I submitted a couple of poems to the Peterborough True Voices Anthology being developed by final year English students at University Centre Peterborough, and they selected one of them to appear in The Moment Magazine Peterborough to help promote the coming pub date in June. I’m super happy; they picked a poem I wrote about going to my first Posh match that really means a lot to me.
You can read it at the link below. There’s some other preview pieces from the True Voices anthology as well. I’ll keep you up to date; I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing!
You’re at a dinner party (or some other similarly sophisticated get-together). You’ve had a couple of drinks, you’ve finally loosened up, you’ve forgotten that you spent Friday afternoon showing Craig from marketing how to read a forwarded email and that you’re going to have to spend a good chunk of Monday doing it too. You wanted to be an artist. You’ve got the humanities degree to prove it.
The conversation takes its turns. Your friends tell you about a conference they recently attended in San Francisco, opportunities they might take to develop a game in Toronto, leadership vacancies.
You tell them about Craig.
Of course, they discuss the housing market.
Finally the conversation moves towards something you might know about; culture. Someone mentions having seen a play, or read a novel, or seen a film adapted from a book. And you’ve read it, you’ve seen it. The book was better.
They ask you what you thought of it.
“Umm, it was good. I really enjoyed it. I need to read the rest of their work.”
Trenchant insight right there.
Me writing this blog post
I’ve read a bunch of classics and can remember only bits and pieces of them.
Take Moby Dick for example. I remember being weirded out by the continual shifts in and out of it being formatted like a play script. I remember the chapter on making rope. I remember… this bit:
Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and can remember only two things; the image of him straining to read by a bit of dull light filtering down a prison hallway, and his advice on preventing burglary:
A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. ‘It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
James Joyce is one of my favourite writers and I can’t remember much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man except for the classic moo-cow opening and the bit about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.
I realised what I hadn’t been doing was taking proper notes.
Take a look at my copy of Ulysses for example, loads of notes, and it’s easily the novel I know best. Taking notes helps you think and helps you remember, and there’s loads of different ways to do it.
The copy of Ulysses I used while I was an undergraduate.
I journal, and some of my thoughts on my reading go in there. I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet where I put a one or two sentence review of every book I finish. This blog plays a part in me actually remember my reading and making some use of it, too. I’ve been endeavouring to keep more personal notes and to make them useful and share them.
I’ve also started keeping a commonplace book.
I’ve known about them for a long time, but in my recent drive to just take more notes in general, I decided to give it a go. I came across the idea again while researching Zettelkasten, which I ended up not trying because it just looks like too much work, whereas copying down the odd quote I found interesting seemed manageable.
Some Things I Enjoy about Keeping a Commonplace Book
It makes me feel like I’m back at uni, a bit. Anything that makes you feel ten years younger is worth doing.
It did increase my comprehension and my recall. I tried my best to treat my books the way C.S. Lewis suggests; like toys. Flipping back through them at the end to look for quotes I wanted to copy down helped me recall what I’d read and cement it.
The copying down fixed the ideas further, and also acted a little bit like a gym for my fingers. Hunter S. Thompson said he learned a lot about writing by literally copying out great works of literature to see what it felt like to copy those words down, to feel them being written by his own fingers. Keeping a commonplace book is microdosing this effect without having to type out The Great Gatsby.
It’s a great way to form connections and stockpile material for blog posts.
Some Things I Wish I’d Known about Keeping a Commonplace Book
Leave a few pages at the start for a table of contents. Leafing through the whole thing to find notes on a particular book might increase your memory of what you’ve copied overall (see my point above in “Some Things I Enjoy…”), but in the moment it it just frustrating. You want that quote for a blog post. You need that quote for a blog post. Your blog post won’t be complete unless you find that bit you copied from Moby Dick where he talks about how much he loves squeezing sperm.
