The New York Times recently published a review of an exhibition called “Women of Letters,” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The article focused on Irene Nemirovsky, author of the bestselling Suite Française. Here are two photos featuring the notebook she used to write a draft of the novel before her tragic death in Auschwitz. … Continue reading Irene Nemirovsky’s Notebook
I’m a writer by trade; so I tend to horde notebooks. And yet tonight to my chagrin I found that I didn’t have a single empty one to use for class in the morning. [link] I found this funny– I think I can safely say I have never found myself in this situation! Running out … Continue reading A Rare Problem
At Megaquotes, there’s quite a list of quotes about writing. The ones below made me think about my own notebooks: So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948 (All those nice fresh … Continue reading Quotable Quotes
Cat Rambo’s thoughts On Writing Process, a guest post at Jeff Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days. I write in large sketch pads, because I like the space to draw arrows and circles and make marginal notes. I used to write in Moleskin [sic] notebooks, but nowadays they just don’t seem large enough for novel-sized thinking. I save … Continue reading What Kind of Notebook Is Best for Creative Writing?
These two posts caught my eye today: This morning I’ve been thinking about how last May my literary archives went to Texas. All my papers (letters to and from me, journals, notebooks, drafts and fragment of work both published and unpublished, contracts, bank statements, phone bills, you name it) had lived with me for over … Continue reading To Keep or Not To Keep: Notebooks and Posterity?
I go through a variety of notebook-using habits. Lately, I tend to have about 3 going at once. I have a soft-cover Moleskine with graph paper pages that I’m using for daily jottings: to-do’s, French vocabulary, notes on books or movies to read, etc. A lot of these kinds of notes are things that I … Continue reading My Current Notebook Usage Dilemma