To honor the slowness of the summer, I’m introducing an occasional series called “Notations”—shorter, more focused versions of the usual Noted essays. Each post will center on a single notebook kept by a historical figure—like Katharine Hepburn’s promptbook, which I’m thrilled to share with you today.

I’m excited about “Notations” because I’ve collected lots of interesting note-taking practices that are best explored on a smaller scale. This series will give us a chance to look closely at individual notebooks I might otherwise not have room to share.

So, here is the promptbook Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) put together while preparing to play the role of Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

A few years ago, I visited the NYPL’s Billy Rose Theatre Division to see Katharine Hepburn’s papers. I was impressed by the astounding amount of work she put into her theatrical productions, exemplified by this notebook:

In 1957, Katharine Hepburn used this notebook while preparing to play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Academy in Stratford, Connecticut.

Though Hepburn received rave reviews for her theater work, she found the schedule challenging. As she explains in her autobiography, she was not a night person:

I like to get up early and work in the morning and afternoon. I like to sleep at night. But to build my career I would force myself to do a play. Night work. Then to keep it interesting I would take it on tour the minute gross dropped below a certain figure.2

Hepburn was never one for half-measures. She invested a great deal of energy into all of her work. We can see this clearly in her promptbook for Much Ado About Nothing.

To make the promptbook, Hepburn pasted the script into a notebook and annotated it with stage directions, including blocking, sound cues, entrances, exits, and other movements on the stage.

For example, on the following page, you can see several kinds of notes at once:

• the sequence of music and lights as the production begins, written in red in the upper left corner

• where characters are located in relation to one another, written in blue near the bottom left

• and character entrances, actions, and exits, tied to specific moments in the script

On another page, Hepburn has sketched the set with the placement of props.

The promptbook helped Hepburn preserve decisions made during rehearsal so she could repeat them nightly on stage. It also shows her dedication to details and precision.

In addition to thinking about her lines and stage blocking, Hepburn was interested in the whole world of the production. For example, she also sketched costumes for this play.

I wish I could go back to the 1950s to watch Hepburn play Beatrice. Judging by the reviews she received3 and her marvelous work on camera, I am certain she made it all seem effortless. But, as with so many talented artists covered here at Noted, Hepburn’s notes reveal the effort that the audience never got to see. It always feels like such a privilege to get a glimpse behind the curtain.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

P.S. Hepburn’s promptbook reminds me of two other posts from Noted’s archives:

Thomas Jefferson’s theories of freedom and justice—complicated though they may be for a man who wrote about liberty while enslaving people—are deeply rooted in the very idea of America. And so much of Jefferson’s thinking about the law and human prosperity was rooted in the three commonplace books he kept during his life: collections of literary quotations and legal precedent.

So before we celebrate July 4th this week, let’s look at three of the most foundational notebooks kept by one of America’s founding fathers. The following three commonplace books show how Jefferson arrived at his legal and philosophical ideas through rigorous study.

Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book

In 1760 (at the age of seventeen), Jefferson began his first commonplace book—filled with literary excerpts—and continued to add to it until 1772. Thus, it offers an incredible view into young Jefferson’s mind and his intellectual formation.

Jefferson began with the ancient historian, Herodotus, which is not necessarily a surprising choice. However, what I did find surprising was that these extracts are about circumcision.

the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine acknowledge of themselves that they learnt the custom from the Egyptians.1

The editors of Jefferson’s papers suggest that his interest in circumcision is part of a larger interest in the Bible’s historicity. After this page, Jefferson transcribes long extracts from Bolingbroke—an 18th-century politician and philosopher—that interrogate foundational ideas, especially those found in the Bible.

The underlying theme here is to question received wisdom and to come to one’s own conclusions. He transcribes the following from Bolingbroke:

No hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phaenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.2

Jefferson continues to quote from Bolingbroke for many pages, suggesting a strong interest in the philosopher’s religious skepticism and view of history as a source of political instruction.

From there, Jefferson adds poetic extracts from Pope’s Essay on Man and Milton’s Paradise Lost, including my personal favorite line at the top of this page:

_________One who brings

A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.

The mind is its own place, & in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

Milt. Par. L. B: 1. 1 : 252.

Jefferson was fascinated by Milton’s language of political rebellion—a rhetoric that Jefferson would take up and make his own during the Revolutionary War.

While literary and rhetorical studies helped Jefferson become the powerful writer who penned the Declaration of Independence, he depended upon his deep understanding of the law, which he studied assiduously in two other commonplace books: the Legal Commonplace Book and the Equity Commonplace Book.

Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book

Thomas Jefferson passed his bar examination in late 1765; at around that time, he began a new commonplace book to record what he learned from studying legal reports.3

Jefferson thought of commonplacing as a way to train his mind. As he read through cases, he tried to reduce them to their most essential parts. This was a difficult skill for him to develop, as he confessed to his nephew:

I remember when I began a regular course of study. I determined to abridge in a common place book, every thing of value which I read. at first I could shorten it very little: but after a while I was able to put a page of a book into 2. or 3. sentences, without omitting any portion of the substance. go on therefore with courage & you will find it grows easier and easier. besides obliging you to understand the subject, & fixing it in your memory, it will learn you the most valuable art of condensing your thoughts & expressing them in the fewest words possible.4

This is Jefferson’s method in his Legal Commonplace Book, in which he amassed over 900 entries:

1. He numbered entries

2. He condensed cases into principles

3. Then, he cited the case from which he derived the rule.

Here’s an example related to warrants:

117. if a warrant be directed to a Constable by name he may execute it out of his precinct if he will; but otherwise if it is directed to all constables in general. case of Vill. of Chorley. 1. Salk. 175.

