I posted about the use of analogue notebooks while I was teaching creative writing.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1976 - Using Journals for Creative Writing
I miss the practice and frequent use of a notebook. I spend so much time on devices and looking at screens. I need to do that less.
BRAINSTORMING AND
PRE-WRITING PROMPT 01
USING A JOURNAL FOR CREATIVE WRITING
Writing in a journal is a common practice, and there are literally thousands of web-based articles and guides for using a journal as a therapeutic tool, a dream record, a memory repository, and/or a brainstorming tool for creative writing.
If you want to do a journal as a prompt for this class, and you write in it substantively at least twice a week, then it counts as TWO of the eight minimum prompts you need by the end of the quarter.
WRITING IN A JOURNAL IS EXERCISE
I keep a daily journal, and I publish it on the Internet and push it out to social media accounts.
https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/
I know you know this. I have certainly made no secret of it, and I have directed you to it for content.
It’s not always a “diary-like” journal of what I am doing in my life. It’s not always a scrap of poem or thoughts about a story that I scrawl in these things (photo below).
NO RULES; NO LIMITS; NO PRISONS
There are no rules for what you put in your journal. Use it to start writings of any kind, free write just stream of consciousness channeling from the imaginative dimension X or the mother ship, use it to unpack things happening in your life that you can think through while writing, whatever you wish. Just write stuff.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WRITER’S BLOCK
It’s exercise. If you get in the habit, and you limber up with journaling, then the writing will flow through you. Real writers do not get writer’s block. That’s a popular fallacy promoted by people who like to call themselves writers but who do not actually do any writing. Writers write. If you write, then you’re a writer. And if you’re writing something, then you do not have writer’s block. It’s that simple.
more at
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1976 - Using Journals for Creative Writing
https://warrenellis.ltd/ltd/going-analogue-returning-to-digital/
Going Analogue, Returning To Digital
I’m writing this in the evening, on a laptop resting on a work board my kid bought me for Xmas. The board is actually intended for tablets, and has a long slot so you can prop the tablet up, lay the board (with its beanbag-padded underside) on your belly and watch Netflix in bed until Netflix checks to see if you died. But it works fine for writing on a laptop on the sofa in the living room. I note all this because at this hour I would usually be writing in a notebook with a pen.
In 2020 I dropped pretty much all of my digital tools. Somewhere around here will be a photo of the notebooks I’ve filled in the last two years.
I almost exclusively think on paper these days. The first page of each notebook is used for a numbered index. When I’m jotting down something I know I’m going to want to refer to later, I assign it a number on the index page and write the same number on the top right hand corner of the piece I’m referencing. I write in it pretty much every day. It serves as work book, commonplace book, personal journal, anything I want to be. The numbering on the spines is done with a Pentel white-out pen. (UK) (US) (Pretty sure I picked up that trick from the Cool Tools newsletter.)
I like it. It’s calming. It allows my mind to wander more. I make different kinds of connections to the ones I used to. It’s more reflective. I do wish my handwriting was better, but I’ve wished that since I was ten, and it’s time to let that go. I use a Pilot Frixion erasable pen in Moleskines, and write in black block capitals that most of the time I can actually understand a day later. (Not always. Sometimes I’ve had to examine my writing under strong light to decipher exactly what the hell I was scrawling down.)
My phone has been made very still – limited notifications, fewer apps – and I’m not connected to the social internet at all, which takes away a number of attention-stealing cycles. I have newsletters, RSS feeds and bookmarks for news sources.
Craig Mod, recently:
“…so glad to be off Twitter, off the networks, off the slurping of the timelines. The mind really does expand, the shoulders relax when you disengage. That din of those places seeps into work. I felt that in reading this other, sloppy essay — oh, this sentence? This sentence is for the algorithm. For the likes. It was a bit sad, is all.”
There is, of course, a tendency to be a little… self-congratulatory about coming off the social internet? Not that I’m accusing Mr. Mod of that, at all. He’s making a good point, too. But I think there’s also some duty to not talk about it like one is newly sober. It’s not a fucking miracle to discover new focus from ceasing to use networked systems that are a dozen years old. Even when I wasn’t actively using Twitter as an engaged speaker, I was using it for news — but the thing about using Twitter for news is that you cannot completely filter out everything that’s not actual news of some kind, and you can’t filter out everything that’s not bullshit clickbait “headlines” and “quotes.”
