“When I was young, people knew I wanted to be a writer—probably because I kept telling them—and often foisted notebooks upon me, as gifts. For a day or so, the fantasy of inscribing wisdom onto various lavishly bound pages was quite entrancing. But everything I wrote was dumb. I knew I was supposed to fill the pages with great wisdom, drafting whole stories and poems, or personal revelations of breathtaking import. But I couldn’t hack it. Things popped into my head and I wrote them down, fragmentarily, with no resemblance to what someone had taught me, or I’d made up myself, was the proper writing of proper literature. And then, ashamed of myself, I’d stop. My bedroom held quite the collection of fancy notebooks with writing only on the first few pages.”
– Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?
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“Yet, I have never kept a diary. Or I have tried, but it never stuck. Again and again I would begin: with a very short entry, or else with a long one that would come to stand on its own, there in the beginning of a notebook, followed by all of those blank pages. I don’t know if, when I wrote essays, I was actually returning I to the same space, if somehow I had managed to get back to those empty pages, managed to get back to a pasture of thought. And now that it is done, I am keeping a real diary for the first time in my life, or is it a pasture, mostly because when I can’t, or don’t have time, to work on my novel, I can still write there. Sometimes I trick myself when writing in my notebook; sometimes I end up working on the novel after all, in those pages. And that is the best reason to return to it, that it brings me closer to something I haven’t otherwise been able to get to, or that can’t get to me.” I want to go further into my writing, into my thinking. ‘And do I?'”
– Amina Cain, A Horse at Night
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I cannot bear the pressure of a notebook.
There is an automatic commitment, that once started, it must be finished.
I don’t like to keep my writing within such a tight hold.
I build up ideas and collect thoughts as fragments.
If I have to imagine my writing as being part of a cohesive whole, if what I write now had to follow what I wrote yesterday, I would freeze.
Too much at stake.
I have never finished a notebook.
Give me a pad of paper and I can fly.
When I finish writing I can tear the sheets from it; the pad reverts back to emptiness, and I can take away my thoughts and put them somewhere else.
Every time I sit down to write I have a blank pad in front of me. No evidence of yesterday’s writing, and no thought of tomorrow.
Each day the writing is brand new.
I am free.
But do I have anything worth writing?
No? Then I can simply remove the page, take it to the bin, and start again tomorrow.
Conversations With Quotations 