Originally, Jefferson relied on William Salkeld’s (1671–1715) reports; however, as he worked, he began to cross-reference each entry with Lord Raymond’s (1673-1733) report, which you can see in the left margin in the above page.5

The point of Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book was to support his memory and enhance his own legal reasoning. But even with 905 entries,6 this commonplace book was not enough. He soon created another one.

Jefferson’s Equity Commonplace Book

Jefferson did not stop with common law. While creating his Legal Commonplace Book, he realized he needed a new notebook devoted to Equity Law. Jefferson eventually wrote 2018 entries in this new commonplace book.

Equity Law was a separate legal branch during Jefferson’s time, and it was like the conscience of the law. Developed in medieval England for cases that didn’t quite fit the strictures of Common Law, Equity Law was argued in a separate place—the Court of Chancery.

So rather than focusing on technical legality, the Court of Chancery focused on what was fair.7 In designating a commonplace book for legal precedent and another for legal judgment, Jefferson differentiated between two kinds of knowledge. With his Equity Commonplace Book, he considered legal gray areas. In this sense, Jefferson was thinking about what happens when rules fail to produce justice.

Among the more interesting aspects of Jefferson’s Equity Commonplace book is how frequently he returns to “Natural Justice,” which clearly pertains to The Declaration of Independence with its opening sentence:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The Equity Commonplace Book, now housed in the Huntington Library, helps us see the moral and legal vocabulary that shaped Jefferson’s thinking before he drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Taken together, these three commonplace books give us a sense of Jefferson as a serious legal scholar: He studied literature for insights into language, pored over legal history to understand precedent, and studied equity for the moral aspects of jurisprudence.

While Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence seems inevitable today, he assembled it through many years of intensive reading, studying, and abstracting complicated ideas into an economy of sentences. Jefferson’s commonplace books remind us that brilliant writing and improbable revolutions are rarely born whole. Both take an extraordinary amount of private reading, studying, and writing.

Notes on Jefferson’s Notes:

Commonplace books can contain more than quotes: When we think of commonplace books today, we often think of something like Jefferson’s literary collection. But 18th-century law students were also encouraged to keep commonplace books to store and categorize legal knowledge. In other words, commonplace books were understood to collect more than just quotes.

Commonplace books are great places to condense ideas: Rather than collecting quotations, Jefferson summarized legal cases and precedent in as few words as possible. This practice prepared Jefferson to become one of the most powerful writers of his day. He knew how to convey complicated ideas succinctly.

The law has never been black and white: Learning about Equity law was fascinating. It is a reminder that legal technicalities can only do so much. Often, human judgment is in play.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

P.S.

I’m taking next week off. I’ll be back in your inboxes on July 6th!

P.P.S.

If you’d like to read more Early-American notes. Check out these posts from Noted’s archives:

Before I went to see Joan Didion’s papers at the New York Public Library, I read all the reports claiming the archive gives us new insight into Didion’s writing process. Of course, I wanted more information—I wanted to know more of the nitty-gritty details regarding how Didion’s worked. So, I made an appointment and read through her papers. As I did so, I kept my attention trained on her methods so that I could write the report I wanted to read. And now here it is!

1) Collect Fragments

Some images shimmered for Didion. She saw pictures in her mind and some stood out. This, of course, makes sense considering how visual her writing can be. She tells us,

Look hard enough, and you can't miss the shimmer. It's there. You can't think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don't talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.2

As Didion prepared to write, she collected what she called “fragments.” Many of them record images. Here is a fragment she recorded in preparation for “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”:

Sitting around on the bleachers one early evening at the warehouse. Paul is there, and the girl with the fox-fur hat, Lynley, and a girl that Paul doesn’t seem to much want around. She is looking for her boyfriend. She found a note on his car for her to meet him at a motel near Paul’s, and she thought that might mean in code to meet him at the Warehouse…3

Didion’s “fragments” also include bits of dialogue she salvages from her reporter’s notebook.

Michael Laton: “A happening depends on the happeners.”

Among the “fragments,” Didion lists the signs she saw on Haight Street in San Francisco:

Didion’s lists (like “Signs on Haight Street”) along with her fragments strike me as a particular kind of noticing appropriate for a reporter—noticing details that will enhance a story—and Didion noticed so much that she had quite a lot to pick from when it came to writing her essay.

She’s still doing something similar decades later when, preparing to write The Year of Magical Thinking, she notes:

THINGS PEOPLE SAID TO ME AT UCLA:

This leads to the second lesson, which is moving information among different writing formats.

2) Transfer Notes to Different Formats

Didion’s handwriting is among the worst I’ve seen, so I was grateful that she typed many of her notes. This, it seems, was part of her process—moving words from her reporter’s notebook to fuller typed paragraphs describing the same material.

As Nathaniel Rich tells us in his introduction to South and West: From a Notebook, Didion’s note-taking often fell into stages. First, she would take rough notes by hand, then she would type them up at the end of the day. Rich explains,

These notes represent an intermediate stage of writing, between shorthand and first draft, composed in an uncharacteristically casual, immediate style.4

From these notes, Didion would start crafting her essays. Here is a sample of a quickly written note she took while researching Huey Newton (founder of the Black Panthers) for a section of her essay, “The White Album.”

To be black in America is to be in a constant state of rage”—Huey P. Newton, quoting James Baldwin

Later, Didion would type up other quotes she heard from Newton. For example, she would use the following quote to end the section on Newton in “The White Album.”

Didion’s writing process is one of expansion and then constriction. She expands her hasty hand-written notes into longer typed paragraphs. And then, she selects small bits from the typed notes to include in her essays.

