Last week I found myself in the new-to-me position of talking about being a writer to people studying for postgrad qualifications in creative writing.

This was a very strange experience, and not entirely a comfortable one. Over the last decade or so, I have become fairly comfortable with expounding on matters and/or techniques in which I feel I have some sort of real claim to expertise; indeed, the week before this particular seminar, I gave a sort of introductory overview of futuring aimed at humanities and social science scholars, and felt not at all like an imposter.

Why then was it so weird to be asked to talk about being a writer? After all, I am a writer, by pretty much any set of criteria you might choose to apply: I spend a lot of time arranging words on pages or screens, and I make most of my income thereby.

I have yet to answer the question to my full satisfaction, but I think the issue is twofold: firstly, the category of “writer” is very broad, and the sort of advice that someone studying creative writing wants from a “writer” is (based on my own experiences) rather narrower, i.e. focussed on becoming a novelist. I can speak to the experience of making a living from writing, but that is not a matter of expertise; I cannot speak to becoming a novelist, which more plausibly is.

(For the record: I have written two novels, but no one will ever see them, because apparently I will have to write at least two genuinely execrable novels before I write one worth showing to anyone.)

Secondly, the genre of writers offering writing advice is vast and various, and in it you will find both justification and condemnation of any approach to the practice that you might choose to name. That’s not to denigrate it, exactly; hell knows I read plenty of writers on writing, and still do from time to time. But I also found it profoundly frustrating, and still do.

Perhaps everyone else realises instantly what it took me many years to understand, because it’s almost never stated clearly and plainly: writing advice is profoundly subjective. What works for Stephen King or Margaret Atwood may or may not work for you! Even if it does work for you, following it to the letter will not make you Stephen King or Margaret Atwood!

As such, my own “advice” mostly boiled down to saying “some people do this, some people do that, try both, see what works”. Maybe it’s easier to just confidently tell people how you do it when you’re Stephen King or Margaret Atwood, and people have turned up because they want to know how you, specifically, do it.

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One topic I dwelled upon for a while was the practice of notetaking. This is, for me, distinct from The Practice, but The Practice and notetaking are both distinguished from capital-W Writing, even though both of them can suddenly and unexpectedly become capital-W Writing while you’re doing them. The difference is hard to explain, but it is also incredibly obvious when that transition occurs.

For me, notetaking is primarily—though, as time goes by, less exclusively—a pencil-on-paper thing. I’ve never fully been able to articulate exactly why the habit of writing by hand seemed to work so well for me, once I (re)turned to it. But there’s a paragraph in this bit about notebooks and notetaking at LitHub by one Cristina Henriquez (of whom, I must confess, I have never heard heretofore) which hints at an answer:

Maybe the notebook functioned like a trick. An important trick, it turned out. It was easy to convince myself that no one would ever read what I wrote in a notebook that I stored in a drawer next to my bed. It felt entirely private, not meant for consumption by anyone other than me. After all, what was I going to do? Send my editor a notebook full of handwritten thoughts? And if no one was going to read it, I could write anything—no matter how tangential or weird or out-and-out bad—without fear of judgement.

That just might be it, you know? After all, I learned to write in public, back in the Gilded Age of blogging—and I chose deliberately to do so, too, albeit for reasons that make less sense looking back than they did at the time. Perhaps discovering notebooks was away to (re)discover writing for no one but myself, writing without audience or assessment? Writing—without wanting to put too fine a point on it—without a comment section?

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I also found myself telling the young writers that, while I take a lot of notes, I almost never actually look at them again, with the exception of notes taken while reading books that I know I’m going to have to cite or paraphrase properly.

This seems, even to me, quite insane. What a waste of time and paper! But the act of taking notes is perhaps more of a mnemonic thing thing than an external storage system: the act of taking notes about something somehow makes that something more likely to stick in the mind, and to develop connections to other stuff already in there.

A few people have admitted to me that they work the same way, and it seems we can add Ms. Henriquez to our ranks as well, albeit somewhat reluctantly on her part:

I was reminded again and again that a notebook unfortunately does not have a built-in search function, no command+F, and several times I knew, I just knew, that I had written something down, something completely perfect and utterly irreproducible of course, but beyond being able to visualize that it was in the bottom right corner of a left-facing page, among all the hundreds of bottom right corners of left-facing pages, I somehow could never find it again.

Perhaps this is why notetaking and notebooks are useful: it’s exactly because they will not be read.

Capital-W Writing is writing which, in one way or another, is meant to be read: it’s writing as production. Notetaking, by contrast, is pure process. It matters less what notes you take than that you take them at all.