Don’t be overzealous. I remember my first year of uni – people would take way too many notes, me included, up to and including writing down everything the lecturer said verbatim. I think the first book I took notes from for my commonplace was The Winds Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose (see my reviews here and here). You know what le Guin is like. I underlined every other sentence and then copied it all down dutifully. This lead to…
…me feeling bad about finishing books, because I’d then have a load of work to do. I know, right? Do yourself a favour and don’t introduce any more friction into your reading experience than absolutely necessary. Selecting what bits are resonating with you and that you want to remember is an important part of the process.
To be entirely truthful with you, keeping a commonplace book hasn’t been a priority for me the last few months. I’ve finished five or six books without worrying about copying any quotes down. I think the most useful part of the exercise might actually be taking the time to have a flick through a book when you’ve finished it, just to refresh bits of it in your memory while it’s still recent.
This is a particularly good tip for e-books, I think. (I read this somewhere and can’t remember where, sorry.) Part of the reason we have an easier time recalling information from printed text as opposed to reading on a screen is that printed text engages our spatial and tactile memory. You remember a quote saying a certain thing, but you also remember it being in a footnote on the bottom right of a page, and not having many pages left in your right hand. That can be lost with an e-book, but you can re-engage that sense by taking time to flip through an e-book before reading it in earnest, making sure you highlight and create notes, and then going back through checking those highlights and notes when you finish. (Again, I read a post to this effect somewhere and now cannot find it, because, as you see, while I am engaged in improving my note-taking practise, it isn’t perfect. If you recognise this advice as your advice, please let me know and I’ll credit you.)
Have you tried keeping a commonplace book yourself? Do you have any advice? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Please do say in the comments!
Recently I came across a great idea that I’ve been talking about with everybody who’ll listen – Scott Hanselman’s exhortation to not waste your key strokes.
I love this idea. It speaks to my own impulse to write so I leave something of myself behind. It isn’t purely selfish, as the idea is that if you know something, and you’re in a position where you’re going to tell someone about it, it’s better to work that knowledge into a shareable form that’s accessible while you’re not in the building and then send them the link, rather than putting it in one email to one person. Thus advances humanity.
Think about the amount of times a Reddit comment from ten years ago has saved your ass. And then think about the times you’ve been screwed at work because the only person who can answer your question just went home, or quit, or is on holiday.
Or died.
Single points of failure really suck.
I’d already kinda come to a similar conclusion myself. I’ve had this blog for over ten years now and part of the reason I started it was to share some knowledge while it was still fresh in my brain. I remembered how impenetrable Ulysses was before I finally made some progress and decided to write my undergrad thesis on it. I didn’t want that knowledge to sit on a shelf somewhere, so I whipped it up as accessibly as I could and turned it into this blogpost. Ditto my post on academic essay writing; a lot of my friends were asking me for advice around that time, so I thought why not do a post.
(I am not an expert, I’ve just shared what I know, whatever that is).
And I remember hearing about the Sims reading list and not being able to find an easy copy of it. I ended up finding a photograph someone had taken of a page in the manual and posted to Twitter. It definitely wasn’t on Goodreads back then like it is now. Still, in the spirit of sharing, I transcribed it and threw it up on my blog. It got linked to under a Super Bunnyhop video which is like, a career highlight for me. A few other people have found it since and hopefully it’s been of use to them.
I try take and share notes at work as often as I can. I take the notes for my own benefit (if you think your memory is flawless you’ve just forgotten how bad your memory is). But if I’ve got them, I might as well share them. And I work in a sector where outcomes aren’t always obvious; being able to demonstrate change is really important. A trail of notes helps me do that, and sharing the notes means my colleagues can spot patterns that have eluded me.
Then there’s my D&D campaign journal. We’re a few sessions in and I’m already finding the notes from earlier sessions invaluable. It’s nice to know the name of the blacksmith, and keep track of what your character owes their party. And it’s up on a blog, so other people in the group can access it as they please. And if anyone else finds it entertaining, then great!
I used to really love sites like GameFAQs and Everything2, and I was really sad that I didn’t have the skill or the knowledge base to contribute to places like that at the time. I’m glad I’ve found someone who has put a name to this impulse.
So yeah, don’t waste your keystrokes! Writing what you know is the first thing people tell you for a reason, but consider what you know that you could share, for the betterment of humanity and our collective knowledge, the way the internet was supposed to be.
