Notes on Notes on Notes

I have a problem. And like a lot of problems, its external physical manifestation is a sort of diagram of the mental mis-synapsism at its origin point, like a garbage bag turned inside out. In a scattering of physical detritus you can trace the weird little brain spasms that are ultimately to blame.

I buy too many notebooks. Way, way too many notebooks. And I almost never finish any of them. My apartment(which is also my spouse’s apartment) is an easter egg hunt where the eggs are mostly the same couple boring colors and the candy inside is a series of never-iterated-upon ideas or a few pages of fiction that went on to be typed into something else later. And instead of using all the pages available before moving on, the new notebooks keep appearing like the old ones have been throwing off spores.

It’s like having any amount of writing in one notebook tarnishes it or contaminates it somehow so that no new thoughts can be put into it without being unduly infected by the miasma.

But remember how I said this is really about my mind? Of course it is. My curse as a writer, one I’m trying to wrestle to the ground in an agonizingly long battle, is in negotiating that hallowed hall where idea drifts into execution. It’s not that I’m particularly bad at execution itself, I frankly think I’ve gotten pretty good at getting words down and shaping them into something in not a terribly long time. The problem is that I am so easily drawn away by the faerie lights of new ideas, leading me off into the misty woods when I’ve barely started to sit down and turn my prior plan into something concrete.

Like that writer in the Sandman comics whom Dream plagues with ideas that never stop flowing from his head long enough for him to focus on any of them, I have far too many things I want to work on or that I half-work on and don’t give any of them enough time, at a time. I used to have this issue with reading books as well. At any given time I’d be in the middle of six or seven or eight books and so it took me months or years to finish any one.

I’ve knocked my reading habits into a more useful space and I’m trying to do the same with my writing. One of the big steps I’ve taken recently is, uh, well… buying a couple new notebooks. Yeah. Wait, wait! Hear me out. My intent is to have each notebook actually serve a distinct purpose so there’s a clear reason for the splitting of my paper thoughts into these discrete chambers. One of them in particular is my ‘story idea a day’ notebook. It helps me funnel all my weird new ideas into somewhere so that I can stay intent on what I’m already working on.

I don’t know how well any of this will work, but I think it’s a good step. I look forward to that day when I at last scribble something, anything, on a final page.