So you think you can write
11 Jan 2011 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kangeikoWe all love opening up beautiful new notebooks, especially if it's some sort of significant calendar event - a birthday, the New Year, a major milestone in our lives. I know that I am facing the impending doom of turning thirty this year with a strange ambivalence... and rather a lot of stationery.
The thing is, I think maybe I have too much of it. Every time I think I need a fresh start, I pop off to the shops and come back with a couple of cloth-bound, leather-bound, hand-stitched volumes of over-priced tat. It's especially bad during the sales, when, let's face it, the dreaded spectre of "but stationary never goes out of style!" rears its ugly head when you end up a little lost in Selfridges and staring, sweaty-palmed, at the discounted Smythson display. The thing about Smythson is, they're never going to discount to a point to make an impulse purchase justifiable to anyone other then Samantha Cameron (who used to be a designer there). To the rest of the hoi polloi, the discounted section is merely a place to gnash your teeth that, even at this stage in your life, you can't afford a bloody notebook.
So you do what every other bugger does, and trek down to Paperchase.
I do sometimes make a detour to the local art shop (I tell myself I'm supporting the local shops and thus the economy). They stock Paper Blanks notebooks. Paper Blanks are much better than the standard Paperchase ringbound rubbish, with snazzy designs inspired by famous artists, events or shiny bits of stuff. I am particularly fond of one that purports to embody the spirit of feminism (for those curious, the spirit of feminism is purple and green and red spangle, with a triangular magnetic clasp). I assume that if I were to write anything un-feminist in it, the notebook would spontaneously explode.
It's not just curiously presciptive notebooks that are the problem. My brother - knowing my love of stationery - gave me a planner for Christmas. It's a gorgeous thing, Moleskine and perfect. Of course, I already have a rather hefty and expensive Filofax I lug everywhere, but the planner actually looked like it might be useful. As it's a page-a-day, I decided I would write a journal entry every day, and use it as inspiration rather than an organisational tool. Two pages into January I had a panic attack over the imappropriateness of using a planner as a journal and had to rip the pages out and glue them carefully into the back pages of my over-old, over-filled, over-tired journal. I now have a planner sans January 1st and 2nd, but as they were a Saturday and a Sunday, I have chosen to start the year with the first Monday in January. If you can't work with your OCD, work around it.
Encumbered as I am with such strict rules for writing - feminist thought in the feminist-themed notebook, work-thought in the planner, travel memories in the map-notebook - it's becoming a little difficult to keep so many journals on the go at once. The inevitable decline is happening: all are spiralling off into nonsense. I tried to tell myself that I was pulling a Lessing, but it's no good, it's just gibberish. The only thing that makes sense is my writing journal, and that's just because it's meant to be full of rubbish.
This is the fundamental problem with beautiful stationery: nothing I ever write will ever feel good enough to be written inside it. And why should it be? Surely the process of writing something insightful and witty and amazing is a long and tortuous one. At least I hope it is; I don't think I could live with myself if people woke up and vomited forth Pulitzer-worthy work without even a spell-check. I don't pretend that anything I write is especially amazing, but I do sometimes feel a sense of satisfaction of having achieved what I set out to achieve, however modest my ambitious may have been. That's ok in story format, and sometimes in a blog entry, but it feels a little ridiculous in a journal. Who, exactly, am I writing for? The stuff I put in there is banal enough to make any potential snoop close the cover with a hasty yawn and a lingering need for sticking the telly on. I don't live in my own head half the time, and if the world was really yearning to read about my amazing exploits in Imaginary Land where things go well at work and I ride home on the back of an alligator... well, they're going to be disappointed, because I mostly just complain about my boss, the weather, and my inability to finish a sentence properly.
The fundamental purpose of a journal is to be read by one person's eyes: your own. The most important thing, then, is not the swishiness of the cover, but my ability to write legibly at speed. It doesn't really matter if I start sentences with prepositions, or split infinitives. It doesn't matter if I can't spell "occurred" (where does that second 'r' come from? Why is it there?) or if I list two things and can't think of a third. That sort of finesse only matters if you're intending to have someone stumble across your private journal long after you're dead and spend a great deal of time and money sorting through your papers and carefully collating them into a volume of unsurpassed wit and exhuberance.
But they won't. Because no-one keeps a paper journal anymore.
If anyone is going to read my collective works after I snuff it, chances are, they're going to end up reading my LJ or DW. This will give them a somewhat biased, edited and polished version of events, interspersed with the odd stab at an artistic endeavour (porn). Do I really want to be remembred as "that girl who wrote all those fics, and then bought it by falling into an active volcano, the dozy cow"? Do I have a choice?
The more I think about my digital footprint, the more I am seized with the urge to hire some technologically competent people and get them to erase all trace of me online. That way, when I eventually fall into that active volcano, people will have no choice but to dig through the boxes of journals with beautiful leather and fabric covers, opening up those crisp, heavy pages to read... complete and utter twaddle.
