When it comes to items, there are many things I have replaced throughout my life. I even had months without my phone or laptop. As a person, I always find myself getting distracted from whatever it is I am doing. I get into things then get out of them. As a writer, there was one thing that always kept me in control, relatively speaking, of course.

My Notebook

Or notebooks, to be more precise. I have a total of 23 notebooks. I started acquiring them around 5 years ago. Before that, my brain was a jumbled mess cooking in the microwave at 500 degrees. It wasn't fun, to say the least.

I usually use my laptop or whatever, but I get distracted by ideas in general. A movie idea, a poetry line, a book or short story idea, or even general topics I plan to write a comedy about or research further.

My Life Before Notebooks

Have you ever had that friend that always seems anxious or distracted at a friends' gathering? I remember until today, a time when I was literally making out with someone and suddenly found myself realizing what the ending of Inception meant, I swear to God, I am not lying. I was literally in the middle of making out with the girl and thinking:

Did the spinning top stop spinning or not? It must have stopped because it was kinda twirling near the end as he was walking away.

And literally, at that moment I said, OUT LOUD:

OH THE POINT IS THAT HE WAS LETTING GO OF HIS OBSESSION!

Let Me Explain

Whenever I get an idea of any sort, it consumes me. I keep thinking about it nonstop until I am done. So I could be doing work and still thinking about some plot in a story I need to write about. Now, instead of just waiting until I am done working and going home then do that, I would be distracted by it all day.

It gets worse with writing itself. One line would take me out of the entire thing I am working on and forces me to focus elsewhere. The end result is often getting stuck in between, and about 70% of the time I would get neither done.

I remember having this idea about stories that are more surrealistic and feelings-based than the actual plot about 7 years ago. But, every time I would get down to writing about one, I would keep thinking about the next. The end result was me dropping everything together.

It is like that annoying song that gets stuck in your head. But, instead of just one, it's like 20 songs playing at once. You can't make out any of them. There's a haunting feeling I have that the ideas would disappear, so I keep trying to save them all together so they wouldn't just fade away.

My Life After Notebooks

It really sounds like a "Duh!" moment now that I think about it retrospectively. Having that notebook with me saved me from getting distracted so many times. I could get a basic idea, write it down, then come back for it later. I could even include in writing what made me think about it and it would all work out later.

The feeling of writing something yourself in a notebook isn't the same as just going to notes on your phone. There's more feeling to it and it allows me to remember things like how I felt when I wrote this down and find that feeling again while writing something on a phone or computer always made me feel more mechanic. It's a bit complicated to explain so let me show you.

First of all, my handwriting is horrible, I know. But there's just more freedom in just moving the pen rather than drag, click this, and click that to make the font look like this or add a line here or there. When I look at these notes, I could look at my thinking process and not just the neat end result. I could retract my feelings work on them and much more.

Having scribbles on something reminds me of what didn't work and why instead of not having it there at all.

Finally

As you can see, they're messy, and that's my writing process. It is a constant mess until the final result. It is my ideas in the correct form, it is simply me.