on keeping a notebook

I was first introduced to the formidable Joan Didion in my junior year of high school in AP English. My teacher was a character, but more importantly she insisted we write a one page essay everyday on rhetoric pieces. One of the pieces we were assigned to analyze was Joan Didion’s landmark “On Keeping A Notebook”. I found the prompt below while digging through my high school box of memories this weekend, actually. 

I was struck by this prompt, and the realization I hadn’t gone back in my rolodex to check on 10-year-old me in a while. When I tried to reach back, I ran into the same block Didion mentioned – I could imagine from a third-person perspective what I was like, but I could no longer empathize and improvise a conversation with her. I felt a wave of sadness wash over me – and I realized I wanted to keep in touch with my younger selves, as well as my current self. Writing offered me the best chance of doing that. 

So I got my first real notebook, a Swathmore watercolor wire-bound notebook with thick pages & wrote with a micron pen about what I did day to day, what was due in my classes, my crushes, the drama at school, what I was grateful for. Thumbing through it now, I am proud to say I can still improvise a conversation with my fifteen-year old self. 

I traveled to Europe that summer with my family, and before we left, I bought my next notebook, a mix of pens, and rolls and rolls of tape. When we came back after three weeks in Spain and France, I had filled 200 pages with pictures, receipts, observations, pressed flowers. I wrote about what it was like to swim in the Mediterranean with skin hot from the July sun, the smell of lavender & bales of sweet hay in Provence as I posed for my mom & her master artist painting in the fields, the taste of wild strawberries gathered in the Alps. 

I took videos there, and when I watch them, I visually remember how it felt to be there – but when I go back and read about what I wrote, it is only then my mind truly escapes to the shores of Monterosso, the streets of Paris, the mountains of Chamonix. 

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When I studied abroad in Rome my sophomore year of college with Professor Bernie Schroeder, I wrote a ton in a notebook rescued from work – a straggly, manila, reed-thin notebook in the back of our supply cabinet. Bernie (as he encouraged us to call him) taught in a way I hadn’t experienced before – chock full of anecdotes, some of them self-deprecating, all of them full of lessons. He had helped build one of the largest distributed marketing agencies in the 80s, and worked in the early days with Apple and Amazon. We bonded over the full leg-brace I had as my constant companion ( I had torn my MCL skateboarding to the library during finals a week before I left for Rome), as he had the same injury years before. 

Bernie encouraged us to write down our goals, lessons we learned from entrepreneurs and investors and operators, and connections that we noticed in disparate industries. I wrote about tasting new flavors inspired by world travels in the oldest Gelateria in Rome, how expats were taking American businesses and translating them in the context of Italy in numerous incubators, and how a hostellier opened a restaurant to support his family amidst a financial crisis. I wrote about what I wanted to accomplish in my last three years of school, people I wanted to talk to, what I wanted to do in the future. 

It was in Rome when I discovered how to write studio pieces. 

Let me explain studio pieces – my mom is an impressionist artist, and paints en plein air(or on location). The pieces she paints on location are smaller, usually 12×16 or 16×20 compositions. They are color studies that guide her development of larger paintings later. Here’s some examples: 

Studio pieces are mosaics of smaller pieces she’s composed over the years – usually larger paintings that radiate the work put into them. She can spend months on one painting, and the finished product is usually 20 layers of paint thick – a reminder of the layered labor put into these studio pieces. Here’s one of my favorites: 

She taught me that these studies are works of art on their own because they capture a certain moment in time, but a studio piece is unique because it is polished to certain perfection under painstaking work. 

My writing before Rome had been like her studies, amazing to capture a certain fleeting moment I’d never get back. In Rome, I found the depth of a studio piece. I learned that how to share less ephemeral moments, like how I was being teaching myself to be mindful in both a foreign country and in constant paint from my torn MCL (here). Pushing myself to be vulnerable in public was and is scary. I spent hours rephrasing it on the rooftop of the converted convent we stayed in, and published it the next day. Messages from people who had read it started to trickle into my inbox, approaching my honesty.

