A Defence of the Commonplace Book

I keep a notebook in which I copy out sentences by other people. This, to the modern ear, sounds like an idle habit, rather like collecting bus tickets. Why copy what already exists? The sentence is on the shelf, after all, in the very book you took it from.

I have kept the notebook for twenty years now, and I want to defend it against the charge of idleness, because I believe it to be one of the more serious things I do.

Copying is a way of reading

There is a particular kind of attention that comes only with the hand. When you copy a sentence, you can't skim it. You have to go word by word, in order, at the speed of the pen. You discover that the sentence has a rhythm you didn't hear when you merely read. You find the place where the clause turns. Sometimes you find that it is not as good as you thought, and the disappointment is its own education.

I tell students that copying out a paragraph teaches more about writing than ten pages of advice about it. They nod politely and do not believe me until they try.

The notebook as a mirror

The second thing I've learned is that the book becomes, over time, a portrait of the reader. I didn't plan this. But when I look back through twenty years of entries, I can see my own obsessions arranged in order, as in a gallery: a stretch of lines about weather, another about grief, a long cluster about the ethics of attention. I did not know I cared about these things until I saw the evidence in my own handwriting.

You are what you keep.

That is not a scholarly claim. It's an observation made at a kitchen table late one night, and I am leaving it unedited.

How I keep mine

The rules are loose. I copy by hand, in pencil, because I like to revise. I write the author and title beneath each extract and, when I remember, the page number. I never copy for length: a sentence is often enough. I leave a line blank after each entry so that later thoughts have somewhere to land, and they do, in the form of small pencilled replies. Some pages have three generations of me arguing in the margin.

I don't index. I used to, and it turned the book into a filing cabinet. Now I browse, flipping at random, and the accidents are the point. A line I copied in my twenties will land beside one from last spring, and the two will start a conversation I'd never have arranged.

An objection, honestly stated

A colleague once told me that all this is a kind of hoarding, a way of avoiding having my own thoughts. It's a fair worry and I have turned it over many times. My answer is that the notebook has made my own thoughts better, because it taught me what a good sentence sounds like, and because it trained my ear to catch a lazy one in my own prose.

If you'd like to try, buy a plain notebook, nothing precious. Copy one sentence a day for a month. Don't tidy and don't explain. At the end of the month, read the whole thing through from the start, and see who you've been.