I do, but not always. I tend to want to listen to an album, and an album is a commitment, so choosing an album can get in the way if I’ve had an idea and need to start getting it down right away. I struggled to start this piece because I wanted to try write with music in the background and I couldn’t decide what.
I settled on Dopesmoker, because I haven’t listened to it in a while and there aren’t too many words in it.
I struggle trying to write and listening to something with a lot of meaning in it that my brain is trying to decipher, willingly or not. It’s dangerously close to multitasking, and you can’t really multitask, only switch between tasks, and at a cost.
I wouldn’t have thought about this, except that I’ve done things like practise scales on the guitar while watching YouTube, which does kinda work, at least for muscle memory. I’m sure there’s someone out there upset I wasn’t paying proper attention to the intervals.
(It’s me, who is terrible at identifying intervals, lamenting my past self. I’m the one who is upset.)
Oh YouTube, something I absolutely cannot do while I write. I tell myself I can, and then I hear an interesting bit and want to see the context, and bam, I’ve alt-tabbed. I can clearly see the insidious influence that Facebook or Twitter have had on me, but I’m starting to think YouTube has hooked me deeply in a way I never expected.
Maybe if I was a painter, or a sculptor, I’d have an easier time listening to music while I work, the contexts not clashing as much. I don’t really have any visual art as part of my overall creative practise and I probably should.
My most vivid memory of drawing: an art class in year 8 (I was about 13). The homework? To draw a picture of your house. So I did, I got out a ruler, and I planned it out, all straight lines and right angles, just like my house actually was.
The feedback was one sentence.
“Do not use a ruler.”
What can I say, I was using methods I thought would best capture the form I saw. I wonder how many other kids broke out a ruler. Probably a lot. I think of myself as a reasonably creative person but apart from this anecdote and a memory of an excited discussion about Metal Gear Solid 3 with a classmate who’d picked up a copy before me, I have almost no recollection of these classes.
Nothing highlights my personal growth to me more than how I feel when I think of all the free, state-mandated education I had access to and didn’t take full advantage of.
Sometimes I’ll grab a notebook and sit by the backdoor in my kitchen and write. I’ll leave the back window open so I can hear the birds, wind, trees, children, my cat meowing to be let in. I’d leave the door open, but there’s a neighbourhood cat who keeps trying to get into our house. We love him, but he isn’t our cat.
There’s a passage in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where she describes how she liked to write to the sounds and the rhythm of Paris around her. She’d drive to a busy, central street somewhere in Montmarte, crack the window a bit, and proceed to get out her notebook and write.
“She was much influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles. She also liked them to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.”
Similar to what people try and do in coffee shops I suppose, although every time I try it I just end up daydreaming and people watching – which can be useful to the work in general, but it is emphatically Not Writing.
The urban environment tends to be most fruitful for my writing when I’m walking through it, not sitting in it.
Maybe if I was a luthier, I’d be able to listen to podcasts while I worked, the way Ted Woodford does.
I can’t recommend Ted Woodford’s channel highly enough, by the way, if you have any interest at all in stringed instruments.
YouTube might suck up a lot of my attention, but it’s also given me a window into the lives of people I’d always had a curiosity about but would never have been able to see. What does the day to day life of a luthier look like? Well, now you can see, and that’s pretty fucking cool, even if it means you’re not writing.
Ah who am I kidding, I’d find some other way to distract myself. For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a series of essays on albums I associate with certain games. For example, around the time I got a copy of Resident Evil 4, I also got The Smith’s Singles and the Melvins album Houdini.
Yeah, what a combo, right?
Any time I hear a major Smiths song now, or any song off Houdini, I have a vivid sense memory (kinda like the one I wrote about here) of that summer I spent playing Resident Evil 4.
I coulda made this even more granular. Back in Vanilla World of Warcraft (or Classic now, I guess), levelling took ages. If you were a newbie, you might spend weeks in a zone. So, for example, around the time I got my first character, a dwarven warrior, to the badlands, I’d also picked up a copy of White Light/White Heat, and I now inextricably associate that album of avant-garde New York rock with a zone in a videogame.
