Writers’ habits don’t just emerge. We cultivate them—they are first aspirational, and then superstitious. If something works once, we hope it will work again. Years ago, in graduate school, I noticed how certain poet friends would casually, but with intent, remove a small notebook from their jacket pocket or bag and jot something down. I noticed it the way you notice how someone smokes—the glamour in the gesture, and how it is referential; it aligns one with a tradition. I started keeping notebooks so I could be a writer who keeps a notebook.

To be honest, I didn’t find that a very promising beginning to this article by Elisa Gabbert, published at Catapault. Someone started keeping a notebook just because it seemed glamorous? But the essay goes on to include some interesting observations about notebook-keeping.

A few pages later: “A journal isn’t about the self, but for it.” Notebooks other the self, exoticize it. This sentiment got translated into a Judy poem: “When I read old entries in my journal, / it’s easy to imagine they were written / by someone else, someone / I’ve grown fond of.”

The jottings have started to feel foreign to me, unfamiliar, but the notebook isn’t old enough for me to feel fondly toward my thoughts. I want more remove, as much as I have on my high-school calculus tests (how could I have known those things?), philosophy papers I wrote in college. I have no memory of writing the sentences, the arguments, but they sound like me. I used to proudly tell people that I don’t change much, but I’m no longer sure that it’s something to be proud of.

In his recent memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, Gary Indiana suggests that reading old notebooks keeps him humble: “If you note things as chaotically as I do, eventually you find that you’ve already written down, months or years earlier, any ‘new’ idea that comes to your mind: on the whole, a deflating discovery.”

Read the whole essay: Personal Data: Notes on Keeping a Notebook