stationery junkie – Deborah Makarios

March 23, 2018

Six Sorts of Stationery for Starting Your Book

It is possible (I hear) to write a book entirely digitally, from inkling (inklessling?) to final draft. But if you’re a lover of stationery such as myself, such a prospect rather chills than cheers. This list is for you.

The first requirement of writing a book is, of course, a Pen. Now, you could use an endless supply of disposables, but it would be much more ecologically friendly – as well as more pleasant and aesthetically pleasing – to use a fountain pen. I wrote the first draft of Restoration Day with an old green Faber-Castell, and then bought myself a TWSBI Diamond Mini to celebrate. It is this latter that I shall be using for the first draft of the new book.

A pen is, of course, of little use without Ink (except in case of emergency tracheotomy; do not try this at home). Here is where the fountain pen really comes into its own: you can have pretty much any colour you choose – and some even come with scents. I picked Diamine Majestic Purple as the thematic colour for Restoration Day, and over 160,000 words later, I’ve only used about 2/3 of the 30mL bottle. For this new book (I really must come up with a good working title) I shall be using Diamine Kensington Blue.

It is true that ink comes in cartridges as well as bottles, but I say leave ink cartridges to printers. A cartridge is, after all, just a way to throw out part of your pen instead of all of it. And if you are worried about needing to refill on the go, get a TWSBI pen with one of their plug-in ink bottles. All the convenience, none of the mess, and it looks great on your desk. (No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.)

Having sorted out your basic writing implement, the next thing you need is something to write on. I would suggest – particularly if you are not yet sure whether your idea has what is known as “legs” – that you do not launch straight into a proper book. Instead, have a Noodling Notebook. This can be as flash or as plain as you like: I used a 3B1 with an evocative pattern glued to the cover.

Fleshing out your idea – what a grotesque expression; let us depart from it – exploring and filling out your idea in your noodling notebook will either fill you with such enthusiasm that it is clear a larger book will be required; or make you realize that as fun as the idea was, it isn’t enough to carry a book. In which case you at least have the consolation that you haven’t wasted your stationery treasure on a few scant pages of notes.

Once you get to the point that your noodling is starting to slop over the edges and grow right out of your notebook, you may think that it is time to take to the proper book. You would be wrong. Don’t believe me? Write down all the juicy little scene ideas which have sprouted out of your noodling on to Index Cards. (Note: not every idea constitutes a scene.) Then lay them out in the order indicated (a pinboard avec pins may assist with this, unless you have a large flat surface which is not otherwise encumbered with meals, cats, sewing etc).

According to Larry Brooks, a novel has, at a rough estimate, about 60 scenes. Do you have 60 cards with scene ideas on them? Alack! It is not so. This can be a rather depressing moment, when you realize that your lofty dreams are in fact exceedingly vague in the middle, but it is better to realize this now than after you have written 30,000 words and realize it’s not going anywhere. (Take it from someone who knows.)

Hence the cards. They also constitute a significantly easier to re-engineer form of your novel than an actual manuscript; but they’re easier to take in at a glance than a page of notes on a screen. Plus there is the possibility of colour-coding!

Finally, you are ready to write the book itself. What do you choose? Some may like to work their way through a ream of paper (one word of advice: paperweights), while others use what for want of a better term I will call Exercise Books. I wrote Restoration Day in eight large ugly ring-bound books – left pages only as I am left-handed when writing and it is exceedingly uncomfortable as well as messy to write with your hand resting on a large metal spiral.

For the new book, I have decided to treat myself. I purchased two Paper Lane A4 80gsm 240-page 7mm-ruled FSC hardback “journals” in blue (and on sale, yay!). The pen loop is rather too small for the TWSBI (another point in favour of fountain pens as opposed to disposable ball-points: you aren’t gripping a tiny barrel for hours on end); but I expect the storage pocket will come in handy.

Which brings me to the last of the six sorts of stationery: the classic Bits of Paper. Yes, you could just use odd bits of whatever comes to hand – old envelopes, receipts, the back of an unwary piece of A4 that strayed on to your desk – but you are much less likely to lose your thoughts, notes, lists etc if they are on pieces of paper which are unequivocally To Do With This. (This also avoids the drama of losing yesterday’s notes and ransacking your desk, only to find that they are on the reverse of today’s notes.)

I like to make a quick précis of what’s going to happen next when I break off for the day, so as to jog my memory quickly back into the flow the next day. Also useful for figuring out exchanges in the right order, diagrams, and a myriad other uses. Consider getting a memo cube or scribble pad in your thematic colour, to be used only for that project. That way, when you see a piece of it floating around your desk, you’ll know what project it belongs to – and when you’re missing a note it’ll be easier to find.

Those are, of course, merely the basics. Truly dedicated stationery-lovers will no doubt find a dozen other openings for stationery in the process of writing a book. Suggestions?

March 19, 2018

Stationery Junkie?

Or, if you prefer, stationery geek, stationery lover, or merely connoisseur of the finer things in paper-related life.