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After that trip, I began to use my notebooks more often as studies – taking notes on calls, conversations, books, tweets, observations, emotions. I don’t often write long form pieces, but I figured I’d share a bit more about my “studio” writing process here: 

1. I’ll write about something if I’ve received more than five messages asking about it ( examples include the cold outreach workshop I did & my guiding questions )
2. I’ll write about something if someone asks me a question that’s particularly provoking – for example, this is the text that spurred this piece: 

1. I’ll write about something if I’m making a decision I feel has or will profoundly affect me ( like this piece on prioritizing family over a dream job across the country ) 

As for my actual writing process, it looks a bit like this: 

First I light a candle, open my windows, put on folk music, sit down in my bed, put palmer’s lotion on my hands, and cuddle up with my laptop & notebook. Next, I open tabs between my blog draft, twitter, west elm, cb2, so I can oscillate between looking at expensive office chairs and decor and stochastic bursts of writing. (I have a really hard time concentrating). 

My writing is similar to my coding, I usually bullet out every paragraph making pseudocode-like comments of different observations, literature. I coalesce skinny threads of thought into webs of connections as I expand each paragraph, noodling around in sentences to find a phrasing I like. I like big words. People tell you you should really stick to small ones, but what’s the purpose in knowing the perfect word if you can’t use it? 

Anyway, I digress. After I’ve expanded at least half the bullets, I scroll up and down the draft, getting a sense for the flow. Although I’m a second half player when it comes to any sport or game of chance, I am indefinitely a first-half player when it comes to writing. I know this, so I like to take a break after the first half and work on the end. Here, I make some notes of what I’ve touched on so I can pick which thread I want to use to anchor the piece. It’s often a quote or an analogy. 

After skirting around the second half of the piece for as long as possible, I’ll switch positions. Often to the outdoor adirondack chair I stuffed in the back of a honda accord, hauled from apartment to house, and shoe-d in tan felt circles, placing my laptop on the keyboard drawer of the desk my dad handmade me. Candle flickering, I’ll silently thank my junior year of highschool AP English teacher for telling me that English rules are just guidelines. She would always remind us that our syntactic and punctuational flutations were the fingerprint of our writing. 

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She taught similar to how I imagine Picasso learned. We learned how to write standard rhetorical analysis pieces so thoroughly I dreamt of them. Then we began the unlearning process – how to workshop and engage and play with an academic style of writing. She’d pull our dull pieces apart like an expert pizzaiolo stretching bare dough, spicing them up with parallelism, decadent words, and abrupt periods. I loved it. 

Before her, writing seemed like a chore. The writing she introduced us to felt like play. 

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After stretching out all my bullets & wrapping the piece, I’ll copy the text of the draft, and paste it into google translate so I can catch any inconsistencies in sentences. (this is a great way to catch errors outside of spell check & it’s much less draining than rereading). It’s kind of like whack-a-mole catching the errors after they pop up in your auditory periphery and before you hear the next one. 

I’ll scan the piece one more time. I’ll begin to send paragraph screenshots to my inner writing circle via text/dm & wait for their replies. Sometimes their response will spark another line or two, but most of the time, they’ll reply with encouragement & request I send the piece when I’m done. And so begins my ship into the real world. 

I’ll post it on my blog, which goes out to approximately 13 people (including my mom, dad, and grandma). I don’t really mind this audience size, knowing I’ll text it to people who asked me those questions before. I see my writing as sort of a fine wine – better after aeration. 

So what I’ve learned over the past couple years is that being vulnerable on the internet creates a serendipity vehicle. People come across your writing and resonate with it – they might be acquaintances, friends, future co-workers. People have come to me years after I write something to say they’ve been thinking about it. It still sparks conversations. 

But at the end of the day, I write for myself. Writing all these notes down leaves much more space in my head for intertwining mental acrobatics between the different disciplines I play in. I am able to improvise conversations with my younger self once again. These pieces I write become part of my ongoing narrative, stakes in the ground that mark the funny milestones where I said to the thoughts in my head, “Alright, that’s enough running around in there – it’s time to come outside.”