Mangle Your Moleskine!
Some of you need break the spine of your Moleskine notebook. Some of you need to throw your Star Wars notebook onto the sidewalk and stomp it a couple of times. Some of you need to buy a cheap student notebook from your nearest dollar store.
Here’s why.
Perfect notebooks can limit our creativity. Notebooks with unblemished covers, perfect handwriting and unsmudged pages do not encourage us to doodle, scrawl, experiment and fail. Those are Perfection Notebooks. They are not Idea Books. They are not Work Books.
Perfection has it’s place. Perfection’s place is in the final stages of a creative project. When you are brainstorming, developing ideas and chasing down tangents, you need a notebook you can be rough on. If you want to dig beneath the surface of your creativity, you may need to draw ugly doodles, cross-out unfit phrases, and messily download your brain onto paper.
If you have a notebook you spent a bunch of money on, or if you have a notebook you want to look perfect, you may need a different notebook. Creative work is hard work. You need a notebook you can fill with blood, sweat, tears, elbow grease and muddy fingerprints.
4 Responses to “Mangle Your Moleskine!”
Comment from Shane Shennan
Time May 18, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Yep, creativity definitely has a way of sneaking up on a person. Thank you so much for your comment!
Comment from deriddler
Time July 5, 2009 at 3:12 am
i also appreciate this one- it inspired me to use the various writing materials and books around me and mess them up and get them the good used feeling- thank you 
Comment from Debra Hoffos
Time September 7, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Hi Shane,
I loved your thoughts and challenge here. Last year I bought a nice journal and waited 10 days before I wrote in it because I wanted the first page to be perfect. This got me thinking about how I too put a perfect looking front page on my life. But, just as perfect notebook pages stifle life and creativity, so too does the perfect front page I put on my life. I want to live more like a poet than a chess-player, so I think I need to get used to mess. Thanks again for your inspiration.
Comment from Susan Dedora
Time May 18, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Thank you for your wise words. I’m always adjusting the way I use my moleskin-this morning I was thinking that I would put my lists in it, in an attempt to log it all-have it with me at all the times-creativity comes when you least expect it.