On keeping a notebook and rockpooling
It’s important to keep a notebook. Taking it to new places is like getting a new stamp on one’s passport. When you enter the woods, open your book, find the nearest tree and pluck a leaf from its branches. Put it in the book, tape it in when you get home. Rub some mud in it for good measure – how else will you remember what it looks like, smells like, feels like? Its essence must be captured in your writing, so keep it fully in your notebooks.
Notebooks. Plural. Stack them on shelves, and when you run out of shelves, make more. It’s important to keep them on display, your notebooks are your motivators. Get multicoloured ones, ones with pictures on, Oxford ones, Harvard ones, small ones, smaller ones, any book will do. Twain had his leather pocketbooks custom-made, with tabs on each page to tear off when they were completed so that he could easily find the next blank page to write on. Label them with your name, the date (DAY/MONTH/YEAR always, don’t give in to the American format), leave room for another date for when you fill up the pages, and your mobile number and address. Trust me, if you lose one you’ll feel a stabbing pain which won’t go away until you find it again. I’ve had a notebook take a week-long trip around Kent before being returned to me by a kind stranger. Give them £10 for their troubles. Come to think of it, advertising on the inner cover ‘£10 reward for return of this notebook’ will go a long way to ensuring its return. It’s worth more than that, but just give £10. You’re a writer, you don’t have much money.
Scribble on the pages without too much care. Do not under any circumstances cross out a word, but you may doodle over them if you need to make a quick sketch of something for later reference. It doesn’t matter if the pages get naturally wet and the words disappear, that’s part of the experience – it says a lot more about what you did that day than any word ever could. Take a look at what I wrote after a day at the beach with my girlfriend using directly pulled words and phrases from my notebook:
Two boys and their cowboy dad. Wild curly hair. Barefoot. They built a shelter from tarpaulin and bamboo. Impressive. They start to construct an ‘art gallery’ on the coarse sand, of shells and rocks. More impressive. How did Dad raise them that two ten year olds would take pleasure in building an art gallery? They move on to the rockpools with Dad. Calling out each discovery.
“Winkles! It’s winkle city here.”
“Happy birthday winkles!” They sing a tune to the peri’s.
Picnic on the beach with Laura. Ham and cheese sandwiches and orange juice. She’s printed me out a guide of shells and seaweeds to use, but I don’t need it because she’s learned everything by heart. Coat gets wet sitting on it as an impromptu blanket, so I am left chilly in my shirt.
On to the rocks. First rockpool: Limpets, bladderwrack, eggwrack, tubeworms in their calcium shells. Baby brittle starfish, surprisingly athletic, snaking away from my touch, always moving towards the shadiest spot. Cushion star – also young – relies on its tube feet to crawl along the rock at a snail’s pace. Laura identifies it all, lets them crawl on her fingers and stick to her wrists as she checks their sex and condition. The pool is big, many places to hide and an ecosystem so complex it seems to me that it rivals the entire ocean, but we move on.
It’s good, but the sand in the crease of the spine and the assortment of shells I collected that day speak a whole lot clearer than my words ever will. The cut on my knee from slipping on loose shingle and landing on a rock tells a story far quicker and easier than a paragraph of words. It is strange for a writer to advocate not using words in this way - I collected the shells and crushed them up, flattening them, and taped them to a page – but I hold that my notebooks are the best pieces of work I shall ever produce. We are storytellers, not specifically writers. We should tell it any way we can. The entry from that day at the beach continues:
Looking for life is simple, it’s always under a rock. Occasionally you’ll see bubbles stream from some thicket of weed and know that’s where to look, but mostly it’s blind luck. Just pick up a slab and wait until the mud clears and hopefully a few sets of angry eyes will be staring up at you.
A large group of students here too: Sea Shepherds. Here to survey the beach on this abnormal day – the tide is almost twice as low as normal. A special opportunity for them and other conservationists to get a glimpse of the seabed out beyond the normal tidal range. Armed with buckets and measuring sticks, they record every detail of the beach as they comb over it, collecting as many species as they can from the rockpools to catalogue.
The next pool is stocked with crabs:
Velvet swimming crabs, violent and scary with Dracula-red eyes fight us as we attempt to catch them – we quit when a particularly feisty one clips some of the end of Laura’s little finger off.
Edible crabs. Docile and large. I catch one of them in the act of detaching a mussel from its rock; quite a feat since a mussel’s ‘foot’ (its sticky anchor thing that lets it glue itself to walls) can be very strong.
Shore crabs – not much to see here except we disturbed an orgy of them mating.
Hairy porcelain crabs. Ticklish and brown with excellent camouflage. We only catch glimpses of them after they realise that our objective is to catch them.
Hermit crabs: Loads. So many different sizes, plus a brood of tiny babies donning their microscopic shells. They are my favourite.
The species roam amongst what Laura says is sugar kelp. It’s caramel brown in colour and Laura says it tastes good, but I don’t think I’ll be trying it.
Caught a poor rock goby with our hands. Laura lifted a rock and its black body was a blur as it tried to wriggle under a new one. I fenced it off and retrieved it after a few slippery attempts and it eventually sat pacified and gasping on my palm. Laura cupped water from the pool and poured over it as we studied its markings and colours and spoke soothingly to it.
