I use notebooks. Field Notes, mostly. I’ve tried making notes on my phone, and it’s fine for some time-sensitive reminders, but for development and that certain writer’s form of “thinking out loud,” nothing works better for me than making marks on paper. I am trained to not be able to fully apprehend a thought until it’s in front of me. Which, yes, is a faintly ridiculous way to live, I know. I’m two pages past the halfway mark on this current notebook — it contains notes on a film I was briefly involved with, development notes for a web project, roughly concretised ideas for my last UCP meeting, the substance of another tv-project story meeting, several pages of to-do written on a plane (mostly written through guilt, because a noted comedy writer/actor was sitting next to me running twelve different work conversations through his iPad while listening through some rushes, and I felt awful that I was just sitting there reading a book), sketching a space for my next EDICT piece, assembling ideas for my dConstruct talk, and more UCP-related thoughts. This notebook will be full by the end of the week. There are four more in my bag.

It is, in fact, an impure form of automatic writing. Or maybe the purest. In the words of Pessoa, writing while “owned by something else.” We all do it. We’re owned by that freakish thing in the backs of our heads that insists we empty the contents on paper in order to see them properly.

Reading: BONELAND, Alan Garner