On the Keeping of Notebooks
You may know that the Venn diagram of writers and Romantics is a circle. If you don’t, that’s because I just invented it.
The urge to write something down is inherent to the romantic. By this, I don’t mean that everyone in this group exudes delight, idealism, or even particularly good attitudes most of the time. In fact, some of the greatest writers were self-proclaimed cynics.
Cynics, yes—but with an innate talent for noticing, for feeling. They’re equipped with a desire to understand, a wish to capture, stories to tell. It’s a wonder I became a journalist, huh? It’s an annoying ailment, really, and often comes with a predisposition to malcontent and melancholy. I’m 25 and still haven’t figured out whether giving in to the compulsion to write alleviates or exacerbates these feelings. But still I write. It’s compulsory for people like me.
My beloved late idol Joan Didion never explicitly called herself a cynic, but read her writing and you’ll find heavy servings of skepticism and sharp disillusionment. Joan was a writer first and foremost, but she was also a journalist. Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album both carry a deep disorientation—an uneasiness that reflects not only the state of the nation but also the splintering of personal and collective identity at the time. To write about a culture fragmented, unraveled, and chaotic, Joan had to be immersed in it.
Sounds like a true journalist to me.
In her essay On Keeping a Notebook, Joan writes about the immense value of, well—keeping a notebook. Different from diaries, notebooks are a different beast entirely. Why? Because they’re personal, messy, and seemingly irrational accounts of some version of the truth.
She wrote that writing, for her, came from “some thrifty virtue derived from preserving everything observed.”
“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I’m only going through the motions of doing what I’m supposed to do—which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be: a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.”
See? Romantic.
But as a journalist, Joan had a specific way of looking at the world; it was a kind of sharp detachment that she said felt enabled her to peel back the layers of what everyone else was pretending to see. A lot of her work is about the gap between appearances and the unsettling realities underneath, especially in the chaotic cultural landscape of the '60s and '70s. It’s not that she’s outright cynical—it’s more that she’s always questioning, always digging. More often than not, she lands in the in-between fragments.
I can’t help but wonder if her notebooks—offering respite, a place to let her hair freaking hair down are what helped her stay sane, keep her course.
“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a note-book. Our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I." We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
To write not to uncover the truth of a thing, but to capture the feeling of it, how it feels to the writer. To understand the world, one’s relation to it, one’s feelings about it.
These are the special and glorious byproducts of writing I come by less and less now that I write for money, for a living.
Maybe this is what they mean when they say it’s not always wise to make your passion your career.
I write for assignments—and, more frankly, for money.
Truth be told, young Hannah would’ve been thrilled to hear that.
I’ve been writing for a long time, starting younger than most. Mostly make-believe stories on my dad’s computer, but there were tons of them—stories, stories, stories. So, when I went to university to study English, it wasn’t much of a surprise. I wrote plenty then, too, but it was more analysis and critique papers. Less imagination, less fun. When I returned for my Master’s in Journalism, it felt different—I was finally picking the stories I wanted to write, the ones I wanted to unearth and amplify. Stories that mattered.
But then, of course, burnout set in. I graduated, and then the country’s political climate took an even bigger shit then I think anyone saw coming. Which of course has become the focus for many of my stories today.
At some point—exactly when, I’m not sure—I stopped believing I’d ever write for fun again, aside from the stream-of-consciousness scribbles in my notebook, prompted by my therapist. That phase dragged on for a while.
Until now. I hope! Fingers crossed. I’m hoping that with this blog-slash-digital-notebook of mine, I can maybe begin to heal my relationship to
Thanks for being here–if you are here at all, that is. Not that it matters–this is for me and me alone, after all–but it is appreciated.