3) The Work is Never Perfect

When a young writer asked Didion what advice she’d give to a writer just starting out, Didion said:

Rewrite. Don’t be afraid to rewrite.5

After spending time with Didion’s archive, this answer did not surprise me. In an interview with Hilton Als, she explained that when she is working on a book,

I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have…At the end of the day, I mark up the pages that I’ve done….I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past the blank terror.6

The rhythms and repetitions of Didion’s writing process show up all over her writing—especially in her later memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights—with their multiple refrains.

Didion once described how she learned how to type by typing Hemingway’s short stories. It seems fitting then, that she would hone her prose by retyping her own words.

So this is perhaps the most surprising thing I saw in Didion’s archive: her personal copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, which appears to contain post-publication edits. Why did she do this? I’m not sure. I searched to see if her edits correspond with other editions of her work—they don’t. Then I checked the play version of The Year of Magical Thinking, but many of the lines she crossed out appear in the script.

She begins on the first page with some small cross-outs.

But Didion’s edits get more significant.

For now, I’m interpreting these edits as a sign of a writer—“a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper”—even after those words are published and acclaimed.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

P.S. Paid subscribers can read more about my visit to Didion’s archives and my thoughts on publishing Notes to John.

Ever since I wrote about Emerson’s tips for finding notes two years ago, I’ve wanted to try his indexing system. So I set myself the task of going through my notebooks from graduate school onward (about 21 years’ worth of notes).

Most note-takers struggle to find past notes. Unless you have a Niklas Luhmann kind of mastery, it’s part of the process. Even so, it’s worth trying to salvage notes from the past—to “keep on nodding terms” with the selves you used to be, to borrow Joan Didion’s phrase.

I am still growing my index, still working on cultivating connections among my notes—it feels a bit like discovering roots undergirding my intellectual development. (Someday, I’d like to index my diaries and personal notes.)

I should say that this kind of large-scale indexing is still quite new to me. But I found it surprisingly pleasant—soothing, even.

There was something mesmerizing about watching my note-taking style and thinking patterns develop over decades. It’s sort of like going through old photos—except I was watching my intellectual development unfold as I revisited foundational quotations and ideas for how I think about writing, reading, and teaching.

In what follows, I share the method I used to index my notebooks, along with 7 things I learned along the way.

Read more

Years ago, I developed a morning ritual: I sit by a window with morning coffee, cat curled in my lap while I pick a quote to write out in my commonplace book. First, I copied quotes from Seneca’s letters, then Mary Oliver’s essays and poetry, then literary criticism. Currently, I’m transcribing quotes from Carl Jung’s Red Book, steadily making my way through a chapter each morning. This is only one of many note-taking habits.

Here’s the problem (or, rather, opportunity): Because I spend my days researching note-taking, I’m always learning about new techniques. And I want to try them all! Each new practice is like fitting another book into an overly full shelf (another habit of mine).

Part of the reason I love trying new note-taking habits is that I genuinely believe in the power of notes—I’ve seen them at work in my own personal and professional life. And, of course, I’ve studied note-taking’s powerful effects in the lives of famous creative people. But another reason is that note-taking is really fun.

Even if your notes aren’t beautiful, they are valuable. And they become more valuable over time, the more you add to them, and the more you return to them.

The power of returning to older notes is something I felt profoundly as I made my way through nearly two decades of notebooks this spring—beginning with my first dissertation notebook from 2009 all the way to my current Noted notebook—with the goal of indexing them.

Next week, I’ll share my indexing process and what I learned from it. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says,

Among the seven ages of human life…the period of indexes should not be forgotten.1

Now that I’ve started an index, I plan to continue it—to add to it and see what connections grow over the coming decades.

Rituals of Return

The Commonplace Book Club (CBC) has become another favorite ritual of mine. It’s the only note-taking ritual I do that depends on community, which makes it particularly special.

For the month of May, after writing out my own quotes, I read through our communal thread. I’d always find a few quotes to hold onto and turn over in my mind throughout the day.

I like rituals of return—of revisiting old notes or old journal entries. This is one reason I continue to make our communal commonplace book at the end of each club session, I go back through all of our threads. I gather quotes from those who have given me permission and collage them into a communal PDF.

Before we get to the communal commonplace book, some housekeeping:

• The prize! Many of you maintained a daily practice through May—and of those who did, I drew a name from the lottery: , who has chosen to receive a signed copy of my book. Congratulations!

• Mark your calendars for the next session of the CBC, which begins on September 1, 2026!

To celebrate this May CBC’s conclusion, I’ve assembled a communal commonplace book filled with quotations from community members who granted me permission to reproduce their entries.

A note: I organized entries under topics (according to commonplace book tradition)—you might have organized entries differently, but that’s all part of the fun. Also, I found screenshots came out fuzzy, so I omitted names and commentary, all of which remain available on our chat.

Many thanks to all members of the club and especially to those who allowed me to use their entries: , , , , , , , , , , Heather Birt, , , , , , John Rocha, Jude Knight, , , Liz Flaisig, Lowell Mick White, Ludy Roper, , , , , Susan Carter Morgan, , , , and Zoe Diaz-McLeese.

You can access the full PDF here or download it:

Communal Cbc May 2026

47.3MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

What note-taking habits have become rituals for you? And which new ones would you like to pick up? Tell us in the comments!

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

P.S. Paid subscribers, look out for a post on my indexing technique next week!

For the past few years, I’ve shared a favorite creator from my youth to celebrate. This year, I’m sharing a favorite creator who has just written about child-like things—in the most ebullient way.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to feature none other than !