Bollocks to that. Where's the recycling bank?
The thing is, I think maybe I have too much of it. Every time I think I need a fresh start, I pop off to the shops and come back with a couple of cloth-bound, leather-bound, hand-stitched volumes of over-priced tat. It's especially bad during the sales, when, let's face it, the dreaded spectre of "but stationary never goes out of style!" rears its ugly head when you end up a little lost in Selfridges and staring, sweaty-palmed, at the discounted Smythson display. The thing about Smythson is, they're never going to discount to a point to make an impulse purchase justifiable to anyone other then Samantha Cameron (who used to be a designer there). To the rest of the hoi polloi, the discounted section is merely a place to gnash your teeth that, even at this stage in your life, you can't afford a bloody notebook.
So you do what every other bugger does, and trek down to Paperchase.
I do sometimes make a detour to the local art shop (I tell myself I'm supporting the local shops and thus the economy). They stock Paper Blanks notebooks. Paper Blanks are much better than the standard Paperchase ringbound rubbish, with snazzy designs inspired by famous artists, events or shiny bits of stuff. I am particularly fond of one that purports to embody the spirit of feminism (for those curious, the spirit of feminism is purple and green and red spangle, with a triangular magnetic clasp). I assume that if I were to write anything un-feminist in it, the notebook would spontaneously explode.
It's not just curiously presciptive notebooks that are the problem. My brother - knowing my love of stationery - gave me a planner for Christmas. It's a gorgeous thing, Moleskine and perfect. Of course, I already have a rather hefty and expensive Filofax I lug everywhere, but the planner actually looked like it might be useful. As it's a page-a-day, I decided I would write a journal entry every day, and use it as inspiration rather than an organisational tool. Two pages into January I had a panic attack over the imappropriateness of using a planner as a journal and had to rip the pages out and glue them carefully into the back pages of my over-old, over-filled, over-tired journal. I now have a planner sans January 1st and 2nd, but as they were a Saturday and a Sunday, I have chosen to start the year with the first Monday in January. If you can't work with your OCD, work around it.
Encumbered as I am with such strict rules for writing - feminist thought in the feminist-themed notebook, work-thought in the planner, travel memories in the map-notebook - it's becoming a little difficult to keep so many journals on the go at once. The inevitable decline is happening: all are spiralling off into nonsense. I tried to tell myself that I was pulling a Lessing, but it's no good, it's just gibberish. The only thing that makes sense is my writing journal, and that's just because it's meant to be full of rubbish.
This is the fundamental problem with beautiful stationery: nothing I ever write will ever feel good enough to be written inside it. And why should it be? Surely the process of writing something insightful and witty and amazing is a long and tortuous one. At least I hope it is; I don't think I could live with myself if people woke up and vomited forth Pulitzer-worthy work without even a spell-check. I don't pretend that anything I write is especially amazing, but I do sometimes feel a sense of satisfaction of having achieved what I set out to achieve, however modest my ambitious may have been. That's ok in story format, and sometimes in a blog entry, but it feels a little ridiculous in a journal. Who, exactly, am I writing for? The stuff I put in there is banal enough to make any potential snoop close the cover with a hasty yawn and a lingering need for sticking the telly on. I don't live in my own head half the time, and if the world was really yearning to read about my amazing exploits in Imaginary Land where things go well at work and I ride home on the back of an alligator... well, they're going to be disappointed, because I mostly just complain about my boss, the weather, and my inability to finish a sentence properly.
The fundamental purpose of a journal is to be read by one person's eyes: your own. The most important thing, then, is not the swishiness of the cover, but my ability to write legibly at speed. It doesn't really matter if I start sentences with prepositions, or split infinitives. It doesn't matter if I can't spell "occurred" (where does that second 'r' come from? Why is it there?) or if I list two things and can't think of a third. That sort of finesse only matters if you're intending to have someone stumble across your private journal long after you're dead and spend a great deal of time and money sorting through your papers and carefully collating them into a volume of unsurpassed wit and exhuberance.
But they won't. Because no-one keeps a paper journal anymore.
If anyone is going to read my collective works after I snuff it, chances are, they're going to end up reading my LJ or DW. This will give them a somewhat biased, edited and polished version of events, interspersed with the odd stab at an artistic endeavour (porn). Do I really want to be remembred as "that girl who wrote all those fics, and then bought it by falling into an active volcano, the dozy cow"? Do I have a choice?
The more I think about my digital footprint, the more I am seized with the urge to hire some technologically competent people and get them to erase all trace of me online. That way, when I eventually fall into that active volcano, people will have no choice but to dig through the boxes of journals with beautiful leather and fabric covers, opening up those crisp, heavy pages to read... complete and utter twaddle.
Bollocks to that. Where's the recycling bank?