The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper

From artofmanliness.com/living

(Extract from podcast)

Brett McKay: ... Today in the show, Roland Allen traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zibaldone to the Friendship Book to the modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favour. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show.

Roland Allen: Hi. It’s nice to be here, Brett. Thank you. 

Brett McKay: ...So when did diary keeping, the way we know it today, is the sort of self reflective notebook. When did that come to be a thing?

Roland Allen: Well, this is England’s moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason, around the year 1600, in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it. We don’t really know why. Various theories out there, but I’m not convinced by any of them. I can’t think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which, for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there’s a play by Ben Jonson from 1604 in which one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it, and he’s very humiliated. And everyone’s familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that, but where it came from, we have no idea.

Brett McKay: And you talk about. They kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there?

Roland Allen: I think time, actually the mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago. Imagine in 1900, you don’t have radio, you don’t have any Internet, you don’t have the movies, don’t have any tv. What do you do in the evenings? You read. Okay. You chat, you talk, you sing, you play instruments. But you’ve just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern hemisphere with long, cold winters when it’s dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema, you have the radio. You then have the tv, and then you have the Internet. And every time, it chips away at people’s evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit down and think, okay, I’ll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult to carve out the time.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping a diary has declined in the west because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was during times of war that sales of diaries or journals would spike.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this is, I’m sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event, your world turns upside down. People start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries, because their lives are in turmoil automatically because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to me. So teenagers keep diaries and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think anywhere you’ll see it now, I’m sure in Ukraine, for instance, there’ll be a lot of people keeping diaries who didn’t before.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve seen that in my own life. I was a big journal keeper in high school and then the early part of young adulthood, and then I remember. And if I look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the. Just ruminating over, oh, here’s this problem, here’s this big decision I got to make. I’m feeling anxious about test scores if I’m going to get a job. And then I remember I kind of reached this point in my 30s career established, had a house, kids. I just didn’t really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I, I stopped doing it. But I’ll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life, I will bust out the journal to write.

Roland Allen: Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about this. There’s research that backs this up of. It’s called expressive writing, where you just write, kind of stream of conscious what’s going on in your thoughts and your emotions.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the whole project. You know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down on the page then helps your body heal from physical wounds because it reduces the levels of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation or an injury or a burn more quickly simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now they’ve researched it and researched it and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments. It holds up completely. And this blows my mind every time. If you go for a cancer biopsy, you will heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It’s absolutely baffling to me how powerful it is.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive writing.

Roland Allen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing effective, you don’t have to do it all the time. Like you don’t have to journal every day to get the benefits, basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it.

Roland Allen: Exactly. And when I asked him about that I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? He said, yeah, yeah, when I’m feeling low or when I’ve got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I’m fine.

Brett McKay: He also has some advice on how to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I’ve run into this problem when I’ve kept a journal, when I’m trying to sort through problems, is I end up doing a lot of ruminating, just bellyaching. And it’s not very productive because I’m always asking, why is this happening? And why that one bit of advice? Instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what? Because that’ll give you better, more concrete answers.

Roland Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because it’s often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in general is it forces you because it’s very logical and linear. You have to call in your prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you’re really emotional. So it gets you to think more clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts.

Roland Allen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: You have this fun chapter on bullet journaling and I’m sure our listeners, if they’ve been on Instagram, they’ve seen pictures of people’s really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history of bullet journaling. When did that get started?

Roland Allen: So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously, and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however, sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn’t say art form, but a very sophisticated way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because he had very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until, I think at college, I want to say he started just writing things down in lists in bullet pointed lists. And he did it with everything. And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped him to focus.

It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I’ve got to say, he’s a lovely guy anyway, but he’s also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting way. And he invented the Bullet Journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands probably of people who have gotten his little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it.

Brett McKay: What I think is interesting about the Bullet Journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever you look at them, there’s lists. People just kind of keep it to a list. But sometimes people get really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like Zibaldonis sometimes when you look at the pages.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think, is really powerful. So every time you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think, yeah, I’ve really accomplished something.