Here’s what I’ve always appreciated about Austin’s work: He takes complex ideas, boils them down to their essences, and makes them really fun and approachable.

For example, in Steal Like an Artist, he consolidates the creative energy implicit in commonplace books into a deceptively simple message. He does the same thing in his new book—out June 2nd—Don’t Call It Art—this time he captures the imaginative genius of childhood.

Reading anything Austin has written feels like a shot of creative energy.

The reason why? He’s having fun. It’s so obvious that Austin enjoys making art and sharing ideas with us. My favorite part of Don’t Call It Art is the section titled “Who’s Having Fun?” Being creative should be fun. It is fun. But then we weigh it down with all these adult concerns.

When I think back to what I did for fun as a kid, it included a lot of notebooks—writing in my diary, sketching silly pictures, or inventing ridiculous stories about the tooth fairy.

I had so much fun with notebooks—and I continue to have a lot of fun with them. They remain one of our best tools of imagination.

If you feel like your notebooks could use a jolt of creative energy, look no further than this guest post. I dare you to read about Austin’s notebooks and not come away with an idea to steal (to use Austin’s language).

And now I’ll hand it over to Austin, who has graciously offered to give us a tour of four of his notebooks! I hope you love this post as much as I do!

Because I am insane, I keep four different notebooks: a diary, a pocket notebook, a logbook, and a commonplace book. Each of them serves a different function.

I keep my diary the way many writers do: Every morning, I sit down with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and I fill 3+ pages. I’ve done this since 2017, when I fell in love with Thoreau’s journals and wanted to keep my own.

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me to detail how I keep my diary, so I wrote these two pages in my diary for him:

What’s not-so-normal about my diaries is that they’re full of drawings and collages and newspaper clippings. I also like to write in it with a brush a la my hero, Lynda Barry:

When I’m writing a book, my diary gets terribly boring because it is mostly me whining about how hard writing is combined with little pep talks to myself to get off my ass and into the studio and get to work. Here’s a fun spread about my long-suffering editor:

I have a bunch of what I call “silly rituals” around keeping my diary. First, I always assign “guardian spirits” to the inside flaps — people to watch over things and provide an aspirational vibe. For example, my summer diary from June 2022 features Dee Dee Ramone by the pool:

I think silliness is really underrated in creative work. Being silly makes you playful, and when you’re playful, you’re more likely to get good ideas and make good stuff.

More silliness: I weigh the diary before I start using it, and then I weigh it when I’m finished. Here is a video of me performing this silly ritual.

People always ask about the date stamps: they aren’t rare! You can get a date stamp at any office supply store.

I also glue a library card pocket in the back of the diary and keep little paper scraps and souvenirs in there:

I try to have my pocket notebook nearby all the time, whether I’m in the house, in the studio, or out and about in the world. It’s basically just a ”waste book” for scribbling and doodling ideas.

I like the way my pocket notebook mixes the mundane and the profound, like this spread that has a to-do list on one page and a newspaper clipping about Margaret Fuller on the other page:

Here’s a spread that shows me working on (self-rejected) cover designs for Don’t Call It Art — if you can read my handwriting, you’ll notice that these were done back when the book had a different subtitle:

Because I fuss over my pocket notebook the least out of all my notebooks, I usually find it the most interesting to flip through.

I think all the time about how we emphasize the importance of keeping notebooks and sketchbooks but we almost never talk about the importance of revisiting them and re-reading them. I have found a weekly review hugely helpful: just once a week, sit down and re-read your notebooks and see if there’s anything you can use.

My logbook is just a list of what I do every day. It’s like an appointment book in reverse. I try to keep it as the day progresses, but I always make sure over coffee that yesterday is logged before the rest of my morning begins.

The mundanity of this notebook is very important. It is the place to put everything — including the stuff that I’d feel stupid about or bored by recording in my diary.

Here’s what I wrote about the logbook in my book Steal Like an Artist:

A logbook isn’t necessarily a diary or a journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. What project you worked on, where you went to lunch, what movie you saw. It’s much easier than keeping a detailed diary, and you’d be amazed at how helpful having a daily record like this can be, especially over several years. The small details will help you remember the big details.

In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled, and that’s exactly what you’re doing—keeping track of how far your ship has sailed.

Here are two pages from my logbook from 2009, a weekend off from my day job before I’d published any books or had any kids:

I have a terrible memory for things that happen to me, so this is the most valuable notebook I keep. I can’t tell you how weird it is to have a record like this going back seventeen years. For example, I can literally tell you what I did on every single day of my sons’ lives. It’s just bizarre to have this kind of index to your life. (I often use the logbook to look something up, and then consult my diary to see if I wrote more about it.)

Here is a peek inside my commonplace book. This is a weird little 5-year-diary I kept from 2021-2025, but with quotes I read instead of things that happened to me.

For the first two years, every day I wrote down random quotes that I’d heard or saved, but in the third year, I started building themes and riffing off of other quotes like you’d do in an old-fashioned commonplace book. (I keep a huge Apple Notes file called “QUOTES” that I dip into.)

You can see on this page that sometimes I clipped things out of print and pasted them into the book:

I really liked making this book and I love flipping through it, but I actually didn’t start another one once I finished. Keeping it — and a fully-searchable digital copy on my computer — made me realize how helpful and powerful it would be to keep a bonafide commonplace book, organized by topic, digital and fully searchable. So that’s what I’m trying to keep now, but on the computer.

Of course, I’ve actually been doing this for years: I built almost all my books off of blog and Tumblr tags and newsletter issues. But it’s nice to have a private file that I can let get weirder and wilder and more messy.

