Writers and Their Notebooks

Write Letters in Your Journal Write to your characters, friends, loved ones—dead or alive.

A gratitude journal, which is a place to record what you are thankful for in life. This type of journal nurtures a positive outlook and is a good thing to have when you’re feeling down.

The idea is to record your first impressions of a place as quickly as possible, avoiding the filter of self-consciousness.

A journal can be a veritable treasure chest of thoughts and anecdotes. It is not only a place to collect ideas, though, but a place to practice writing and overcome writer’s block.

As the poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

The notebook is not an end, but a means.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Howard V. Horg, The Essential Kierkegaard (2000)

Lu Chi’s Wen Fu: The Art of Writing.

They’re photographs of my mind and they help me make a kind of sense of my development as a person as well as of my development as a writer.