Thanks for a(nother) glimpse into your note taking world, Mark! I don’t harvest my notebooks, and I have a collection that dates back to 1987. A neighbor once asked why I save them all. Great question. And your post here has me wondering the same. There’s probably a lot that could be trashed, but I dunno--I sort of like looking back and seeing that grocery list I made 8 years ago or the name and number O jotted down. Weird, I know.
Wow, this seems like a useful process! A fun and interesting read.
I’m a mostly digital creator, I would say, but I do write story notes/ideas in a notebook. I try to have a notebook on hand most places I go, especially work. If I don’t type a story note into my “notes” on my phone, I jot it down in my notebook. I have 2-3 filled notebooks from the past year or two. Everything I consider useful finds its way onto my laptop sooner or later.
I love this post! I had wanted to interview you about your note taking process, but now I don’t think I need to! Really excited for the next installment!
I do some harvesting, but I’d never throw out a notebook. I just transfer import stuff to digital files.
Also, can we think of published writing as a kind of harvesting? We pick out the best stuff from our notes to include?
Ps--I’ve been thinking about your question about harvesters. I think part of the problem with harvester-notebooks is that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to know something’s been harvested. At least with notebooks in the archive, when we can’t ask the note taker.
I harvest, but more from scraps and doodles into books for safekeeping and future inspiration. I like going through old ones to remember what was happening or revisit an idea. I haven’t yet gotten to harvesting the harvest, but maybe the meta-harvest is for the future? I find all this discussion fascinating, though, and I agree that it’s therapeutic. Gardening for the mind.
Sometimes I think I’m obsessive in detailing my own experiences, but then I read this ... Wow! Honestly, I don’t care about notebooks at all, but the process is fascinating.
Oct 5, 2022·edited Oct 5, 2022Liked by Mark Dykeman
Great post! But blimey, Mark, that's HARDCORE notebooking!
I don't have space issues for storing finished notebooks - all of my notebooks since 2018 (when I started keeping a notebook in bullet journal style) take up a 25cm cube in my office book cabinet. For that reason I have no need to find alternative ways to accommodate notes I want to keep - I keep them by default.
My technique is to index my notes as I go. One A5 notebook covers absolutely every aspect of my life, and on any one page I might have a note about my medication, the fact that bin day will be changing from Thursday to Friday next month, the cooking time for my low-carb cheesecake, the registration number of the speeding vehicle which broke our van's wing mirror, what I had for supper last night which so scuppered my diabetes control this morning, or a reminder to send a copy of Jim's book to someone. It's extremely diverse. By indexing the notes as I go along - simple to do with a notebook with printed page numbers like my Leuchtturm - I can find any important entry really easily when I need to.
My index is rather like your list in 33 rows, but I do it as I go along. I don't have to accommodate notebook parts elsewhere - my books stay intact, and I know exactly where to find the information - in some cases without looking at the index. For instance, I know that last year's Christmas card list will be found towards the end of the book labelled AUG-NOV 2021. Everything is dated.
Whenever I finish a notebook (every four months) I read through it to see if I've missed anything important that needed indexing - I've never yet found anything I've missed! But it's a lovely opportunity to reflect on those four months before my notebook takes its place in my cabinet.
As well as my A5 notebook described above I have just two more: a tiny pocket notebook and a large writing notebook. My pocket notebook is for capturing writing ideas and streams of consciousness when I'm out (although the odd shopping-list reminder ends up there too, on the go, truth be told) - and these get transferred into my writing notebook when I'm next at my desk - or as soon as I get home, if the urge to write strikes! My writing notebook is where I store my writing ideas - again, in an organised fashion - and write my drafts.
Mark, I'm hugely impressed by your process for storing information you've recorded, but it looks like a lot of work!
I could see arguments for both "Keep" and "Trash" camps. I think I'd lean more towards the former but, then again, my notebook collection isn't as extensive :) Great system, though!
You have one of the most elaborate systems I have ever read about. It seems to me you could get lost trying to figure all that out. I find it kind of overwhelming, There is so much detail.
I have never thrown out any of my notebooks. It's fun to go back and look at your progress through the years. Sometimes you might think, why did I write this the way I did or wasn't I a genius when I wrote it this way. Plus what if you're famous someday, they'll want to see your handwritten notes/stories, right?
I do have a problem with keeping track of stories I create. I don't have an index. When I go and look for something, I have a hard time trying to find everything I have written for that particular story. When I start something, I put a two letter code and a dash and then the page number in a square at the top of the page. Then the next page gets the same thing and that page number. But I don't have an index to remember where in the notebook it is located at. And then sometimes, I stop that story and write something else down. It may be another story or something I want to put on my Substack. So then, I pick the story back up and start renumbering it again. So I could have a substack newsletter sandwiched between some long form fiction story I'm creating. It gets confusing. On more than one occasion, I'll be hunting through the notebook trying to find where it was that I talked about story-A for substack and won't be able to find it. It's a little disorganized and frustrating.
I have ripped some pages out of my notebooks to staple them together. Those are usually the substack stories that I have already written and posted.