Regardless of the terminology employed, is this you? Do untouched notebooks make your heart beat faster? Do you obsess over writing implements? Do you hoard – in short, do you love to buy, receive and/or use stationery? What are your tastes – and what your most recent addition?

April 24, 2015October 19, 2017

Dear Diary: Woe!

Thus began my first attempt at a written chronicle of my day-to-day life. I was twelve years old, which may account for the style. Or, then again, that might just be me.

I pursued the theme, off and on, for years. Jo Brand says that she re-reads her diary occasionally “to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.” I don’t re-read mine, for similar reasons. I was probably only miserable a minority of the time, but that minority formed the majority of the time I wrote in my diary. When I was happy, I was too busy enjoying myself to bother telling an exercise book about it.

More enjoyably, I kept a joint diary with a friend for some time. We had two exercise books, and swapped them once a week, read what the other had written, and had a jolly good go at solving the problems of the universe together.

Once the circumstances of life drove us to different countries, my diarising became very intermittent, until I left university and suddenly found myself craving the word fix. The diary from that year is not so much miserable as simply too boring to re-read, although I’ve considered trying it as a remedy for sleeplessness.
The following year I moved to Wellington to study scriptwriting, which solved the word fix problem; but, being away from everyone I knew, I kept talking to the diary anyway. (Back to the miserable setting, alas.)

Then the Caped Gooseberry and I started our long-distance courtship, and I gave up writing a diary, because why rewrite in a book what one has already typed out in an email? As I was unemployed that year (overqualified for any job I could do, underqualified for everything else), I sent a lot of emails. Certainly not miserable, but probably boring to any but the starry-eyed correspondents themselves.

Then I got a job, got engaged, and moved cities (all in a matter of weeks), which left me learning the new job full-time, planning a wedding and filling in weekends at a writing initiative in another city. Re-starting a diary somehow failed to make it back on to the To Do list. It wasn’t until a year or so later, when my spiritual director suggested I read The Artist’s Way, that I started regularly diarising, or journalling, or whatever you call it.

The early ‘morning pages’ read largely as repeated rants about how cold it was – I used to get up half an hour early for this – and how much I wanted to leave my job. (By now an experienced diarist, I was capable of being both miserable and boring at the same time.) Then I started blogging, and soon after had the idea to actually do the Artist’s Way exercises, over the course of a year. Which I did, more or less, blogging about it as I went. Luckily for the reading public, I never blogged the morning pages.

But by the end of that year, the morning pages had turned into a sort of spiritual diary. Largely, to be fair, me ranting at God, but then, God likes people to talk to him, even if all they do is yell. I think those early morning scribbles kept me sane, or at least out of depression’s grip. It seemed some days that was the only thing worth getting up for, and the only thing that could bear me through the day. I had to keep it up.

Once I left my job, I carried on with it, albeit at a much more civilized hour of the morning. (If God had intended humans to rise before dawn, he would have made us able to see in the dark.) I generally write in it six days a week, and sometimes include what’s been happening in my outer world, particularly when it affects my inner world.
No-one reads it but myself and occasionally the Caped Gooseberry. Oddly, considering that it’s a place for being honest with myself about deep and sometimes difficult things, it’s actually an enjoyable experience to re-read, unlike the “what I did today” diaries – or more accurately, the “what I felt about what I did today” diaries. Neither miserable nor boring – who’d have thought I had it in me?

I keep three other diaries, to my surprise; or rather, two diaries and an annal.

One is the record of my writing work, written in a paperblanks week-at-a-time diary (a Foiled Mini Horizontal with a magnetic closure, if you’re a stationery junkie like myself). I keep track of what I worked on each day, as far as both the current Work In Progress and this blog are concerned. I also note other matters of writerly importance, such as how often the fountain pen requires refilling (a good indicator of how much writing I’m getting through) and when I buy ink, or a craft book.

The second diary only dates from the beginning of this month, and I am writing it on the computer – I really don’t know why. Why on the computer, that is. I’m not quite weird enough to write a diary without knowing why. It’s a very specialized diary, and I promise to tell you all about it – some other time. (It pleases me to be mysterious about the prosaic. Bear with me, I beg you.)

The annal is one which the Caped Gooseberry and I keep together. The book which houses it was a gift from my comrades at the DDJ – a beautifully bound blank-paged book in which, each anniversary, we sum up the happenings of the previous year. It is sometimes disturbing to look back and see how much one has forgotten, even of the ‘highlights’. Forgetting the photos which are taken at the same time is, in my case, a matter of self-defence – I am most decidedly not photogenic.

To finish on a completely random note, if you are looking for a fictional diary to read, I can highly recommend Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. A cut (or indeed, a whole slice) above the usual run of historical-fictional teenage girls’ diaries, and very funny to boot. This is one of those books where the reader becomes incapacitated with laughter and the book has to be passed around the room. (This is the voice of experience.)

Sadly, I fear posterity will find no such hilarity in my diaries, should I unaccountably fail to have them destroyed before I die. Posterity: consider yourself warned.