I’ve been re-reading old bullet journal this morning and found this page, from 2016, which led to the most important writing gig I’ve ever had:

I produced this on my friend Meg’s back deck, trying to sort through the complicated steps required to apply for a PhD and break them into tangible, completable steps. I basically broke down everything I had to do–and especially the things I didn’t know how to do–and laid things out.

I wrote this on the 29th of August, 2016.

By January of 2017 I was in the program, on scholarship, producing three short books (White Harbor War, On Writing Series, and the yet-to-be-released Cerberus Station Rumble). For three and a bit years, the university paid my bills and I got to sit and think and write.

Back in February I wrote a blog post about the things writers and publishers can learn when comparing the CIA’s Practical Timelines for culinary students to traditional recipe formats. The Practical Timeline essentially breaks down what we think of as a “recipe” into four categories of information:

What ingredients do we need?What tools do we need?When needs to be done?When does it need to be completed?

The page above was the first time I applied that thinking to a complicated project with a bunch of small, daunting steps that could have derailed me. This single page plan basically worked thorugh five layers of questions:

What do I need to gather together for the applicatoion?What do I need to do?What do I need to find out?What are the smaller tasks?When order do I need to do things?

I doubt I’ll ever write anything that pays me as well as the years I spent on a PhD scholarship, and one might think that’s what makes this page valuable.

And you’re partially right. But I’m looking at it for another reason.

NOTEBOOKS MAKE PROCESS VISIBLE

I’ve been thiking about this page a lot this week, as I recently asked one of my mentees to consider working in a notebook for a stretch. They’re very much an at-the-keyboard kind of writer, and normally I’d roll with that, but they’ve hit a period of feeling disconnected from a project.

I usually advise a short stint of writing in notebooks for a few reasons. First, because filling a page is more tangible than typing 250 words, particualrly in the era where word processes infinitately scroll and add new pages as each one is filled.

Second, because making writing tactile is often distracting enough to shut up that little perfectionist voice that wants to focus on why things are bad. And writing in a notebook is, tangibly, not a finished draft. It frees you up to make mistakes.

But the third reason–and the most significant, for me–is that notebooks make processes visible. When we write on a computer it’s easy to write and rewrite and lose track of how things iterate and develop.

We don’t get a sense of whether we write good lines on the first draft, or come up with them as part of a process. Our creative thinking tends to disappear because it’s hard to go back and see what was after you’ve made a change.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there are times where it’s incredibly useful to be able to see how something developed. Looking back at my 2016 notebook, I’m actually surprised by how much pre-work I was doing on the page.

I’ve got about twelve years of journals showing how I work. They don’t always have a complete picture–my focus on a bullet journal waxes and wanes, depending on what else is going on–but it’s enough to see patterns and the relationship between periods and how strings of “bad” weeks often lead to work I’m incredibly proud of in retrospect.

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