One of the one frustrating experiences of learning occurs when the great/unusual/ wacky/surprising question that occurred to you in the middle of some activity disappears over the horizon as soon as you try to recapture it. Bye bye inspiration!
It is also undermining to feel that your ideas remain unvoiced. A note-book serves as a brilliant means of preserving the various processes of your thinking and shows how you arrive at ideas. What an invaluable and creative way of not only knowing your subject better but also of course yourself! Pictures, jottings, diagrams, mind maps, slogans..everything is possible…make sure the note-book fits your life style?
Great questions about size? Pocket? handbag, Discreet? Plain paper, Ruled?
‘She gather me…the pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know…a friend of your mind.’ ( Toni Morrison, Beloved)
1) Begin your notebook personally with your own prejudices, expectations, thoughts. Remember that a note-book is a reflective reading journey lasting months or years and it must really begin somewhere and move with you ‘elsewhere’.
2) A notebook is often the best place to voice your own voice: to speak the unspeakable. Never try to closet these ideas behind an impersonal voice. Authenticity really really works in a reflective notebook. Keats, Mansfield, Woolf all kept notebooks. they all played with ideas and challenges.
3) If you notice a recurring interest or obsession in the journal then invest in it. See it through. Why does this theme haunt you? Discovering our own preocupations is illuminating and often liberating: intellectually as well as personally.
4) Look at pivotal moments in your thinking. Why did you change this reaction/why did it remain?
5) Dare more! Critical cowardice has no place in a reflective notebook. Go with the flow. Look what happened to Lot’s wife wehn she looked back!
6) Spontaneity is great. It nurtures creativity and inspiration. It leads you into unusual pastures and liberates tired and ‘safe’ thinking.
‘I genuinely don’t know what I made up and what was reality.It’s become a story to me.’ ( Jeanette Winterson)