Keep a Notebook That's a Net, Not a Diary

I was fourteen when a teacher called Ms Iyer handed our class a battered paperback anthology and told us, with no ceremony at all, to copy out any lines we liked. So I did. Then I started writing my own underneath, to see whether I could tell the difference. I have not been without a notebook since.

People hear "keep a notebook" and picture a diary. Monday, did this, felt that. Put that idea down. A diary is a record of what already happened. A notebook, the kind I mean, is a net. You do not carry it to write down your day. You carry it to catch the things that drift past and would otherwise be gone by the time you got home.

What the net is for

A net does not care what it catches. It is held open in moving water and it keeps whatever the current brings. Mine keeps: a phrase a stranger said on the seafront, in the wrong order and better for it; the exact grey of the harbour in flat light after rain; a word my daughter got wrong this week and improved without meaning to. None of those is a song. Any of them might be the start of one.

You are not writing. You are noticing.

Here is the part that took me years to trust. The notebook is not a test of how interesting your life is. It is a record of how closely you looked. People call this a knack, or worse, a gift you either have or you don't, and I think that is mostly a way of keeping people out. It is noticing, and noticing is a thing you can practise, the way you practise anything: badly at first, then less badly.

Last week I caught one on a walk along the front, the buggy wheels ticking, the light gone strange and flat after the rain. A line arrived, eight words, and I still do not know whether it belongs to me, or to someone I overheard, or to nobody at all. I wrote it down anyway. That is what the net is for: you keep it now and find out later whose it was.

Most of it is nothing. That is how it works.

I develop my own film in a blacked-out bathroom, and the first thing the darkroom teaches you is the contact sheet. Thirty-six frames on a strip, and you sit with a loupe and accept that most of them are nothing: blurred, dull, half a thumb across the lens. You are not hoping all thirty-six are good. You are hunting for the one. A notebook is exactly the same. The wonderful line is in there, surrounded by ninety that are nothing, and the nothing is not waste. The nothing is how you get to the one.

You are not hoping every line is good. You are hunting, through a hundred that are nothing, for the one that was worth the whole net.

How to actually keep one

Keep it small enough to live in a pocket or a bag, because the net you left at home catches nothing. Write the date and the place at the top, the way you label a photograph, so a fragment can tell you later where it came from. Do not tidy it, and do not censor it; a net with a tidy mind editing it on the way in is a net with most of the holes sewn shut.

Then, every so often, go back through it cold, weeks later, when you have forgotten what you meant. The lines that still have a charge are the ones to keep. When a caught fragment wants company, when you have the colour of the afternoon but not yet the image to set beside it, SenseSpark is built to hand you the unexpected neighbour, the second thing that makes the first one mean something. (And if you would rather practise the catching itself, the first line is where a lot of these fragments end up.)

My notebooks sit on a shelf in an order I promise is not a system, and I can find a line from any year of them in seconds. Most of what is in them is nothing. A grey afternoon. A stranger's half-sentence. A word a three-year-old broke and mended.

And then, every so often, one frame on the strip comes up with light across it that you do not remember letting in.