What’s interesting to me is that I never would’ve made the decision to keep a digital commonplace book without the exercise of keeping an analog one.

I’m sort of known as an analog guy, but digital stuff is a huge part of my work. I often think of my life as a kind of analog/digital loop. Most of my ideas start in my notebooks, on paper. Then I get them into the computer, manipulate them, and share them. Then, I head back to the notebooks to see if I can find some more ideas…

Hi, again! It’s Jillian.

I can’t sign off without sharing my notes on Austin’s notes. This is what I’m holding onto from his post.

Notes on Austin’s Notes

A little bit of work over time really adds up: Austin is remarkably consistent. And he’s a great example of how creativity rewards those who show up again and again. Not every day is going to be a great creative day, but the work compounds over time. This brings me to my second point…

Note-taking is a kind of ritual: Note-taking tends to work best when built into the structure of your days—when it is something that happens habitually, whether that’s the weekly review, morning pages, or weighing your diaries. Austin is particularly good at rituals, and he introduced me to one that I’ve been practicing for nearly two years. The “bookends approach” is simple—just begin and end each day with a book. Here’s Austin’s illustration of it:

Notebooks are great containers: I love notebooks because they bring me back to the physical world. And I love how Austin fully embraces the notebook as a physical object—with all its storage capacity. When I look at Austin’s notebooks, I think of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages or Susan Sontag’s notebooks stuffed with paper.

Austin’s published books replicate the same expansiveness of his notebooks. Don’t Call It Art is part creative guide, part commonplace book, part photo-album, and pure creativity. Reading it has made my writing days more fun. I think it will for you too!

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts. Which of Austin’s note-taking tools do you want to steal?

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

History often reduces people to symbols—the lady with the lamp, in Florence Nightingale’s case. But she was a real, flesh-and-blood person, complete with all the heartache and triumph that attends a full life.

Nightingale recorded much of this in her diaries and private notes. And it is there that we find her in the depths of despair, wondering how she can continue to live if she can’t pursue her vocation. We also find her studying religious communities’ daily schedules and institutional discipline. Later, she is intensely focused on medical reform.

As we celebrate Memorial Day today in the United States, join me on this exploration of a nurse who became gravely ill during the Crimean War, and went on to transform military medicine and save countless soldiers’ lives. Because of Nightingale, we have fewer soldiers and military medical staff to mourn today.

Read more

Every morning, I pick a quote to hold onto for the rest of the day—returning to it in the empty spaces: when I’m waiting on the subway platform or as I’m stirring tomato sauce. The quote becomes a kind of anchor for my thoughts. A touchstone for the day.

So, I’m sharing some of that inspiration with you. Perhaps one of these lines will become a small anchor for your own day.

Thank you to all the members of the club—especially those of you who agreed to let me share your contributions. Your names appear before the quotes you shared.

On Writing

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at a time that we are reading.. —Vivian Gornick

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”—Thomas Mann

“When can you call yourself a writer? A real writer is one who writes. That’s the only permission you’ll ever need.”—Sue Monk Kidd

“The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.” —Walt Whitman

“Back in the library his revenge is his story. What he will write will recall the bite of this wit and legendary appetite” —Pet Shop Boys

“The belief that speech can overcome confusion is something I’ve never heard anywhere but in the West. Words do not set life in order, neither in cornfield nor on the asphalt. The notion that everything has to make sense is also something I’ve only encountered in the West.”—Herta Müller

On Creativity

“All that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and every line, shall be instinct with life.”

~ Katsushika Hokusai
One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji,
Post Script

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? —Rollo May

Slowing Down

“Without the light of critical thinking, of deep slow reading, of genuine introspection; yes, without the light of metacognition and the self-awareness that comes with it, we will gradually and irrevocably lose our ability for empathy, compassion, solidarity; lose our ability to remain fully human.” ~Elif Shafak 20 April 2026

“Let silence take you to the core of life.” —Rumi

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.—Marge Piercy

“I wonder if we’ve lost something in the past few decades as our psychological knowledge has grown - a more ecological sense of ourselves, embedded in a broader society”
Katherine May
Substack
1/5/26

“Be still and know. Be still. Pause. Rest. Be” —O. Raheem

Be patient,
you have an ancient beauty. —Toi Derricotte

Personal Growth

“My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them“ Richard Branson

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” — William James

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” —Mary Oliver

“And that is what I did. Sat down. Thought. Came up with explanations. Marveled at this odd process. How things acquire meaning…”—Solvej Balle

“To discover that you can still cope, when life becomes dystopic, is certainly an immense piece of learning about the extent of your own adaptability, flexibility and resilience.” Emmy Vandeurzen

“What women have to stand on squarely is not their ability to see the world in the way men see it but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.” —Mary Austin

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke

The Self

“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”—Thomas Edison

“...to be herself means to find the pattern, the underlying order, which exists in the ceaselessly changing flow of her experience.” Carl R. Rogers - Becoming a Person

“This is how it feels every night as he tries to sleep, his thoughts ranging across mountains and oceans, weaving through stars, his brain a lantern inside his skull, blazing.” — Anthony Doerr

from Parry Idris, quoted in Auden’s A Certain World

“Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing.: —Sarah Manguso

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.” —Paulo Coelho

“I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous—I let go.” Anaïs Nin

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be...otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” — Joan Didion

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” —Émile Zola

“Therapy and writing have a great deal in common.” —Mary Pipher

Encouragement

One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold that you might otherwise never have crossed on your own. —John O’Donohue

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say, “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, bow their heads.” —Mary Oliver

Notes and Notebooks

“Something written by hand is a piece of your personality on paper”—Anna Quindlen

But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills (as we will see), and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead. —Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience

“The truth of the journal does not lie in the interesting and literary remarks to be found in it, but in the insignificant details that tie it to everyday reality.” - Maurice Blanchot

I hope you find this gathering of quotes as nourishing and inspiring as I do! I’d love to know which quotes you’d like to hold onto. Share a favorite of your own in the comments or over in our chat!

