If there’s one shop, other than a bookshop, in which I can lose all track of time (and spend a near fortune!) it’s a stationer’s. Notebooks in all shapes and colours and sizes and designs, lined up on shelves, just waiting to be filled, to paraphrase William Wordsworth, with the breathings of your heart. If I want a treat for myself or a writer friend, I visit Smythson of Bond Street  and choose one of their beautiful leather-bound notebooks. The smell! The feel of the pages! Divine…

I have had a notebook to hand for so many years now that it’s second nature to me: I’m bereft without one. As a young woman, I wrote my first book longhand in notebooks; today, I reserve them for jotting down ideas as they come to mind. I think many writers have a strong relationship with notebooks: despite our use of modern technology to write novels efficiently, to write will always mean to write.

Author Lawrence Norfolk recently wrote an interesting piece for BBC News entitled ‘Writers’ notebooks: A junkyard of the mind’. He states:

A notebook accumulates its value slowly, line by line and page by page. (…) A full notebook potentially contains the rest of your writing life.

That is how I see my notebooks: invaluable. They are the mapping of inspiration and creativity; they are the soul of the writer on paper.

For me, the joy of writing in a notebook is that it feels liberating. I can write anything, in any way! This is writing that is just for me – there are no rules; there is no one judging.

Or is there?

If you are lucky enough to become a renowned author, your notebooks become objects of great worth. The British Library, for example, exhibits all sorts of author notes, from great writers like Austen, Dickens and Hardy. Perusing their notes affords a glimpse into ideas in their rawest form.

I wonder, though, how these writers would feel about the publication of their notes? Would they edit them, if they could? Rewrite them more neatly? Would they see such publication as an invasion of their privacy, or simply be delighted by the interest in their creative process?

However they may feel, I don’t doubt that they would never wish their notebooks destroyed. They may be a world away from my published books, but in fact my notebooks – those vehicles through which I created my books – will always remain just as precious.