It seems to me that I should be using some kind of indexing system like either you or Rebecca uses. Maybe then I could find what I'm looking for.
I harvest notebooks and move anything worth keeping into Notion. I intend to do it every time I reach the end of a notebook. In reality I have at least 5 full notebooks waiting for my attention right now.
I love seeing my notebooks in my bookshelves the way bibliophiles love seeing their collections of beloved books. I guess that makes me a Papyrophile Ponderer 🤔 Curator.
Um what!?!? Notebook harvest? My mind is blown and I am so excited. I was JUST thinking i need to figure out what to do with my half-filled/abandoned story notebooks and this is the answer. I am very excited to try this out, thanks so much for sharing!
I love your thorough 'harvesting' method! I, too, trash notebooks when I am nearing the end (usually, as you say, because I have accumulated a nicer one waiting in the wings).
I love your thorough 'harvesting' method! I, too, trash notebooks when I am nearing the end (usually, as you say, because I have accumulated a nicer one waiting in the wings).
This is not quite the same thing, but I believe it's related. In 2017, in order to deal with 72 stored journals that I didn't want my daughter to have to deal with when I someday die, I started what I called "The Journal Project". I photographed each cover—many of them were embellished/decorated. I read through each one, saving certain relevant pages or pages that contained artwork. There were a few journals that I saved in their entirety... but really very few. Mostly I felt quite willing to part with writing that had helped me at the time, but definitely wasn't worth saving until the end of time.
Most of it I tore up, and I stored the torn pieces in a massive vat (a large wicker laundry basket that was made more tall with a "wall" of matte mylar) in my studio. I really wasn't sure what might eventually happen with the torn pieces.
The torn pieces lived in the vat until an exhibit I had this past summer at the Victoria Arts Council here in Victoria, BC. Mostly the exhibit was paintings and memoir comics, but the torn journal pieces (or some of them, at least) became part of an installation—the Arts Council building was once a bank and the installation was in what was once the vault. You can see some pictures of the exhibit here: https://www.balampman.com/#/lifeswork/
That is a VERY interesting idea. I am a throw away nothing type person, but NY real estate places a nontrivial storage cost on common items, so I may consider this.
By the way, your symbols almost spell out something like XR!CK?+ so if you do something like switch the X with a T for "throw away" and the + for something like Y for "yes keep in notebook format" and the ! to I for "important," you get "TRICKY?" for memorization purposes.
There's just something about notebooks, that feeling of the paper and the writing tools that I sometimes come back to. I understand that push and pull between efficiency vs. effectiveness when it comes to harvesting of notes and notebooks, like the word itself, like getting heirloom seeds and clippings of something we can graft on to new works and pieces.
Thanks for a(nother) glimpse into your note taking world, Mark! I don’t harvest my notebooks, and I have a collection that dates back to 1987. A neighbor once asked why I save them all. Great question. And your post here has me wondering the same. There’s probably a lot that could be trashed, but I dunno--I sort of like looking back and seeing that grocery list I made 8 years ago or the name and number O jotted down. Weird, I know.
Wow, this seems like a useful process! A fun and interesting read.
I’m a mostly digital creator, I would say, but I do write story notes/ideas in a notebook. I try to have a notebook on hand most places I go, especially work. If I don’t type a story note into my “notes” on my phone, I jot it down in my notebook. I have 2-3 filled notebooks from the past year or two. Everything I consider useful finds its way onto my laptop sooner or later.
I love this post! I had wanted to interview you about your note taking process, but now I don’t think I need to! Really excited for the next installment!
I do some harvesting, but I’d never throw out a notebook. I just transfer import stuff to digital files.
Also, can we think of published writing as a kind of harvesting? We pick out the best stuff from our notes to include?
Ps--I’ve been thinking about your question about harvesters. I think part of the problem with harvester-notebooks is that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to know something’s been harvested. At least with notebooks in the archive, when we can’t ask the note taker.
I harvest, but more from scraps and doodles into books for safekeeping and future inspiration. I like going through old ones to remember what was happening or revisit an idea. I haven’t yet gotten to harvesting the harvest, but maybe the meta-harvest is for the future? I find all this discussion fascinating, though, and I agree that it’s therapeutic. Gardening for the mind.
Sometimes I think I’m obsessive in detailing my own experiences, but then I read this ... Wow! Honestly, I don’t care about notebooks at all, but the process is fascinating.
Great post! But blimey, Mark, that's HARDCORE notebooking!
I don't have space issues for storing finished notebooks - all of my notebooks since 2018 (when I started keeping a notebook in bullet journal style) take up a 25cm cube in my office book cabinet. For that reason I have no need to find alternative ways to accommodate notes I want to keep - I keep them by default.
My technique is to index my notes as I go. One A5 notebook covers absolutely every aspect of my life, and on any one page I might have a note about my medication, the fact that bin day will be changing from Thursday to Friday next month, the cooking time for my low-carb cheesecake, the registration number of the speeding vehicle which broke our van's wing mirror, what I had for supper last night which so scuppered my diabetes control this morning, or a reminder to send a copy of Jim's book to someone. It's extremely diverse. By indexing the notes as I go along - simple to do with a notebook with printed page numbers like my Leuchtturm - I can find any important entry really easily when I need to.
