You can’t get a lot of good from an expensive notebook.

You can’t get a lot of good from an expensive notebook. I usually find they’re too precious to spoil with mistakes - and most of my words are a mistake. They don’t make me write much; their premium weight is something I can’t put out of my mind. They’re not heavy with potential, they’re heavy with obligation.

In the end, if you want to write, the goddamn tatters and smears and bent pages of a cheap notebook won’t stop you. And if you don’t, a leather bound volume with pages spun out of silk won’t save you. The words are going to come, or the words are going to remain out of your grasp, and there ain’t much you can buy from a stationary shop going to fix it.

They’re all just tools.

We put a lot of store by our tools. Notebooks, sure, and laptops and tablets too. Smartphones, pens and cameras. The tools dominate our work. We consume them, and then they consume us.

Some of the biggest moments of the calendar year seem to be the announcement of new tools, from Google, from Microsoft, from Apple. We wait with bated breath to see what these tools are going to be, and to imagine the work that we’ll do on them, and the worlds we’ll build, but I can’t shake the feeling that we spend more time gasping and imagining than we do making.

When I was a kid, I wrote my first digital words on a Commodore 64. I’ve written line after line, story after story in word processors, Linux laptops, Blackberries, that first iPhone, laptops so old and so clunky they groan and whine with every keystroke, and yes, tattered old notebooks. Today, I write most of my work in a beat up and second hand MacBook that I’ve travelled the world with, and bent and dented falling off of skateboards, and covered with stickers. All of these words carry the same value and the same worth, and none of them are impacted by my tools, beyond sheer enablement.

I don’t think much about my tools.

It leaves too little room for them to work.

xox Joany 🍕