Someone sent me this article the other day, and here’s the quote we both independently flagged from it:
But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions.
I’m not as up to date on some things as I used to be, but, framing it like that — what am I really missing? Value is not necessarily intrinsic to a digital service (or most other things). We choose to invest these things with value. And sometimes we’re too caught up in the stream to reframe these things and do a proper test on them. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate snapping out of long-term behavioral loops that one allowed to form in the first damn place. One just gets it done and then keeps getting it done until it’s better, I think.
There’s a tech industry term: dogfooding. It means using your own product or service. The inventor of Twitter fucks off to silent tech-free meditation retreats for weeks at a time. How was that not a red flag?
I read digitally on a Kindle for the most part, for reasons of There Is No More Space In This Little House For Books. When I finish reading a book, I download and print off my Kindle highlights, and paste them into a notebook.
I used to take a photo every day, and post it here and/or Instagram. I don’t take a photo a day any more, but, when I do photograph something I want to remember, I use a fun little device I bought in 2020 for this analogue purpose. It’s an Instax mini-printer (UK) (US), which churns out half-size Polaroids that I put into the notebook with sticky dots.
Somewhere around here will be a Weathershot Pro photo. The Instax photos are too small to allow the data chyron to be visible. I like the data on Weathershot photos. I miss having that. Note the portrait size. I no longer need to frame photos for social media, so I can use whatever size I like.
I still use Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a store with very basic “social” functions that can be cut off – it doesn’t distract or engage, nobody can reach you, it just plays and sells you music. Most of the music I buy there is physical, but sometimes it’s digital, and my wishlist is digital. Just writing down URLs in a notebook seems fairly pointless.
I have not yet built the habit of writing about the books I read in the notebook. I just paste in the record of sentences and paragraphs I want to remember. I seem to have this deep-seated muscle-memory-like thing, that writing about books is a thing that happens on a keyboard, and is put out into the public space in case it helps anyone else curate their reading.
All of which is to say, I’m happier in an analogue life, but there are things that only really work for me on a digital level. I liked taking a photo a day, and we tend to forget that digital photography means we no longer burn through expensive physical film and processing to get that photo a day. And also we get as many tries as we want to get a photo we like enough to represent that day. Especially when one is, like me, a terrible photographer who just farts around with a camera because we like it.
So I’ve decided to reactivate LTD, in a limited way. I’m conceiving of it, at this time, as the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.
And now I’m closing the laptop and picking up my notebook, and lighting a fire so that my fingers warm up enough to hold a damn pen properly.
https://warrenellis.ltd/mc/morning-computer-18feb22/
morning computer 18feb22
The wind is booming here, and I want to try something new in the “digital notebook” framework here, using a legacy title. Listening to this while I try the thought out:
I hadn’t noticed this, and will likely forget it again, so I’m making a note: the Bandcamp phone app now allows for queueing and playlists. I have bought (checks site) 1355 records through Bandcamp, so this is a good thing for me, except that I will now spend days trawling through those 1355 records building playlists I will hardly ever use.
Probably the most expensive photograph in the world, apparently. Also, world photos from the month of January 2022 from Foreign Policy. Though I certainly still miss the flow of imagery from Instagram on the desktop, my RSS feeds are still highly visual — and I don’t have the tug of IG on a phone to go look at some nice photos for a few minutes.
Nathen Chen didn’t even take his phone to the Olympics: “so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.” In leisure reading, the Guardian has a short primer for starting with James Joyce – I’ve been dipping back into both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake over the last several months. Ulysses remains beautiful:
Old and secret she had entered from a morning world
And FInnegan’s Wake remains the exhausting, if often lovely, work of a man who should have been beaten to death for compulsive punning:
Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback
(But lovely!)
The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay.
“Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in ‘collective computation’—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.”
Studies suggest that writing systems emerge only when cities emerge. James Joyce said of Ulysses that if the city of Dublin was destroyed tomorrow, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.”
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2202.26 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2430 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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