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

Nightingale’s research and activism drove sanitary reforms that dramatically decreased mortality during the war and after; l…

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Whatever he was thinking, Kerouac likely transferred it to one of his many notebooks. They remain a testament to his creative mix of discipline and rebellion. Kerouac wrote doggedly, but loosely. He set out to be a great writer, but he would do it his way. As a teenager enrolled at Columbia University,1 he wrote,

If ever the day comes that someone asks me to what I attribute my success as a famous & great writer, I shall tell him it is because, in my teens, I never wrote one single ode to anything.

JK2

Kerouac’s most celebrated work, On the Road, is an ode of sorts to the American spirit as Kerouac experienced it in the late 1940s while he hitchhiked across the country in his 20s.

While at Columbia, Kerouac met Alan Ginsberg and then William Burroughs. The three would call themselves “the Beats,” and they electrified the literary scene of New York and San Francisco, setting off a current of creative experimentation that still empowers many of us today. And Kerouac kept notes through it all.

Kerouac’s notebooks are deeply satisfying. I love the way he gives himself over to them, pouring his interior monologue onto the pages. Kerouac’s notes grant us a front seat to the great writer’s brilliant creativity, his love of language, but also his self-loathing and sadness. The notebooks trace Kerouac’s becoming and disintegration—sometimes on a single page.

Kerouac’s Journals

Let’s begin in November of 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at Columbia. It is 2am at a diner near Columbia University’s campus. He sits alone, with a small notebook in front of him.

On the first page, Kerouac writes,

Sunday Morn, Nov. 3

2:00 A.M.

1940

Place: West End Cafeteria

Broadway N.Y. City

(On Columbia U. Campus)

I am seated alone at a table as I write in this book. Perhaps these young people in front of me think that I am doing my homework, or even that I am crazy.

Neither.

I am going to say a few things, after having spent the last seven six hours thinking as hard as I could. (And as rationally.)

In this little notebook, he sets out to record his ideas, accompanied by reflections on Kant, Joyce, and Romanticism. As Douglas Brinkley writes, these early notes

…reveal an earnest artist trying to discover his authentic voice…3

Here, Kerouac declares his love for Thomas Wolfe’s writing, declaring him “my God.”

He also sets himself a required reading list that includes texts he has already read but wants to revisit.

Raised in a devout Catholic family, Kerouac spends a lot of time contemplating Jesus (as he does on the above right-hand page). He draws crosses on many pages, and much of his writing borders on the confessional.

“A Study in Disorganization: The Problem of Myself”

In 1944 Kerouac still had his sights set on literary fame, but first he had to untangle the problem of himself, which he considered the biggest problem for his art.

…I earnestly consider one of the main problems in my art and understanding, and perhaps the most fundamental in the light of creative development of the individual artist, the problem of one’s self, and in this case, the problem of myself. What am I?…how do I behave?…why do I behave as such?…and how does it affect my art and understanding? what do I want?

A year later, Kerouac would write a note on the inside cover, describing the notebook as

a symbol of “becoming”—

Months after Kerouac concluded his reflections on “The Problem of Myself” he adds a diary entry while traveling by train to Canada, inspired by Ginsberg’s suggestion that he “re-examine” himself to find his “true self”. But, while writing, Kerouac decides that he prefers his multifaceted artistic self because it doesn’t cling to a single identity.

Ginsberg recently suggested that I carefully re-examine myself in order to find my true self. I dread that…I have a thousand identities; if after examining my self in the disgustingly single minded way of self-analysis (as witness the foregoing pages) if, after that, I should happen to stumble upon a combination of patterns suitable to round out a recognizable “me,” then where would be my thousand-fold “artist” self? I find my pleasure is not being a single person…

Kerouac’s Mood-Log

Relatedly, Kerouac set out to track his moods over the course of a writing project in March 1947. He explains his rationale:

In an effort to discover the hidden laws of elation & depression while writing.

Here, he records his feelings while writing. They range from

Perfect assurance and spiritual poise; all things fell in place

to

A “whats-the-use” day.

Three months later, Kerouac declares the project done.

WORK COMPLETED!

Now to life!—until July when I begin again—but Now—to life!

Perhaps you’ve also noticed how many daily words Kerouac wrote. 1,000-2,500 words a day was typical for him. But before you feel too badly about your output, consider that Kerouac’s signature writing technique was spontaneous prose—a high speed method, unencumbered by self-editing.

Kerouac’s “Writing Logs” and “Private Philologies”

The “Mood Logs” are intertwined with Kerouac’s “Writing Logs”—here is one he kept while writing what would become On the Road. On a day in which he writes 1500 words, he muses:

I sometimes wonder if On the Road will be any good, although very likely it will be popular.

I particularly appreciated this page from the log, which includes a stain on the bottom left corner from

cooking in the yard

The “Private Philologies” section of this notebook includes descriptions of words that interested Kerouac. For example:

The Scythian name for earth which is “apia,” meaning WATERY OR WATER-ISSUED) or first ISLE, their LAND), is a name of great significance to me and undoubtedly explains a universal feeling concerning water.

In this week’s postscript, I’ll spend more time delving into Kerouac’s notes taken on the road for On the Road, but for now, I’ll leave you with the following interview Kerouac did in 1959. At the end, he reads from his work and it made me wish we had a full recording of him reading everything he ever wrote—I found his sense of rhythm intoxicating.