My index is rather like your list in 33 rows, but I do it as I go along. I don't have to accommodate notebook parts elsewhere - my books stay intact, and I know exactly where to find the information - in some cases without looking at the index. For instance, I know that last year's Christmas card list will be found towards the end of the book labelled AUG-NOV 2021. Everything is dated.
Whenever I finish a notebook (every four months) I read through it to see if I've missed anything important that needed indexing - I've never yet found anything I've missed! But it's a lovely opportunity to reflect on those four months before my notebook takes its place in my cabinet.
As well as my A5 notebook described above I have just two more: a tiny pocket notebook and a large writing notebook. My pocket notebook is for capturing writing ideas and streams of consciousness when I'm out (although the odd shopping-list reminder ends up there too, on the go, truth be told) - and these get transferred into my writing notebook when I'm next at my desk - or as soon as I get home, if the urge to write strikes! My writing notebook is where I store my writing ideas - again, in an organised fashion - and write my drafts.
Mark, I'm hugely impressed by your process for storing information you've recorded, but it looks like a lot of work!
I could see arguments for both "Keep" and "Trash" camps. I think I'd lean more towards the former but, then again, my notebook collection isn't as extensive :) Great system, though!
You have one of the most elaborate systems I have ever read about. It seems to me you could get lost trying to figure all that out. I find it kind of overwhelming, There is so much detail.
I have never thrown out any of my notebooks. It's fun to go back and look at your progress through the years. Sometimes you might think, why did I write this the way I did or wasn't I a genius when I wrote it this way. Plus what if you're famous someday, they'll want to see your handwritten notes/stories, right?
I do have a problem with keeping track of stories I create. I don't have an index. When I go and look for something, I have a hard time trying to find everything I have written for that particular story. When I start something, I put a two letter code and a dash and then the page number in a square at the top of the page. Then the next page gets the same thing and that page number. But I don't have an index to remember where in the notebook it is located at. And then sometimes, I stop that story and write something else down. It may be another story or something I want to put on my Substack. So then, I pick the story back up and start renumbering it again. So I could have a substack newsletter sandwiched between some long form fiction story I'm creating. It gets confusing. On more than one occasion, I'll be hunting through the notebook trying to find where it was that I talked about story-A for substack and won't be able to find it. It's a little disorganized and frustrating.
I have ripped some pages out of my notebooks to staple them together. Those are usually the substack stories that I have already written and posted.
It seems to me that I should be using some kind of indexing system like either you or Rebecca uses. Maybe then I could find what I'm looking for.
I harvest notebooks and move anything worth keeping into Notion. I intend to do it every time I reach the end of a notebook. In reality I have at least 5 full notebooks waiting for my attention right now.
I love seeing my notebooks in my bookshelves the way bibliophiles love seeing their collections of beloved books. I guess that makes me a Papyrophile Ponderer 🤔 Curator.
Um what!?!? Notebook harvest? My mind is blown and I am so excited. I was JUST thinking i need to figure out what to do with my half-filled/abandoned story notebooks and this is the answer. I am very excited to try this out, thanks so much for sharing!
I love your thorough 'harvesting' method! I, too, trash notebooks when I am nearing the end (usually, as you say, because I have accumulated a nicer one waiting in the wings).
I love your thorough 'harvesting' method! I, too, trash notebooks when I am nearing the end (usually, as you say, because I have accumulated a nicer one waiting in the wings).
This is not quite the same thing, but I believe it's related. In 2017, in order to deal with 72 stored journals that I didn't want my daughter to have to deal with when I someday die, I started what I called "The Journal Project". I photographed each cover—many of them were embellished/decorated. I read through each one, saving certain relevant pages or pages that contained artwork. There were a few journals that I saved in their entirety... but really very few. Mostly I felt quite willing to part with writing that had helped me at the time, but definitely wasn't worth saving until the end of time.
Most of it I tore up, and I stored the torn pieces in a massive vat (a large wicker laundry basket that was made more tall with a "wall" of matte mylar) in my studio. I really wasn't sure what might eventually happen with the torn pieces.
The torn pieces lived in the vat until an exhibit I had this past summer at the Victoria Arts Council here in Victoria, BC. Mostly the exhibit was paintings and memoir comics, but the torn journal pieces (or some of them, at least) became part of an installation—the Arts Council building was once a bank and the installation was in what was once the vault. You can see some pictures of the exhibit here: https://www.balampman.com/#/lifeswork/
That is a VERY interesting idea. I am a throw away nothing type person, but NY real estate places a nontrivial storage cost on common items, so I may consider this.
By the way, your symbols almost spell out something like XR!CK?+ so if you do something like switch the X with a T for "throw away" and the + for something like Y for "yes keep in notebook format" and the ! to I for "important," you get "TRICKY?" for memorization purposes.
There's just something about notebooks, that feeling of the paper and the writing tools that I sometimes come back to. I understand that push and pull between efficiency vs. effectiveness when it comes to harvesting of notes and notebooks, like the word itself, like getting heirloom seeds and clippings of something we can graft on to new works and pieces.