This was the first post on my new Substack last week. I’m just messing around. I still want to post here because I don’t want anyone to miss out and the sunk-cost fallacy is real – I’ve had this blog for ten odd years and have no intention of letting it die. Who knows, my Substack experiment might fail. For now, though, if you want my newest writing as soon as it is ready – subscribe to my Substack. The work will make its way over here a week or so later, though, so don’t worry.
Do it yourself.
We publish econo.
Swear if you want.
Borrow and steal, but make sure you credit.
They might not want you to succeed, but we get to define what success is.
You do not need to write a novel.
You’d be surprised how wide the definition of novel is.
If you write you’re a writer.
You’d be surprised at the definition of writing.
Write emails and letters and reports and blog posts and manifestos and correspondence with your representatives and instructions and journals and diaries and lists and book reviews and image descriptions and tweets and texts and recipes and newsletters and customer feedback and free associative pieces.
Write at work at home in a line in meetings at the coffee shop in bed at night on your phone on your keyboard in your office in margins and notebooks on receipts and cards.
You can do it, and do it well, and if it matters to you, it matters.
They are developing machines that write convincing stories and paint convincing pictures.
If the doubt persists, write and refer to your own.
By all means learn to code but they are automating that too.
Dream, and live cheaply.
Use it until it falls apart.
If you can clearly communicate one image, one idea, one emotion, you’ve written a good poem.
Read it aloud if you can. The mouth knows. How do the words feel? Or have Google read it to you.
If you’re lucky enough to have a nice family, listen to them. Write some of it down or record it. The first time you need to ask a dead person a question will be a blow unlike any you’ve ever felt.
Google docs is your friend.
Back your stuff up.
Every draft is an act of emission.
Failure is fine.
Your uncle probably doesn’t work at Penguin Random House; quickly make peace with a day job. Write the shit out of those interoffice memos. If you want to interest people, you need to write about them; a day job is a great place to pick up material.
Use as many semicolons as you like; if anyone ever cares, you’ve got a reader, good job.
Use your local library, as a matter of principal, and because good writers read.
What do you know about that no one else does? What interests you? What could you write about in excruciating detail, if you wanted to?
Go for a walk and then sleep on it. If the solution is still not apparent, talk to someone about it.
Can you go around it?
Do you need to do it?
You don’t need any discipline except the discipline to write down the ideas that come to you while you’re falling asleep.
Do write your dreams down. One day you’ll have a plot point that is only resolvable through a dream, and you want convincing material.
Buy your friends’ books, read them and review them. Commission your friends to do art for you.
You might not have admirers but you can have friends.
A liberal education is a fine thing and a gift you can give yourself.
Amazon does suck, but if you’re walking away from Omelas do it with open eyes.
Be willing to do this (for yourself) for free, or don’t do it.
If you intend to make money doing this, take photographs or play an instrument with no hope of remuneration. You don’t have to get paid for everything.
I have no intention of having children, but I want to give my work a chance to last.
I no longer have any illusions about being famous or living forever. I want to do good work and leave my little bit of the world better than I found it.
Your uncle that doesn’t work at Penguin Random House probably also doesn’t have a London townhouse he can put you up in. Is there an art scene where you live? Can you make one?
Be a one person art scene.
Want to do it well but be willing to do everything badly.
If you ever get delusions of grandeur go read Shelley’s Ozymandias.
I’ve found it very helpful to keep a reading journal recently, but I wanted to write a quick post on how helpful I’ve found keeping a regular journal as well. The difference is, I’ve gone back to keeping a regular, (mostly) daily journal by hand.
I’ve found it very helpful to keep a reading journal recently, but I wanted to write a quick post on how helpful I’ve found keeping a regular journal as well. The difference is, I’ve gone back to keeping a regular, (mostly) daily journal by hand.
It’s helped reduce my anxiety and has increased my feelings of clarity about my current situation and plans for the future. Keeping it by hand has had an effect as well; I’ve found it a lot easier to open up and use it as a way to drain negative feelings out of myself.