Brett McKay: Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking?

Roland Allen: Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: Full of lists. So I’m a great believer in lists and therefore I’m a kind of bullet journaler. But I never had the ADHD type issues, which Ryder did.

Brett McKay: So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future of the notebook?

Roland Allen: I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren’t these things going to take over? But what we’re seeing, I think, is a reaction to it. When people like you, you’re saying that Evernote or whatever doesn’t seem to work for you as well as a commonplace book does. So you’re going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook. That’s quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know, the psychologists all know, that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it’s better in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don’t think that notebooks are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well, with these clever kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they have their place, I think, particularly in the office. But I don’t see the next Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet.

Brett McKay: How do you combine your use of an analogue notebook with digital tools?

Roland Allen: I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I’m bashing out emails for work, because I have a day job as well, but When I’m doing anything creative for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it’s my own creative work, anything I’m writing, I’m writing another book at the moment and thinking about the book after that. It’s all in notebooks to begin, and they’re full of spidergrams and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I’m reading. And I’ve become more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook, basically, or a series of notebooks for every chapter I’m working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they certainly weren’t six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then that time are really haphazard, but now they’re very organized.

Brett McKay: Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all?

Roland Allen: Ha! That’s interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use, the ones I make now are so much better organized. And it’s interesting that I sort of really educated myself on the journey and I found so many examples of really good note taking which I could essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible. The ones I make at the moment now I like a lot. I’m sure I’m going to hold on to them for a long time.

Brett McKay: Well, Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Roland Allen: Well, the book is out in the States. It’s published by Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it’s available everywhere. Your Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you’ve got no other choice. But yeah, so seek it out. The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I’d be really grateful.

Brett McKay: And when you pick up the book at the Barnes and Noble, you got to check out the moleskin section. Get yourself a moleskin too, while you’re at it.

Roland Allen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Roland Allen: Thanks very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Roland Allen. He’s the author of the book The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com also check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. You can find our links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/podcast-1057-the-power-of-the-notebook-the-history-and-practice-of-thinking-on-paper/

100-Year-Old Woman Has Journalled Every Single Day for 90 of Those

From timesnownews.com

Nearly 33,000 entries later, she is still at it. Even childbirth or illness could not keep the centenarian from writing 

A 100-year-old American woman has journalled every day for 90 years. Evie Riski, of Lakota, North Dakota, started recording the daily events of her life on January 1, 1936, a week before her 11th birthday, and hasn’t missed a single day of journaling—she has nearly 33,000 entries to show for it.

Riski’s first diary was a gift from her father, who wanted her to record each day in writing, just like he did. Nine decades later, she has created an expansive time capsule of a lifetime of daily events in her hometown.

The centenarian, who was recently featured by The Washington Post, grew up in Niagara, about 20 minutes from where she lives today. According to her daughter, Michelle Locken, 59, she has seen the world change right before her eyes.

                                                       Riski's diaries chronicle major historical events, like the introduction of electricity

“We didn’t have a TV or a radio or a telephone, and I can tell you exactly when we got electricity—It was 1944,” Riski said.

For her diary, she has always used cursive, even in the post-digital world, where virtual letters have replaced much of what used to be the written word.

“Grandma’s were at our place. Clarence walked from Aunt Alma’s this morning,” reads an excerpt from her formative years.

It’s been seven years since she moved into a retirement home, but Riski’s still at it.

“We often realize too late that time passes quickly, but Evie has found a way to memorialise her life, page by page,” Anna Halvorson, the administrator at Prairie Rose Independent Living, said.

Even childbirth or illness could not keep her from writing. When Riski was admitted to the hospital, she would write on scrap paper. After coming home, she would transcribe her notes into her journal.

“There was really no excuse for me not to write in it,” she said.

Riski’s diaries are all stored in her cedar chest.

