Materials. Here in Other Materials is all the interesting extras such as receipts from his favourite bookshops and bars, his packing lists and passports, decades of jotted-down facts, ideas, and reminders, as well as logs for all his fishing, hunting and boating.
Hemingway wrote, “I belong to this notebook and this pencil”. He filled notebook after notebook, at home, in cafes, on his boat trips, any adventure, any life moment he surrendered to capturing it down. This varied mix of capture not simply of story ideas but also of everyday events, smells, sights, sounds, and the weather is the reminder that we need to forget about what we are going to write and start. A notebook is filled with our life in all the forms that it takes. Please don’t feel it must be restricted to ideas, lists, or a journal. It can be if you would like it to, or it could be all these things and more.
If anyone knew how to use a notebook, it was Hemingway and he used it for everything. He had no worry of what was on the first page or if it was neat or even legible. In one of Hemingway’s notebooks, he wrote that he broke his right arm in what appears to be the writing of someone who had indeed broken his arm and had to try and write this with his non-dominant hand (see link for an article with this photo as it needs permission to be republished).
A notebook should never be forced, but like all our practices, it is a habit to maintain. Don’t let the empty page or new notebook daunt you. Start with what you experience and go from there or use a prompt such as this one from Hemingway that has helped me make a mark on many overwhelming blank pages.
‘Write one true sentence and then go on from there’
A notebook is something you will feel a little odd about now, but give it a decade, and you will wish you wrote more. My grandma keeps a diary. I have referred to them as life log books in this article. What’s amazing now is that she can pull one out and tell you how much a ferry they caught 60 years ago cost, along with much other unique information about her life.
I belong to this notebook and this pencil. EH
Write, draw, doodle, map, list, highlight, colour, whatever your notebook brings out of you, surrender to it as a practice that will be a messy first draft as this life wonderfully is.
Know someone else would find this interesting, please share it:
I've kept my notebooks from the last ten years or so. Actually think I have some from the year I was having my son (2006) so even longer back. But I'm starting to feel like I need to process them and move on. When I do flick back through them, there are so many little joys to be found there.