I’ve got notebooks I’ve used as journals dating back twenty years, but in the last few years I’ve mostly opened up a new Google doc to vent. This has the advantage of convenience, but I am not sure it’s the healthiest way for me to engage in the practice. And that’s because I’ve noticed that when I journal in the same environment, the same way, that I produce things I am going to show people, like this blog post, I tend to hold back.
A bit of me feels like I’m writing for an audience. And it’d be so easy to share it. There’s literally a button that says share in the top right of the screen. Or I could copy and paste the whole thing. A bit of me doesn’t like this, and won’t fully let go. Which isn’t a great feeling.
Designating a notebook to be your journal is a private, personal thing, and every time you open it up, you’ll know you’re writing for yourself. Sure, you might end up workshopping some stuff and copying it out, and that’s great, but you will be writing for yourself first and foremost. Which is good practice anyway, but sometimes you might need a little prompting, I know I do.
I’ve also noticed that it can be a mindful practice. The physical sensation of writing is something you can focus on and that can keep you in a reflective space. With your phone on silent and turned face down, or in another room, you can focus on your feelings and on expressing them.
I tended to journal in a different place to where I usually work, because I usually work on my computer in a little alcove, which is fine, but it’s also where I tend to play videogames or browse the internet. I know that’s not great, but it is what is with my living situation. I’ve had some lovely afternoons sitting at my kitchen table by the open back door, feeling a pleasant breeze and hearing birds sing. It gave me moments where I could sit back and notice when I was happy, something Kurt Vonnegut recommends and which I think is a good idea too.
It was much nicer than sitting at my computer, switching between tabs, looking at the news, trying to focus on something else and not being able to.
It’s also a fantastic store of detail if you intend to write fiction. I’ve often written down interesting little details about my day, things people said, stuff I’ve seen. Not all, but some of the best writers of fiction have done it by taking real life’s exquisite detail and rendering it on the page. W. Somereset Maugham, for example, whose A Writer’s Notebook is a fascinating insight into how a prolific author stored up enough material to keep writing.
And you don’t need many materials. A cheap notebook and a pen. Or a pencil. I’ve used fancy Moleskine notebooks in the past because the paper is easy to write on and they have a nice pocket in the back for keepsakes, like tickets and notes, but any notebook will do. I am currently using this one I got from WH Smith because I liked the pattern on it. If you do have a bit of extra money to spend on a nice notebook and a nice pen, you can transform it into a daily gift you give yourself.
My current journal!
I try to do it every day. I don’t always because I seem to have a much easier time building bad habits than good ones, go figure. I’ll probably journal about that tonight.
Do you keep a journal? Please let me know in the comments if there are any practises that have helped you 🙂
I’ve had a Goodreads (add me!) for a long time, and I enjoy it just fine and will carry on using it, but there’s something about the idea of having a physical record of what I’ve been reading that appeals to me. Watching a notebook fill up is just a satisfying feeling. It’s nice to disconnect and write by hand sometimes, even with handwriting as bad as mine. And, you’ve still got the record if Goodreads goes down.
I’ve been keeping a journal on and off since I was ten years old, which means I’ve been doing it for at least nine twenty years oh my God.
I’ve found it useful in various ways.
Of course it’s helpful to be able to go back and check dates, what happened when, that kind of thing.
It’s also helpful to be able to go back and see evidence of how much you’ve grown; things that used to be difficult to cope with that are now routine, things that used to be bad that no longer are.
The evidence is there in more than one sense. Each page you turn, each notebook you fill, is physical proof of your commitment to yourself.
I’ve had a Goodreads (add me!) for a long time, and I enjoy it just fine and will carry on using it, but there’s something about the idea of having a physical record of what I’ve been reading that appeals to me.
Watching a notebook fill up is just a satisfying feeling. It’s nice to disconnect and write by hand sometimes, even with handwriting as bad as mine. And, you’ve still got the record if Goodreads goes down.
