Helen Sword's Pleasurable Notes

"Containers for chaos”

Jan 27, 2025

Among the many joys of writing this newsletter is getting to meet some of my writing-heroes—not least among them, the great

Helen Sword

. It is not an understatement to say that Helen taught me how to write academic prose through her books such as Stylish Academic Writing, Air & Light & Time & Space, The Writer’s Diet, and most recently, Writing with Pleasure.

Writing with Pleasure helped me understand why I love note-taking so much: it makes writing pleasurable. In fact, for this book Helen asked nearly 600 academics to describe pleasurable writing experiences. 60% of the responses included “writing experiences that involved some form of writing by hand.”1

Helen is also a wildly creative note-taker. So, pick up your pen and join me on an exploration of Helen’s methods. I hope they add a bit more pleasure to your note-taking practice—they certainly have for me!

Helen’s Life Notes

We began our conversation with Helen’s life-long diary habit. Here she shares a selection of diaries.

Notice how the diary open at the far right of the above image begins “Part II” — this is because a teenage Helen tore out all the diary entries from 13-14 years old, explaining:

Today I ripped out and threw away the first section of my diary from basically the age of 13-14. I feel that my entries during that time did not really express my actual feelings, and thus sounded corny and immature. So I have gotten rid of them and to hell with posterity!

In a diary entry from her mid-twenties, as Helen developed into the literary critic and writer that she is today, she casts a critical eye on her diary practice, explaining,

I realize and have long realized that my pleasure in diary writing is threefold, at least. First, it helps me crystallize my thoughts, clarify my positions, and as a side benefit, hone my writing skills. Secondly, it provides a written record of thoughts, attitudes and experiences that I can (and do) look back on with pleasure…

And then, a young Helen wonders about the third utility of these journals: leaving a record after her death. In lines that recall the Brontës, she writes,

Some great-grandchild will find this book at the back of the closet. And I will, at least as a pale apparition, come briefly to life.

But when she became a mother, Helen explains, her diaries became boring as she self-censored, realizing that she didn’t want one of her children to accidentally pick up a journal and read about themselves.

Helen’s Process Notes

For the last fifteen years, Helen has carried around small notebooks wherever she goes. These “process notes,” she explains,

…are just me thinking all the time.

Her process notes record raw ideas, to-do lists, and diagrams that help Helen think through ideas. She hasn’t indexed them but she does go back through them. If there are ideas or quotations she’d like to capture, she records them in the next notebook or on a digital file. She’ll also cross out things she’s already done.

Helen explains that she struggles with “neat notebooks” because she’s always drafting and editing and changing ideas as she goes along. After all, the notebook is not her finished product; she keeps them in service to her teaching and published books.

Helen’s Purposeful Notes

Then, there are notes Helen keeps for particular ends. Each records a different note-taking practice, so I’ve added numbers to Helen’s picture. The descriptions below correspond with each numbered notebook.

One of Helen’s teen commonplace books, recording lyrics from favorite songs.
Helen’s contribution to the September Commonplace Book Club. She picked a tarot card everyday, found a quote to match it, and then wrote a reflection.
Helen’s attempt at morning pages. As she explains, she unwittingly picked a very large notebook for a practice that requires three pages of writing every day.
Helen’s gardening journal.
“Memories and Dreams”: A commonplace book filled entirely with Helen’s original poetry
A dream journal from Helen’s early 20s. Rereading this journal, Helen says, is like encountering “a foreign self.”
The Email Trail, which is Helen’s game for making email more enjoyable by turning it into a coloring exercise. She charts different aspects of her email exchanges. For example: How many people did each message go to? What was the gender of each person? Did Helen reply or delete the email?
Helen’s original teen poetry against an illustrated background.

Helen’s Book Notes

Helen has been writing books since the mid 1990s.

1. Academic Research

Helen’s first books were academic (Ghostwriting Modernism and Engendering Inspiration). At this time, she kept notes on a yellow legal pad as she did research in the British Library. (Back when it was housed in the British Museum and there was actually a “pornography room” where scholars went to read books like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.)

2. Color as an Organizing Principle

For her books on writing, Helen used an entirely different method of data collection.

I asked Helen to share one of her spreadsheets for Stylish Academic Writing—it’s the book that first made me fall in love with her writing. Here, she analyzes over 1,000 peer-reviewed articles across several disciplines to discover the styles that work. In the following spreadsheet, she tracks examples of jargon, abstractions, titles, and “show and tell.” She explains:

The top section shows which authors and topics actually ended up in the book, while the bottom section lists possible alternates.

Looking at this spreadsheet, you will not be surprised to learn that color is one of her “key organizing principles.”

As she worked on her most recent book, Writing With Pleasure, she realized just how valuable color can be as an organizing principle. She explains,

…color and writing by hand in notebooks and all of those things are actually really important and valuable forms of thinking and of organizing knowledge. I think it’s really easy to get acculturated into thinking that color is frou-frou. It’s not serious; serious scholarship is black and white print. And so over the years, but especially with that book [Writing with Pleasure], I just went back and said, no, color is good, because it actually helps me think.

For a look at how Helen uses color in her Scrivener, watch her conversation with

Margy Thomas

on Secrets of Structure.

Screenshot from Helen’s conversation with Margy

3. “Containers for Chaos”

To visualize the structure of Writing with Pleasure, Helen created post-it notes for each section of the book (chapters and chapter sections). Then she recorded each section’s main point followed by its supporting evidence.

With these post-it notes, she was able to play with the book’s structure and move parts around. Along the way Helen also wrote a haiku for each chapter as a way to further crystalize her ideas.

Helen describes her Scrivener files, these post-it notes, and her haikus as “containers for chaos”—ways to reign in the messy components that she will ultimately wrangle into a finished book.

As Helen explains:

I’m a paradox of a really messy mind that is also very structural.

Helen’s Handmade Notebooks

Given that color is so important to Helen, it makes sense that she also creates her own colorful art in the form of collages. She uses these collages in her newsletter and WriteSPACE courses, and to decorate her notebooks.

When we met last May in Brooklyn, Helen gifted me with one of her handmade notebooks and it remains one of my most prized possessions. There’s no gift quite like a handmade gift.

Notes on Helen’s Notes:

Master your Notebook Envy: In our conversation, Helen echoed a comment I hear frequently from readers. Sometimes we look at other people’s notes and wish we could take notes that are as beautiful, organized, tidy, [insert your own adjective here].... I certainly feel this way sometimes! Then, I remind myself that we all think differently, so we all need different kinds of notes. Noted would be very boring if all notetakers were the same!

Experiment with different note-taking methods: Get to know your own mind and the way you think through ideas by playing with different note-taking techniques. Some will work for you. Most won’t. Just remember to stay flexible, and allow your note-taking methods to evolve with new projects as Helen’s have.

Discover your own organizing principle: Helen uses color to organize her notes. I love color, but it doesn’t really work for me as an organizing principle. I find grouping notes under keywords much more useful. I’m also a big fan of diagrams with color added in for fun, not for organizational purposes. What are your organizing principles?

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

I’m personally going to try Helen’s haiku and sticky-note organizing techniques as I work on my new book. I’d love to know if you’re eager to try out any of Helen’s practices.

I’d also love to know about note-taking practices you find pleasurable. Let me know in the comments.