Notebooks allow for all kinds of record-keeping, and I kept one myself as a kid. I was attracted to mixing up words and pictures freely, since that's how I think.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.
More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.
If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.
We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion impossible in our unaided minds.
I'm always trying to figure out ways to keep hold of memories. My one-sentence journal, for instance.
I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.
Kids who want to become writers might want to start carrying a small notebook in their backpack. I encourage people to sit down in malls and listen, just listen, to how people talk.
Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.
I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.