“Every night, when I finish writing, I always look back one year to see what I was doing the year before,” she said.

https://www.timesnownews.com/viral/100-year-old-woman-has-journalled-every-single-day-for-90-of-those-nearly-33000-entries-later-she-is-still-at-it-evie-riskis-diary-a-stunning-time-capsule-of-a-lifetime-of-events-article-118199526

Start a dream journal to find out what your dreams really mean

From thedailystar.net

Keeping a dream journal helps track and interpret dreams, improves emotional insight, boosts creativity, and enhances lucid dreaming. Writing consistently strengthens dream recall, aiding self-discovery. Focus on details, remain open-minded, and use sketches for better expression 

Have you ever wondered why we dream and where they come from? Have you ever wondered what to do about the mad yet incredibly realistic dreams you sometimes have? Your dreams often fade away as quickly as you "see" them and the best way to keep track of everything you see in your dreams is by simply maintaining a dream journal.

What is a dream journal?

A dream journal is a simple way to keep a record or a personal note of your dreams by writing them down as soon as you wake up before they fade away from memory. It serves as a tool to help you understand your dreams over time, ultimately revealing a significant pattern or theme that emerges during your sleep.

It is also a common method for people intrigued by the concept of lucid dreaming (when you know you are dreaming while asleep) or those who try analysing their subconscious minds better.

Pretty fascinating, right? Once you get accustomed to keeping a dream journal, you will find yourself in surprising situations while writing down your experience.

                                                                                         Photo: Collected / Lidya Kohen / Pexels

The benefits/purpose of having one

Writing in a dream journal can help you better understand your emotions, improve coping skills, benefit mental health and can even improve sleep!

The details of one's dreams are often incredibly vivid but they begin to slip away within a few minutes right after one wakes up. So, if you fail to write them down, you will not end up remembering much of your dreams at all. Preserving the details, even by just scribbling or jotting some words down from the bigger images in your head will be very helpful for later reflection.

Similarly, if you are stressed out about something and you fully have not been able to acknowledge or process it in reality, you probably will dream it in the form of losing something, feeling trapped, or being chased.

This is an obvious sign to grasp that often you dream of whatever's in your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is also another reason why you should be writing your dreams down as they usually work like an indicator pointing to areas where you are struggling emotionally in life. Hence, you can try allowing yourself to explore unprocessed feelings to gather more emotional insight that you have not yet by beginning to write a dream journal.

Furthermore, our dreams are often wild and strange with the most bizarre combinations or scenarios.

Some people like to use all that wildness and draw creativity out of it. If you are a writer, artist, musician, or any kind of creative person, having a dream journal could be great for deriving creative inspiration. If you want to read more into it, you will also learn about some famous artists and scientists who have credited their dreams for their inventions.

Last but not least, as impossible as it may sound, keeping a dream journal helps you realise and become aware that you are dreaming while in the dream, or, in other words, lucid dreaming.

Although it is something that improves your sense of control over your own dreams, lucid dreaming requires a lot of training, practice, and patience to track a difference or progress. In other words, lucid dreamers take time to reach the point where they fully trigger the lucidity of their dreams. Not only that, but these types of dreamers have a particular intention as to why they dive into their interests.

When you dream, recognising "dream signs" — things that appear in your dreams but would surely be strange in the real world — is one of the first steps to triggering your lucidity. For instance, if you constantly keep dreaming about the colour red whenever something important is about to happen, it's a sign of a sort. In easier terms, these repetitive signs or symbols are what you can track to understand when you are in a dream.

Every benefit you have read about so far is related to how consistent you become with writing a dream journal and how better you get at remembering your dreams. Something even more interesting that adds up to it is how over time your ability to recall and notice more details improves because you have done nothing but "train" your brain to pay attention to your dreams.

Reflect on the meanings of your dream, as understanding it can lead to self-discovery and help you understand your true self.

How to keep a dream journal and what to write about

Keeping a dream journal is quite simple. You can start by placing a diary on your bedside table so that when you wake up, you can immediately jot down whatever you remember. When you write things down, try focusing on the details of it more. Focus on describing the characters, signs, patterns, environments, emotions, and more with as much as possible. Sometimes make an effort to include your thoughts on the dream you are writing about. Most importantly, keep it consistent.

