I’m going through my notebooks, around thirty years’ worth of them, finding the ideas that flared and the ones that didn’t. It’s amazing how many memories they evoke. Scratched down notes, some crossed out, made on commutes, or in lunch breaks.
I’m a patchy notetaker, I tend to take my stuff to the computer as soon as I can. But there are still hundreds of notebooks. And while it might be a bit disheartening to see all those undeveloped ideas, it’s also reassuring. Without them I have still made books and written stories, and so many in one way or another have been folded into other things.
A writing life, lived amongst all the other bits of life, is full of flashes of inspiration, but there is only so much time and only so many things you can do. It’s good to be reminded that everything starts out just as a few lines, a scrawl on paper or a tapping on the screen.
When this work doesn’t feel quite real – and it sort of isn’t at the beginning – you need to remember that writing is knitting story from nothing (the nothing that is everything – thoughts, dreams, books and stories, and the incessant terrible glorious pressure of the world).
Character, world building, structure, the beat of words to drive a story on, all of it comes from there. Something made out of scribbles.