I know it seems silly, but no social network is forever. It looks like Amazon has integrated it well into their Kindle ecosystem, but you never know. One day it might become unprofitable and get the plug pulled. Or they could make some changes that you don’t find acceptable. Whatever it is, it might not be forever.
Art Garfunkel still has his list starting 1968. I’ve still got my journals from when I was ten.
Goodreads is great for the community aspect, I’ll give it that. Seeing what my friends are reading, having conversations, getting recommendations, that’s all ace.
But reading in public can be a bit dicey. What if you want to explore some political ideas that your social circle don’t find palatable? Or read some erotica? Maybe you want to read a Harry Potter and you don’t want your friends to know?
Of course you keep it off your Goodreads. But a private notebook is a great way to record your achievements and stay on top of your reading goals regardless.
Here’s what I record in mine:
Number your entries and keep track of how many things you’ve read!
Title (duh)
Author (double duh)
Translator, editor, anyone else involved
Publisher and year published
How it came to you. Did you buy it new, find it in a charity shop, borrow it from a friend, get it from the library?
Format (Paperback, Kindle, so on)
ISBN
Date you finished it (or gave up on it!)
You can record what you like, really. I don’t record any measure of quality or a review score, but I might start depending on how I feel.
And don’t feel put off if you really don’t like the idea of writing by hand or carrying a notebook around! You could do this in a Google doc, or a .txt sitting on your desktop, or your notes app. I’d suggest keeping it backed up to carry on dovetailing with the idea of posterity, but it by no means has to be done by hand.
I’ve been using this notebook I found in Waterstones. I do love a William Morris design, and if my intention is to have it be something I use for years, I want it to be something I enjoy looking at.
How do you keep track of your reading, if you bother at all? Do you use Goodreads, or another online tracker? Do you keep a notebook, or a text file? Let me know in the comments.
Setting out your problems on paper is always an excellent strategy.
Living through history is a massive pain. Who knew? The world is on fire and I feel small and confused. Nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow, let alone over the next year. Were you expecting oil prices to go negative? Did you expect that the United States would erupt? Did you expect that a Tory government led by Boris and a group of people selected not for their ability but for their loyalty to Boris (and Cummings) would completely balls up their response to the Coronavirus crisis?
Ok, the last one was a trick question.
I’ve written before about journaling as a mental health strategy. I think it is valid now more than ever. I’ve not been keeping a pandemic journal as such, but I try and write at least an entry every few days and I try and include summaries of the significant events and my thoughts and reactions to them as well as details of my person life and how I’m feeling and so on.
Setting out your problems on paper is always an excellent strategy.
It occurs to me now that perhaps I could have kept them separate, had entries that were personal and then had separate entries that dealt only with the crisis. Well, any suggestion that I double the amount of work I do is always going to go down well, isn’t it? I have no intention of publishing it or showing it to anyone, so for me it doesn’t matter. My historical record, such as it is, can rest alongside all my personal stuff just fine.
(Speaking of publication, I’ve noticed recently that I sometimes have trouble writing things in a word processor. I’m connected to the internet and am a copy paste away from showing the world my whole work. It feels almost like writing in public. This is fine for say, the draft of this blog post, because my intention from the start has been to show it to people. I could post it right now and if there are mistakes I can just edit it. But that feeling of writing in public causes me to shy a bit when I write journal entries, or try and draft stories or poems. Nobody wants to show anybody the first draft of their poems. That first draft always has to exist without an audience. If you feel like me, I recommend journaling analogue style for a bit. It’s a good way to take a screen/internet break, and it’s as private as you’ll get. You’ve got a pen and an empty notebook lying around, I guarantee it.)
I know it’s a bit late in the day to suggest you start a journal on this crisis, seeing as it’s been going on months now. But like I said, who knows how long all this stuff will continue? And we’re not concerned about creating accurate historical records. This won’t matter to anyone but you. If you’re feeling lost and sad and confused, and you want to try claw back a bit of control, then a journal where you discuss the news and your feelings about it might help. I applaud anyone who has managed to look away from it all and stay looking away, but I have to look.
James Farson 
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