I've started and abandoned maybe fifteen notebooks. The pattern was the same every time: buy something that looked like you'd want to write in it, fill the first few pages with a mixture of ambition and observation, then stop. The blank pages didn't feel like possibility after that. They felt like evidence.
This one is different. It's a cheap Muji softcover, and I've had it for nearly a year. I write in it most mornings, not about anything particular. Mostly it's a warm-up: what I'm thinking about, what's bothering me, what happened yesterday that I hadn't finished processing.
I don't reread it much. The writing isn't the point, or it is, but only in the moment. When I've gone back through old entries looking for something I half-remembered writing, it reads like someone else's anxious email. The value is in the act, not the archive.
Write it down and it either resolves into something manageable, or turns out to be nothing, which is usually the answer.
I think more clearly after writing than before it. The writing doesn't surface brilliant thoughts. It forces a kind of order that thinking alone doesn't. You can hold a half-formed worry in your head for days. Write it down and it either resolves into something manageable, or turns out to be nothing.
The cheap notebook helps. A beautiful leather one would feel like a commitment, something to live up to. This one is disposable, which makes it easier to write badly in it, and writing badly in it is the only way I write in it at all.