Friday Write #115

The genius of commonplace books

Greetings, writers—

Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’m not sure I knew what a commonplace book was until a few months ago, when I told my friend L about copying a lot of quotes from a novel I was reading. “Oh,” she said, “you’re keeping a commonplace book,” and I said, “Yeah, I am, totally,” as if I was familiar with the term and knew what I was doing all along.

When celebrated memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club, Lit, etc.) was a guest on optimization bro Tim Ferriss’s podcast¹ and he asked her about practices particularly helpful for writers, she suggested keeping a commonplace book². Karr said she’s kept them for years, copying down poems, good lines, and “beautiful pieces of language.”

A page from the commonplace book of Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening, among many other works of fiction

So it’s a place for literary excerpts? Ferriss asked, and she said yes, but you could also write down something you heard on the street. She explains:

There was a guy standing on my street. This is like a couple of years ago when I first moved into this apartment, screaming “Murder or suicide?” at the top of his lungs. And everybody was walking around the street, walking around him. And it was early in the morning and I walked up to him and I said, “Excuse me, sir.” He was screaming, “Murder or suicide? Murder or suicide?” And I went up to him and said, “Sir, isn’t there like a third alternative? Like, isn’t there a door number three?” And that little encounter I wrote down.

Ferriss, naturally, wants to know what happened next on the street.

I was going in to get a pastry for a friend of mine who was visiting from London. I got him one. I thought I’d bring him a pastry when I came out. But when I walked into the bakery, he was looking at the sky with a curious look. He was thinking, like, “Isn’t there a door number three? Isn’t there another? Gosh, there might just be a door number three.”

I still think there must be more to that story, but Karr leaves it at that. She goes on:

Mostly what I write down are pieces of language or things, poems that I read, paragraphs, anything, so that you’re just constantly copying in longhand. You can’t type it. You’re constantly copying things that are beautiful. You’re constantly guzzling beauty, you’re guzzling the beautiful language. So that you’re kind of steeped in it like a fruitcake in good brandy.

I love the idea of being steeped in beauty. Who wouldn’t?

My reading page-count has ticked up lately, and so has my collection of excellent lines from novels. (I’m still on a mid-century NYRB kick.) But—and here is another embarrassing thing—I don’t copy these lines down in a journal. I scan them, via the Notes app on my iPhone.

To not handwrite a beautiful line seems like a crime, albeit a minor one, but I’ve come to terms with the sad fact that while I can rarely locate the right notebook, I can always locate my phone, even if I have to use the Find My alert. Plus, if I use the scanning function, I can clip entire paragraphs and I won’t have to struggle to read my handwriting.

Do you keep a commonplace book, in any sort of format? If you don’t, I encourage you to start, because they can be downright inspirational. My scanned quotes teach me things, remind me of ideas I want to explore, and offer me heights to aspire to.

Two options for your writing prompt today:

1. Begin—or add to—a notebook/Notes file of wonderful phrases you come across in your reading. (Or on the street. Or anywhere.)

2. Riffing on Mary Karr’s story, write a scene in which one of your characters encounters a stranger in some kind of crisis.

My kid was reading The Bell Jar on the train and I scanned the first page. I’d forgotten how good the opening is.

1. …which I used to listen to during my long, slow runs, part of that ‘learn-about-self-improvements-I-shall-not-undertake’ habit of mine that I also find sort of embarrassing

2. You can find the transcript of the podcast here.