In the video, Kerouac claims he wrote On the Road in 3 weeks. He probably typed it that quickly. Of course, we know from looking at Kerouac’s journals he had been working on his novel for nearly a decade. More on this later this week!

Notes on Kerouac’s Notes

Self-exploration is a cornerstone of creativity: as Kerouac writes in “The Problem of Myself,” exploring oneself fuels creativity. Influenced by Jung and Freud, Kerouac studied the workings of his mind and his own paradoxical identity in the service of his art.

Keep a mood log: Creative projects can be an emotional rollercoaster. I noticed a pattern in Kerouac’s mood-log that I seem to have myself: great writing days are often followed by not-so-great writing days, as though the mind needs to rest.

Mark your location in your notebooks: I love Kerouac’s attention to geography and place. Whether he’s marking a state (Colorado) or a cafeteria (West End Cafeteria) the location of his writing mattered to him. It adds another layer of physicality to our notes—especially when food (or coffee in my case) stains our pages.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

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Yours in Note-Taking,

P.S. Paid subscribers, read more about Kerouac’s notes from the road

Every day in May, we’ll be sharing favorite quotes on our private chat, building a communal commonplace book. I’m very excited to join you in sharing quotes and creating our seventh (!!) communal commonplace book.

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While he acknowledged that memorization had its uses, Feynman didn’t believe it was true learning. He said:

Have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of another word…1

Understanding science—or any other discipline—is more than memorizing words. Feynman argued that there is a difference between understanding concepts like Brewster’s law and watching light reflected off water.2

He valued a specific kind of learning above all others: Knowledge acquired through doing. Students could learn the names of all the different kinds of microscopes, but that wasn’t the same thing as actually looking through the lens, never mind building one.

Many of Feynman’s ideas about education bring us back to the material world—to noticing how sunlight reflects on water or the way sugar dissolves in tea.3 His notes suggest a practical lesson for the rest of us: one way to move beyond memorization is to visualize ideas.

In what follows, I’ll explore three ways that Feynman used visualizations to deepen his learning—and how we might borrow some of his habits for ourselves.

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As I approach the full draft of my next book, I keep thinking about the boxes of notebooks sitting on my bookshelf.

After studying note-taking for the past two decades, I’ve filled 70+ notebooks—spanni…

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Richard Feynman (1918-1988) understood the value of self-education. He was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, a member of the Manhattan Project at the age of 25, and a dynamic public int…

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With this in mind, I was excited to visit the New York Public Library to see their newly acquired collection of A.A. Milne’s (1882-1956) proofs and maquettes (book mock-ups) for Now We Are Six and House at Pooh Corner.1 These papers, I suspected, would be instructive in thinking through how Milne finished his projects.

So much of the end of a written project involves increasingly small, precise decisions: In Milne’s case that included copy-editing and page layout. Today, authors receive digital “proofs”—a preliminary, PDF version of a book—to mark up. But Milne worked in a pre-digital era.

Moreover, his partnership with the illustrator E.H. Shepard was unusually close in the way that their words and illustrations intertwined. In fact, Milne insisted Shepard receive a share of the royalties rather than a flat sum—a clear sign that Milne valued the depth of their collaboration.

As I hoped, Milne’s proofs and mock-ups are wonderfully material—bulky things, filled with cuttings and paste-ins, loose slips of paper, and Milne’s own hand-written corrections. They also offer a unique insight into the end-stages of his creative process.

So, let’s explore Milne’s notes at the end of his process—the notes he took just before his Winnie-the-Pooh books hit the shelves.

These post-scripts offer paid subscribers a deeper dive into the figures I cover in Noted’s regular posts. While I work on my book, I’m pushing these postscripts to every other Monday. The next post will be free, and you can read my full post on Shepard’s notes for free here. As always, if you can’t upgrade right now, send me a message and I’ll comp you.

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But Christopher’s actual Pooh bear turned out to be a bad model for the illustrations. Made by the company Alpha Farnell, little Christopher’s teddy…

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One must learn to paint.

Picasso decided to write something else:

One must not learn to paint. 1

Two things were true of Picasso from a young age: he was rebellious, and he loved to draw. As a child, he was so obsessed with drawing that he often got into trouble just to have time alone with his sketchbook.2

Even when he wasn’t working on his sketchbooks, he was still sketching. Picasso’s school books are filled with youthful drawings.

Here are a few more examples from 1893/1894 when Picasso was 12 or 13 years old.

The first two pages (above) are filled with drawings of pigeons, which happened to be his father’s preferred subject. Picasso’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco,3 was an artist and instructor at the Art Academy of Málaga. He was also Pablo’s first art teacher.

Picasso dedicates “La Coruña,” one of his childhood magazines, to his father and notes himself as “Director / P. Ruiz.”

As Picasso told it, as a teenager, his father asked him to complete one of his own unfinished paintings. The young Pablo did such a good job, his father handed over his paint brushes and exclaimed that he would never paint again.4 This statement proved hyperbolic considering that Picasso’s father did, in fact, continue to paint.

The point remains, though, that Picasso’s father recognized his son’s precocious talent. In fact, Picasso could imitate virtually any style of painting by his teenage years. Still, his father remained a towering presence. In Picasso’s first large-scale painting, “First Communion,” he used his father as model for the priest.

By dropping his father’s last name (Ruiz) later in life, Pablo distanced himself from his father’s shadow. Picasso set out to be original. And, as we know, his style would change dramatically over the course of his long, celebrated career. But one thing never changed: Picasso continued to rely heavily on his sketchbooks.

