Commonplace Books as Idea Generators

Inspired to take up Jillian Hess's challenge.

Apologies for posting this on a Saturday evening of a holiday weekend, but it describes a writing challenge that begins tomorrow, Sunday, September 1st. If you don’t read this post until Tuesday, just start the challenge then.

One of the inspirations for A General Education has been Jillian Hess’s Substack account, Noted, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Each week Hess presents and analyzes the note-taking practices of a writer, artist, or thoughtful human, followed with a few lessons what we can learn from that individual about transcribing our developing thoughts on paper. Hess’s strategy of focusing each post on a single author, and then drawing a lesson or two from the analysis, provided a model for how I have approached these posts each month.

Hess currently has issued a challenge to her subscribers: Copy out a quote from a favorite source every day for the month of September. She is hosting a Chat in which paid subscribers will post images of their quotes each day (although that part is optional). But the idea is that all of the participants will create what she calls a “glorious communal commonplace book.” Hess has written a scholarly book about commonplace books, which have been a longstanding interest of hers.

I have written about commonplace books myself in Small Teaching, because they were the source of a teaching technique I recommended in Chapter Five of that book. Commonplace books, versions of which have been around since Greek and Roman antiquity, serve as print repositories for the intellectual gatherings of a reading and thinking person. Historically, they were notebooks in which individuals would copy quotations from their reading, as well as other items they wished to record and remember: ideas, conversations, poems, sayings, recipes, and more.

I became interested in commonplace books because of the role they could play as idea-generators. I have long been interested in the sources of our most creative ideas, and in my own life I have noticed that the juxtaposition of seemingly random things has produced some of my own best ideas. A commonplace book facilitates this process. Between the pages of two notebook covers, quotes from Aristotle and Zadie Smith rub shoulders; a line from a movie sits side by side with a funny joke my daughter told me; and on two sides of the same page I find myself reflecting upon the trajectory of my life and writing down the definition of theriomorph, a word I recently encountered in my reading.

When I feel I am stuck in my writing, or looking for new topics that will generate new essays or books, I can page through my notebook and find strange pairings that might become the seed of some new idea. I see unexpected connections across time periods, texts and authors, questions and problems. Having this experience for myself led to the development of Connection Notebooks, the teaching technique I mentioned above. You can read more about them in Small Teaching, but in short they are blue books that I have students to bring into class each week, and at the end of class sometimes I will ask them to make a new connection between that day’s topic and something outside of the course: a life experience, another course, a film or television show. They are essentially variations of commonplace books, but with just a limited frame: a record of something they found interesting in class that day, and some other memorable experience from their lives.

Commonplace books, and notebooks in general, have been generators of meaning in my own life for a long time. Beyond their uses for writing productivity, I find it satisfying to have my notebooks as records of my random ideas and experiences, which lends a sense of stability to the thinking self. Our thoughts, even the best and most striking ones, pass so quickly in and out of our consciousness, that it can produce a sense of intellectual transience that can be unsettling. I can look at my notebooks and think: I read those things, I thought those things, I have been those things. Sometimes I can open a page and recognize the originating moment of a published essay or book.

I should note that my notebooks extend beyond the scope of traditional commonplace books. I do record quotes in them, but I also use them just frequently as journals of daily experiences. I actually didn’t start using personal notebooks at all until I turned forty, and in the last dozen years or so the nature of those notebooks has gradually transformed. For quite a few years I used little spiral-bound ones that were literally called “fat lil notbooks,” which were extremely cheap and could be squeezed into a back pocket. They were convenient but the first and last pages of them were hard to write in, precisely because the notebooks were so thick.

In 2016 I was doing some workshops at Central European University in Budapest and stumbled across an outdoor market that had a stall from BomoArt, and was enchanted by the notebooks they were selling: hardbound with leather trim, with gorgeous cover images, and the opportunity to have your initials embossed in the leather. I bought one, and have never looked back. I now order them online as I need them. I consider this my one financial indulgence as a writer, for which I forgive myself. I’ll own it: I am a writer, and I buy fancy notebooks from Budapest.

I am currently in the middle of one of those notebooks, which contains my usual mix of journaling and commonplace book material, but when Jillian Hess issued her commonplace book challenge, I decided that I would need to start a new one just to fulfill her directive. Fortunately, in order to save on shipping, I usually buy a few notebooks from BomoArt at a time, and I had one remaining blank one.

Jillian Hess’s Commonplace Book Club starts tomorrow, on September 1st, although I couldn’t help myself and started three days early. I have been reading Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, an argument about the role of play in the development of culture, and intend to write about it in an upcoming post in this space. But two quotes from that book had already struck me as worth preserving: one from the Foreword, about Huizinga’s compulsion to write the book, and one in which he summarizes the features of play, which have struck me as having striking similarities to classroom learning. I intend to carry on here as you see in the image below: quotes on the right side of the page, and my comments on the left.

You do have to be a paid subscriber to Noted to participate in Jillian Hess’s Commonplace Book Club Challenge, but I promise you that Hess’s account is worth the subscription. (Even if you choose not to become a paid subscriber, you should still subscribe to her account!) I encourage all of my lovely subscribers to join me and many others who hope to see how this ancient technique can become the source of new ideas for yourself—and for your fellow writers and thinkers.