I bought a notebook the other day. This decision was prompted by a post The Struggling Writer made last week. I figure since I’ve started weblogging again, and I’d like to start writing more fiction, I should have something on hand to capture those sudden moments of deep insight. I picked up a small plain Moleskine. I’ve used one before, and it was perfect to carry around and write in. Also, it makes you feel like Hemingway.

I’d like to use the notebook to sketch outlines for stories, write rough drafts for posts, and whatever comes to mind. My main problem with notebooks is that writing in them feels so permanent. When I’m writing a rough draft on my computer, or jotting down a note on a scrap piece of paper, I know it’s only going to exist temporarily. If the idea or rough draft is awful, I can delete it or toss it out. If it’s something I want to continue, the rough draft will fade away as I work on it. In a notebook, it’s there for the life of the book. Until that book is lost, those silly scribblings aren’t going anywhere.

This may not seem like a big issue to most people, and it probably isn’t, but as I said in the comments of the mentioned post, I can’t help but think of the notebook being found a hundred years after I’ve become a world-renown author. Even the thought of a notebook filled with my rough drafts and random thoughts is enough to make me want to crawl under a rock and never come out.

For example, this is what I wrote on a scrap piece of paper in my car while waiting for a red light to change last week, thinking it might be used as a weblog post:

Dear middle-aged, overweight guy jogging down the street in spandex biking shorts,
Is wind-resistance really that much of a issue?
Why?
Lose your bike?
Misshapen junk.

Not exactly the deep insight you’d get from Hemingway, is it?