It will become easier for you to maintain a dream journal if you follow these simple tips —

It's always best to have an open mind and be non-judgemental when you write about a dream.

Do not think too much or worry about making a great piece of writing or the quality of it, just go with the flow and express.

If you are experimental with scribbling, sketching, or drawing here and there, it could help you convey the details and depths of your dream that words may not fully capture.

https://www.thedailystar.net/life-living/lifehacks/news/start-dream-journal-find-out-what-your-dreams-really-mean-3816741

Thoughts on the Diversity of Diaries and Recent Drawings

From samanthadionbaker.substack.com

By Samantha Dion Baker

If writing is a form of drawing, then every diary can be seen as a sketchbook. And if all artwork represents a moment in time captured by the artist’s hand, then every sketchbook is, in essence, a diary. This connection between writing and drawing reveals why there is no single right way to keep a visual diary. It’s something I emphasise every time I teach—I’m not here to show students how to draw like me; my way is just one of many.

Recently, this idea became even more personal as I accompanied my son on visits to potential colleges and universities. He’s been strongly encouraged by the schools he wants to attend to keep a sketchbook to show process, ideas and exploration, yet ironically, even with me as his mom, he doesn’t keep one himself. Coaching him on what this practice could mean—beyond what he’s observed me doing his entire life—has been a challenge. He’s resistant, which is understandable. I’ve shown him examples of how sketchbooks can take countless forms and how his process doesn’t have to mirror mine. Still, I’ve come to realize that the push to embrace this practice has to come from within him, not from me.

My fascination with illustrated diaries extends beyond my own work and teaching. When I visit galleries and museums, I find myself drawn to the sketchbooks and preliminary works of artists as much as, if not more than, their finished pieces. There is something deeply inspiring in seeing scribbles, notes, and raw thoughts on paper—especially when accompanied by the artist’s own handwriting. I have a particular love for old handwriting, and the unfinished quality of sketches often feels more intimate and revealing than a polished final piece. A recent visit to the Royal Academy of Art in London reminded me of this as I admired a tiny book of Leonardo da Vinci’s filled with his intricate sketches and thoughts.

Leonardo daVinci’s pocket-sized sketchbook. I so wish I could have flipped through each page!

Despite my experience, I often find myself unsure of how I want my own sketchbooks to look and feel. As a result, each spread ends up wildly different from the next. Perhaps this is why my sketchbooks offer a wide variety of styles—none of them perfectly executed but each capturing a different facet of my artistic journey. This diversity allows me to share examples that, I hope, can inspire people of all skill levels, tastes, and goals to embrace their own way of visual storytelling.

In 2018, I was invited to speak on a panel at the British Library alongside writer and humourist David Sedaris and Helen Fielding, author of the Bridget Jones series. It was an experience I will never forget. Not only was I honoured to be in such talented company, but I loved the deep dive into what a diary can mean and look like. From transforming personal diaries into novels, as Fielding has (which then became a whole cultural phenomenon), to using small personal tidbits to inspire jokes and creative stories, like Sedaris does, each of us shared how diaries shape our creative process. Unfortunately, I can’t share images from the evening because Sedaris has a strict no-photography rule, but here are links to the other artists I spoke on the panel with and shared my work alongside: Kev F. Sutherland (My 1970s Diary) and Patti Keane. One of my favourite David Sedaris books that many people don’t know about is David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium.

Ultimately, illustrated diaries are as unique as the individuals who create them. Whether they are filled with precise sketches, messy scribbles, or detailed notes, they serve as a reflection of personal experiences and perspectives. There is no right or wrong way—only the deeply personal act of capturing life on paper. Here is another nice piece I found on the topic.

On that note, here are some of my recent pages:

The bridge never gets old, so by now I can almost draw it from memory.

My super talented friend, Charlotte Hamilton, hosted a drawing class on Zoom all about Colette, and the page above is what I created during the session.

https://samanthadionbaker.substack.com/p/no-53-thoughts-on-the-diversity-of?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web