Getting a notebook and saving your scraps
Okay. Before we write anything else, we need to talk about where the words go after you write them.
Because they will get lost. I promise you that. You'll be sitting at a stoplight at the point of the mountain, staring at the fog sitting down in the valley like a bowl of soup, and a line will show up in your head fully formed and pretty good, and you will think "I'll remember that." You will not remember that. It'll be gone by the time the light turns green.
So. A notebook.
It doesn't matter what kind
Don't go buy something nice. Don't get the leather one with your initials on it from the fancy aisle. That just adds pressure, like you need to be worthy of the notebook before you write in it. Get whatever's cheap. I use the little spiral ones, three for a dollar, the kind that fall apart eventually. That's fine. By the time it falls apart you'll have filled it.
Keep one in your truck or your car. Keep one by your bed. If you've got a phone and you actually use the notes app, that works too, though I'll admit I don't trust it the same way. Paper doesn't need charging and it doesn't autocorrect "washing" into something embarrassing.
What goes in it
Everything. That's the whole instruction.
- A line that popped into your head
- A phrase somebody said at Costco that had a shape to it
- Half a verse you got stuck on
- A chord you stumbled onto that you liked the sound of but don't have words for yet
- Something your grandmother used to say
I want to be plain about this one, because it's maybe the opinion I hold hardest in this whole class: save your scraps. Most of what you write down won't turn into anything. That's fine. That's not waste, that's just how it works. But the stuff that seems useless today is very often the exact thing you need eighteen months from now when you're stuck on a different song entirely. I hate throwing things away. Ask my wife about the garage. But a half-finished line is not garbage. It's a jar you haven't opened yet.
A story about a jar I opened late
A few years back I was going through some family history papers — this is separate from the whole Nelda situation, this was further back, a great-great-grandmother I never met and barely have a photograph of. And in with the papers was a hymn. Just words. No tune, no notation, nothing. She'd apparently written it herself, sometime in the 1800s, and it had just been sitting folded up in a box for something like a hundred and fifty years.
Nobody living remembers the tune, if there ever was one written down at all. So I put a melody to it. Simple one, because that's what I do. And I have no idea if it's right. I'll never know if it's right. That bothers me a little, honestly, more than I expected it to.
But here's my point. She wrote those words down. She didn't have to. She could have just hummed it to herself while she worked and let it die with her, same as most songs do. Instead she put it somewhere it could be found. A scrap, saved.
That's what your notebook is. You don't know which line in there is going to matter. Neither did she. Write it down anyway.
The practical part
Tonight, before you go to bed, do this:
- Get a notebook. Any notebook. If you don't have one in the house, an index card works for tonight.
- Write today's date at the top of a page.
- Write down three things — a phrase, a line, a word you like the sound of, anything. Doesn't have to connect to anything else.
- Put the notebook somewhere you'll actually see it again. Not a drawer you never open.
That's it. Takes five minutes.
One caution, and it's a small one: if you're keeping a notebook in the truck, keep it out of direct sun on the dash. Doesn't matter much in January but come July it'll cook up there and the pages curl and the ink fades faster than you'd think. Glovebox is fine.
Before next time
Carry the notebook around for a few days and just notice what wants to go in it. Don't force it. You're not writing a song yet, you're just proving to yourself that the scraps are worth catching. 🙏