Picasso’s Notebook Covers

Picasso turned to notebooks as a crucial tool throughout his life. He explained:

I picked up my sketchbooks daily, saying to myself: “what will I learn of myself that I didn’t know"5

Between 1894-1967, Picasso filled 175 sketchbooks. They were so important to him that he inscribed one of the sketchbooks with the words

Je suis le cahier

[I am the notebook]

His son, Claude Picasso, describes the artist’s notebooks as “stepping-stones to trampolines for somersaults.”6 And, critics agree that Picasso used his notebooks to work on discrete artistic problems ranging from stylistic to thematic issues.

Let’s spend some time on the sketchbooks Picasso used to prepare for his most controversial painting.

Picasso Prepares to Stun the World

As the 20th century began, Pablo Picasso hunted for a new style. Because photography had improved considerably from its 19th-century beginnings, artists recognized that their talents for realism would lose value. They needed to do something else.

Picasso answered with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

In 1907, this painting set the art world on fire. Even Picasso’s future collaborator Georges Braque described it “as if a fire-eater had been drinking petrol.”7 Indeed, art critics tend to mark the beginning of modernism with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” because of its clear departure from previous painting norms, in which artists attempted to faithfully represent the world. But why represent nature realistically if a photograph could do it just as well?

One need only look at Picasso’s notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into “Les Demoiselles.” He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks with his attempts to represent the women. It was with this painting that he introduced the world to what would become known as cubism.8

With “Les Demoiselles,” Picasso radically simplified human forms so that they no longer signaled social or psychological information. Picasso began working with shapes that did not necessarily belong together. Specifically, he collapsed several perspectives into a single image. For example, the two central women in “Les Demoiselles” face forward, but their noses are in profile.

Picasso spent a lot of time working on the women’s faces—often moving from realistic representations to geometric forms.

In his notebooks, Picasso established “a repertoire” that he could pull from for “Les Demoiselles” as well as future paintings.9

Much as he worked on composing a face of geometric forms, he also worked on the proportions of a human body, using techniques he had learned at the academy.

And then he used these proportions as he worked on the women’s bodies over and over again.

He worked on how he would position them.

After so many repetitions, Picasso moved on to consider color.

Then, After hundreds of sketches, he felt ready to approach the canvas and, ultimately, to stun the world.

Studying Picasso’s sketchbooks make one thing especially clear: Creativity begins well before the masterwork. It begins with a lot of sketches. Before “Les Demoiselles,” there were countless repetitions. Picasso gives us permission to make a mess in our notebooks.

Notes on Picasso’s Notes:

Think back to your childhood: Having studied many creative people’s notebooks, I’ve found that, like Picasso, people often clearly express their preoccupations, interests, and character quite early in their childhood notes. Perhaps that is true of you too? I know it is true for me.

Creativity is Repetition: I’ve been thinking about Picasso’s creative practice in terms of repetition—the necessary, unglamorous labor of creative work. And thinking about it in terms of writing in particular (because I’m a writer and an English professor). Writing this post helped me realize that so much of what I try to teach students is that writing requires a kind of sketching—trying out multiple introductory paragraphs before settling on one, for example. I also realize that this is what I do when I write. It’s not even conscious at this point. I tend to write a different introduction every time I open a document. If time allowed, I’d rewrite every sentence in this post a hundred times.

Think about the relationship between consecutive pages of your notebook: One particular technique Picasso used in his notebooks was pressing hard enough with his pencil to leave an imprint on the following page that he could play with as he sketched the same form again. Play with pressing down on your pen or pencil to create ghost images as Picasso did.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Yours in note-taking,

P.S. Paid subscribers can read about how Picasso used photography while creating Guernica:

P.P.S. Picasso was one of the first celebrities in the age of photography and film. For that reason, we have some wonderful recording his process. I’ll leave you with the artist himself, as filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot for his 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso.

The hand that wrote the words in her journals; the hands that hovered over the pages I held in the archive; and, finally, the hand that drew this sketch floating on a notebook page:

My breath caught when I saw this image. It struck me as precisely the kind of picture that would have fascinated Sontag.

This hand curled in on itself recalls the fragmentation of body parts Sontag noticed in photographs. Because she sketched her own left hand, I cannot help but think of that hand as it is now—entombed in Père Lachaise Cemetery. As Sontag wrote,

Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.1

Can we say the same of sketches, I wonder?

Maybe if given enough time I could approximate a Sontag-style reading of this particular notebook page, but I could never write exactly like her. In fact, I don’t want to. Why would I write in imitation of a great stylist for any other reason than as a kind of exercise?

All of this made me wonder about style. What is it? How do we recognize it? Where do we locate style in a piece of writing? Sontag wondered about these things too and wrote about them throughout her career.

Much like Sontag, I love a list. Prompted in part by her fabulous accretions of information, as I read through her notes, I collected her reflections on style.

Sontag wrote about style as an aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical issue. If this sounds abstract, it also has practical implications. After all, we can see Sontag refining her personal style in her notebooks.

Moreover, Sontag’s reflections have helped me think about my own writing style, both in terms of the overall form of my essays, the subjects I choose to write about, and the rhythms of my sentences. It has helped me think about how to support students as they develop their own styles.

I hope this list also helps you think through your own style—writerly or otherwise.

These post-scripts offer paid subscribers a deeper dive into the figures I cover in Noted’s regular posts. While I work on my book, I’m pushing these postscripts to every other Monday. The next post will be free, and you can read my full post on Sontag’s notes for free here. As always, if you can’t upgrade right now, send me a message and I’ll comp you.

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Tha…

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