hypergraphia

jbecreate:

Don’t forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.

-Charles De Lint

tenderbeasts:

I wanted to make a post about my avid note taking, notebook having tendencies. I have a lot of ideas about notebooks as memory repositories, layers and layers of ideas and thoughts collected into one place. A whole museum of concepts. Places of worship for words. If not just to remember things, I recommend notebooks as a place (and note taking as an action of putting things into that place) as something that lets things come to life and grow outside of your likely, if you’re anything like me, cluttered brain. Sometimes it just becomes a good place to talk to yourself.  

(A few images of a pocket moleskine i’ve been working on a specific project in) 

I function as a writer and artist, it’s never been ‘either or’ or even ‘both’. It’s one thing that is me, defined as two things for everyone else to understand.  So my notes become this frantic amalgamation of scribbles and doodles. I normally start with drawing. A drawing fills the page and I write around it or in it. 

The drawings don’t always correspond to the words but sometimes they do.

What do i take notes about? The simple answer is everything I am interested in remembering and recording. Fact or thought or emotion or story idea, name, character, setting, it get’s written down. I think a good way to really think about it is to convince yourself that everything has a worth and while it’s up to you to decide what that worth is, acknowledging that it at the very least has that worth and means something, puts weight into it. I think that’s a good place to grow from. To understand that the smallest idea can become something big and wonderful if you give it the space to grow.  

( I had a bad habit of shoving all this chunky ephemera into my notebook until I could no longer write in it, I have since purchased a cork board and pin all that up on there)

I often find that note taking works better for me when I have something to work on, a project to direct that to. Taking notes has become this need, it’s how i process the world, pulling things apart and putting them back together again. I often approach note taking not like a writer but like a magpie snatching every shiny thing it passes by or a tinkerer, trying parts on for size, fingers always twitching to build. There’s always something to record, to detail and work out, to pull to pieces and put those pieces into together with pieces from other places, making connections. It’s a dialogue that doesn’t end. I love working in them because they feel so alive. 

I often carry all my sketchbooks/notebooks around with me because I like to flip and see what I was working on. I got a little obsessive about it at one stage before I had to take a step back and reconsider. 

A lot of the pages looked like this little lovely thing

I think my advice for note taking and notebook keeping would be 

1. Stop judging the output, stop thinking of how it’s going to look (or do if that’s what works for you). I’ve never gone into a page of my notebooks thinking about how I want it to look but rather the idea i want to get out of my head. Let the idea speak for itself. 
   
2. Find something you like working in, find utensils you like working with. Comfort and familiarity with a thing causes you to relax and it let’s things grow organically.
3. Your notebook and note taking aren’t gonna look like mine just like mine aren’t going to look like yours, both are good. Don’t compare your work to others! Compare your work to your old work and remember that nothing can devalue the worth of those ideas and thoughts. 
4. Talk to yourself, go on page long rambles about your favourite recipes, about the movie you loved, record the interesting facts that no one cares about when you tell them, draw a lil bug and call him steve. In a few months, a few years you’re gonna see it and think very fondly about it. 
   
   

This is ok to reblog and If you have any questions or thoughts feel free to approach me!!

(via notebookmuseum)

thefusspot:

So it appears that Autodesk did a thing.

Go nuts, my friends.

(via bigmammallama5)