“It’s okay, Mr Goby, this won’t be long.”
“Look at the orange on its front top fin.”
“That’s its dorsal. Here, have some water.”
“You’re a baby, Mr Goby, just a lad.”
When we put him back, he sat, stunned that he was alive. It took a poke in the tail with my pen to convince him to find a new rock to hide under. He chose a fledgling kelp forest as his new home.
Unless you have a photographic memory a la ‘Mike Ross’ from Suits, remembering such details is impossible. Having my notebook on hand for quick detailing is essential. Sure, I could Google each specie when I get home to check what they look like, but how could I say my work was true to life if I were to use such details on the faith of some website?
Likewise, dialogue holds great importance in a notebook. In my first year of university, in a screenwriting class, I was challenged to eavesdrop and collect snippets of interesting conversation from friends and strangers (without them knowing, of course). How else may a writer produce realistic conversation if she does not use real conversations? Use your notebook to collect these tidbits. They’re interesting, show character and you get a chance to learn about other people’s lives just by listening to them. Later on in my course, I moved to creative non-fiction as my staple genre and learned how to interview people – a vital skill in the academic, commercial and creative fields. Everything that I had learned about listening to people and picking up on their interesting quirks and personalities helped me to connect with those I spoke to. When all you need to write is simple “Stutters, fidgety, repeats the word ‘like’ a lot, northern accent” to remember their entire character, you have become a master listener. In my piece which we follow so doggedly, I used my ears to uncover a strange and characterful sailor who would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
The ferry service from Plymouth Barbican to Mount Batten today is in disarray. A combination of an enticingly warm sunny morning and the low tide mean that the service is simultaneously packed and unable to go anywhere. The custard coloured tub sits grounded in the thick clay mud that streams from the estuary into this part of the sound. As we wait for the tide to rise, the afternoon sun begins to wilt and the clouds that were held back by its intensity encroach on the sky. Eastern European winds batter the dock as the skipper approaches us. He is short and fat, with a beard that wraps around his neck.
“I can on’y take six of you’s atta time now,” he says. “I don’ wanna get stuck in the mud halfway, like.”
The group growls at him with angry faces. I feel like a mountain goat stranded by an avalanche. Laura and I decide to leave the queue and find drinks in the bar instead.
Another key component of any notebook you write is a detailed description of every meal you eat. Every great notebook will contain these grossly emphasised sections in every entry. Hemingway would do the same:
‘The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l’huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil was delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes à l’huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.’
The purpose of these passages may be purely to practice one’s descriptive abilities – after all, when else other than after dinner does a writer feel such strong emotion towards anything? However I believe it to be a purely empirical task. George Washington was famous for carrying a manner of tools in his pockets for measuring and recording the qualities of plants and other objects he found of interest, cataloguing them all in a detailed table or graph in his pocketbook; would it be so strange to presume that a writer records every detail of his meal for the same reason that Washington records such objects? After all, the president must have travelled constantly, always encountering new species of plant and animal to record regularly. What else does a writer do than eat and drink and smoke with the same regularity? Meals are recorded in vivid detail because unlike nature and travel and people and love – food, alcohol and cigarettes will always be served to a writer.
Concluding our exploration of Laura and I at the beach:
I choose mulled cider and she chooses tea. Hers arrives in a pot so large the Queen would be proud – with biscuits too! Mine is cherry and gala apple, sweet and filling, in a tankard no less. We drink and I scribble notes in my book, but the paper’s wet with seawater and the ink runs. Laura is watching the boat from the window, but it’s still not moving. Half a dozen passengers shiver out on deck. I suggest taking a taxi home instead and she quickly agrees. A few last gulps and we’re off to order one from the hotel next door.
He’ll be twenty minutes, so we hold hands and drink in some more sea air and early evening views amongst the chip-eating tourists. The waves mingle with the gulls and turn to white noise.
In the bay, two orange kayaks are paddled back to shore with a third dark blob following them. A seal.
I have no idea if she’s right or if she just made that up, but I go with it. He trails half a length behind the kayakers, puffing from his nose a sharp mist of cold seawater, trying in his own peculiar way to entice the kayakers to turn and play with him, but they continue towards the dock. Oscar looks deflated when he sees they won’t be turning back and snorts one last breath and dives to feed deep below.
As we wait in the car park of the hotel for our lift home, the two wild boys and their father appear. The boys are complaining that the art gallery wasn’t finished yet.
“We can’t leave it now, the seagulls will eat it!” Shouts one of them.
True. Last week, in Looe, I was ambushed by a particularly brave bird that attempted to land on my shoulder to steal my crab sandwich and cone of chips. I swiped at it, losing a few chips and also my dignity. Laura laughed outright at me and two pretty girls nearby giggled too. It was a fantastic sandwich though (£5.20 from this small shop placed next to the river; look for the sign that says ‘Double decker sandwiches – cheapest and biggest in town!’). I can feel the boy’s pain.
The entry concludes with a memory of another day at the beach under similar circumstances and includes a reference to the exact wording of a sign. “How did you remember that?” you may ask. Well, I wrote it in my notebook of course.
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