Inventories
On Notetaking
Last updated: May 25, 2026
Speaking of which, I've found, and continue to find, Mauk’s newsletter, “In which the traveller takes a notebook”, incredibly helpful—especially for journalists & nonfiction writers.
The really crucial part of this system is not the transcribing or categorizing, which may not appeal to other, less compulsive kinds of writers, but the constant presence of the notebook. You must always have your notebook on you. It is your pacemaker. It never leaves your body. If it does, you’ll die. Having the notebook with you, thinking a thought, recognizing (rightly or wrongly) some value in it, writing it in the notebook—these must become the same breathlike action, something that on reflection seems to have taken place in a single frictionless moment. It must require no conscious effort to jot something down in the middle of a conversation, on the subway, during oral surgery—if you are worried about appearing rude, think about all of the situations in which people feel free to look at their phones for lesser purposes—such that becoming a note-taking obsessive requires only practice. You must never think “where is my notebook” much less “which notebook/notes doc/app/file should I put this in” when a thought strikes. The writing must feel like an immediate extension of the mind.
What is surely the defining piece on this theme: Joan Didion's “On Keeping a Notebook”, from her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
More on Didion's approach to notetaking: read this and this from Jillian Hess’ excellent newsletter.
When Diary-Keeping Gets in the Way of Living, Sarah Manguso—author of one of my favourite books, Ongoingness.
I wasn’t trying to predict the future or find any order in the day-after-dayness, but I was trying to just make sense in the incredibly complex interactions that you have with people all day long. Every exchange that I had with another person, everything that I observed, every little throwaway moment I had on the subway observing this and that, the denseness of experience just seemed unmanageable without writing it down. After I wrote it down, it was a great relief to just have at least made that much sense of it in translating it into prose. So I guess it was a low level constant anxiety attended by a simultaneous gentle relief. But it was a long time before that anxiety dissipated almost entirely, which is where I am now.
Life Writing, Zadie Smith, on being incapable of writing a diary. If she did it her way, “the writing of the life will take longer than the living of it”.
I realise I don’t want any record of my days. [...]
I wonder if it isn’t obliquely connected to the way I write my fiction, in which, say, a doormat in an apartment I lived in years ago will reappear, just as it once was, that exact doormat, same warp and weft, and yet I can’t say when exactly I lived there, who I was dating or even if my own father was alive or dead at the time. Perhaps the first kind of non-memory system—the one that can’t retain dates or significant events—allows the other kind of memory system to operate, the absence of the first making space for the second, clearing a path for that whatever-it-is which seems to dart through my mind like a shy nocturnal animal, dragging back strange items like doormats, a single wilted peony, or a beloved strawberry sticker, not seen since 1986, but still shaped like a strawberry and scented like one, too.
“Catching Thoughts, Gathering Ideas” by Garth Greenwell on the different notebooks he uses for different purposes: a master notebook, a pocket notebook, and a private journal. On his master notebook:
The first thing I do is number the pages. (I number each two-page spread; if I need to specify recto or verso later I’ll mark one a and the other b.) I realize this is very Notebook 101, but it took me a long time to realize how helpful it is to keep an index page at the start of a notebook. Even more helpful: a double index (you can see it above). Originally these notebooks were also calendars / planners, which I loved—having a paper calendar helped me stay away from my phone—and I used the left hand column to mark the pages dedicated to that. [...]
The right hand index column is for everything not related to scheduling or time tracking: meeting notes (I used to scribble these down on scraps of paper, which I then just shoved in a desk drawer; it’s very helpful to have them between covers), ideas for classes, outlines for books that will probably never be written, brainstorming and outlining for essays and Substacks.
Years ago, I heard Anne Carson speak about her notebooks, and she explained her reasoning for not keeping separate notebooks for scholarship and poetry: she liked to have everything mixed together, so it could cross-pollinate. I do like to have project-specific notebooks, but I’ve always remembered Carson’s remarks, and this notebook is structured (or not structured) to let everything mix together.
Greenwell also has another great letter about annotating books, and exporting them to a notebook, then a computer. It’s far too labour-intensive for me, but it sounds meaningful!
“how i'm taking notes (for now)” by Brandon Taylor is relevant for annotating books as you read, and though it doesn't introduce a new approach—just underline and write in the margins, then ‘export’ the relevant quotes and your thoughts to a notebook—it does make a point about what would seem to be the impracticability of this for most.
And some people were like, “Does it slow you down?” But I feel like they are asking a question without really knowing what they are asking. Does it slow down what? The notetaking? The reading? Whatever is downstream of those activities for you? Why is speed being taken as some sort of de facto virtue? We know that a lot of things that are done quickly can also be shit. Slowly made things can also be shit. Speed is not really a useful in determining quality or efficacy unless what you are after is speed. [...]
This notetaking technique obviously won’t work if you are trying to prepare a text five minutes before class? But also… why would you think that this technique would work for you if you are trying to prepare a text five minutes before class? Like, a productive notetaking technique is a technique that produces results suitable to your uses—be it writing an essay, a novel, a book, a memo, etc, whatever—and sometimes that suitability will reflect time and speed, sure. But not always. A useful notetaking strategy is not always about speed. I recognize that we live in a capitalist hellscape and the language of commodification has rotted all of our minds and stolen our souls, sure. But that doesn’t mean that we should or need to concede to its logic at every turn.
Admittedly, lack of time is the reason why I only do the underlining and writing in the margins part and not the ‘export‘ part. I don't write full notes in the margins, just something that I hope will jog my memory if I return to the book again in the future. Brandon Taylor also shared that, before he started doing serious literary criticism, he only used to underline and write 'lol gay' in the margins, which made me laugh. My own version of this is ‘haha!’ 😆
A Surprisingly Simple Way to Remember Everything You Read, Sabrina Nesbitt:
Finishing certain books can be difficult, yes. Finding time is difficult. Remaining disciplined and moving past the moments of exhaustion and defeat by a seemingly insurmountable year is difficult. But none of that difficulty matters if the reading dissolves the moment it is completed.
The real challenge is memory.
Not in the shallow “will this be on the test?” memory. But the memory that builds an internal, deep knowledge, where books and authors sit in a room together in my head and dialogue about themes and form. And, this room being a room that I have constant access to. Where a passage from an bildungsroman in February floats into my head when reading a fantasy novel in October.
—e.d.