Thursday, May 3, 2012

notebooks and travels

When I travel, I buy notebooks. I take them home with me and use them for writing. I'm able to compose on my laptop, but I prefer longhand for that first encounter with the characters, where and how they live, what develops. Maybe it's a superstition, but to me the process of writing feels more organic. I especially like the scratchy-scrawly feel of a fountain pen. The notebooks too. They're special because they come from... over the rainbow. I have notebooks from Spain, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia, Mexico. The notebooks bought in Tunisia and Morocco are from France because the level of literacy is--or was--so low in those countries that mostly only people with European pretensions were shopping in the stores that sold stationary and paper. I hope that's no longer true.
Quite apart from the story developing as I write, I get pleasure from remembering the country where I bought the notebook. Often--as this morning--there's an extra surprise.
Because another thing I do when travelling is pick a flower here and there--often no more than a weed--and slip it between the pages of a notebook. I'm Canadian. You bet, I notice flowers when it's winter and back home I know there's snow heaped along the sidewalk. Lipstick hot hibiscus, tangerine bougainvillea!
Since I buy four or five notebooks in a country, and only get a new story idea maybe once or twice a year, time can pass before I turn the page where I find a pressed flower. This morning I flipped a page of  a notebook bought in Mexico.

4 comments:

  1. Oh, I love this! And I'm sorry I didn't read it before I left on holiday. I would have taken pleasure in bringing back some notebooks. I'll steal this tradition of yours if you don't mind!

    As for pressed flowers. I used to do that... haven't in a while, but still come across the odd blossom. Recently a whole field gathered in England decades ago.

    Thanks for inspiring such beautiful thoughts.

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  2. Notebooks from other places are wonderful to fill with stories or lines or observations. It links the travel and the writing. Both are ways to be away.
    Now I want to ask where you went.

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  3. British Virgin Islands. We were married there 20 years ago; also lived six months on Virgin Gorda. I made tons of notes, but I love the idea of using a notebook from the place, something typical, or something special. In this case, it would have been nothing more than whatever the schoolchildren use. (Only one grammar school on the island; older kids must take boat to neighbouring island.)

    BTW, I like your sentence: 'Both are ways to be away.' I've been thinking a lot about why we travel...

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  4. A lot of my notebooks are exercise books school kids would use--which fits how I feel about first-draft writing.

    Nice to make an anniversary trip. Happy Anniversary!

    Why we travel... yeah...

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