I buy notebooks with unreasonable optimism.
Every time I open a new one, I seem to believe I have become a different kind of person.
Organised.
Disciplined.
Possibly even someone who writes dates at the top of pages.
This illusion rarely survives the first week.
By page twelve, there is a sentence without context, the name of a street I no longer remember looking up, three words underlined twice, and a question that appears to have been extremely important at two in the morning.
I have no idea what it means.
This used to bother me.
I thought notebooks were supposed to become records. Neat collections of ideas moving gradually towards something complete.
Mine never did.
They became archaeological sites.
An unfinished thought on one page might sit thirty pages away from the answer to a question I had forgotten asking.
A description of a railway station could suddenly make sense beside a note about two people who did not yet have names.
Nothing was in order.
And yet, occasionally, something connected.
I began to understand that perhaps this was the point.
Ideas rarely arrive politely.
They do not wait until the previous thought has finished.
They interrupt.
They appear while you are doing something else.
They insist that a particular sentence matters and then refuse to explain why.
A notebook gives them somewhere to wait.
Most ideas will never become stories.
Some should not.
There are observations that deserve only one line.
Questions that are more interesting without answers.
Characters who appear briefly, say something useful, and disappear before anyone has the chance to give them a surname.
I used to think unused ideas were wasted ideas.
Now I think they are part of the cost of finding the right ones.
A notebook filled with perfect ideas would worry me.
It would suggest I had stopped taking risks.
Or, more likely, that I had started lying to myself.
The empty page is honest.
It makes no promises.
It does not care what you wrote yesterday or whether the last idea worked.
It simply waits.
Perhaps that is why a new notebook still feels optimistic, despite all the evidence I have collected against this feeling.
I open the cover.
I look at the first page.
For a brief moment, everything is possible.
Then I write something completely unrelated to what I intended.
And the notebook begins.
— D. Vaen