Back to school shopping for your Dream Project

and the unending allure of the next new notebook that will change everything

Once on a trip to Colombia I ventured to a bookbinder’s shop in search of pocket sized handmade leatherbound notebooks. I purchased one with a peach cover and another in cobalt blue. The size of my palm, finely made with a slender strap of black elastic to keep the notebook closed. I slid it into the back pocket of my jeans and walked around Bogota feeling chic and like a Writer.

One tiny problem though -- I never took the notebook out of my pocket. It was too pretty for random notes or the garbled thoughts that surfaced ambling around a foreign city. I still have the notebook neatly tucked in a bookshelf alongside other pretty notebooks I’ve never used. I didn’t want to deface them. That’s how it would’ve felt. I’ve since abandoned them. Now I buy composition notebooks and happily scribble in them in my worst handwriting. 

It’s back to school season and so I’m curious, what tools support your craft? What stories do you tell yourself about the supplies that you want and the supplies that you need to bring forth your messy first efforts? 

Maybe leatherbound is what your heart desires. Maybe you want to hold sacred handmade space for yourself. Wonderful. Go for it. Find what works for you. For me it’s a BIC Pencil #2 0.5mm. 

The equipment is a story. Find the narrative that fits the tale you need to tell to get the pencil (or chisel or keyboard or needle and thread) moving.

The point is to create the environment where you come to understand that if you’re practicing every day, you can be a bit sloppy. You can let it pour out. You can stop being so focused on polish and start tuning into what it is that’s bubbling up on any particular day. 

You can let it be imperfect and messy. Mercifully, you can stop demanding that every sentence you write or everything you make be gold. This was never possible, but somehow we believed that some people – people different from us – were factories of beautiful prose and beautiful projects. This was a place to hide and a pretty good one at that.

But as you produce more and more, you learn that the bad outcomes and poor first efforts come to matter less and less. Every now and then you catch a thread of something worth pulling on and this is what you’re writing, making, creating for. The white hot. The unexpected. It takes a great deal of dross to get to it. It takes moving through the flotsam and jetsam of your mind, through what you think you should say and what you dare not say.

In this way, the discard pile is essential. You’re composting, as Natalie Goldberg says:

Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this ‘composting.’ Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories…Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil…

The garbage is not just tolerable but necessary, as it turns out. Not something to be embarrassed by, but integral work necessary to get from here to there.