About the author

Conrad Williams is the author of the novels Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable and Blonde on a Stick; the novellas Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms and Rain and a collection of short fiction, Use Once then Destroy. He lives in Manchester, UK.

All content on this site is © Conrad Williams.

Friday 12 March 2010

Day Four... Notebook nutcase

1160 words.

I love a handsome notebook. Often I go out and forget to take one with me and of course that means I'll be clouted by an idea and have to nip into the newsagent to buy a new one. But it won't be a nice one. It'll be what you'd expect for 99p. So I use it once and it goes in the notebook drawer. With about forty or fifty other notebooks. I have nice notebooks too. Whenever I travel abroad, I have to buy a new notebook from the country I'm visiting. What I'm trying to say is that I have too many notebooks. I have enough blank pages to last me a lifetime of notes. And I fail, spectacularly, to restrict one notebook to one project. So by the time it comes to write up a particular project, I have to spend several decades flipping through pages in various notebooks to find relevant notes. I try to be organised. Really, I do. I have a filing cabinet with printed labels that say 'Stationery' and 'Ideas' and 'Notebooks' on the drawers. The 'Notebooks' drawer is full.

I'm not the only writer who does this, am I?

2 comments:

Tessa said...

I keep my notebooks in chronological order of use, and that's as far as organisation goes. They're not supposed to be neat creatures.

How can you separate ideas from notebooks anyway?

Conrad said...

That's more organisation than me. Chronological order. What a great idea. What about accessing the stuff I need, though? Do I need to index everything? That would take months. Another displacement technique to keep in mind...