What To Put in Your Notebook

A look inside my top secret sketchbook practice

I used to be superstitious about my sketchbooks.

I would never show a drawing in progress to anyone. If someone looked over my shoulder while I was drawing, I’d hide the page.

Why? I’m not sure.

Fear an idea might be lost? Fear that someone glimpsing my unedited lines might interrupt the flow of creative magic?

Whatever the reason, whether the prying eyes were those of a friend, family member, or curious passerby, I shielded my pages.

Now, dozens of sketchbooks later, I have grown less attached.

I don't hide my sketchbook drawings—in fact, I pass them around at book readings and school author visits, hoping they inform future artists.

But I still believe the sketchbook holds a mystical power.

In a sketchbook’s pages grow the seeds of future work.

Lunch break doodles, stray snippets of conversation, illegible sketches of characters in action—all these might one day emerge, grow and bloom into a fully-formed work of art.

What's equally as important are the pieces that won’t grow into a completed work.

The dumb jokes. The bad drawings. The unoriginal observations. The puns that are just too clever to unleash on the world.

Aimless sketches are the detritus of the active creative mind. They are the compost that fertilizes my creative practice.

Without this compost of unused ideas, there might be no future harvest.

In my sketchbook pages I try new visual voices. I experiment with new art supplies. I put on new lenses with which to see the world.

Ideally, I’m working with no intention of publication, no thought of eventual revision, and no boundaries on my imagination.

I love looking at the sketchbooks of others. It's like lifting the hood of someone's creative brain and glimpsing its complicated machinery.

Seeing the sketchbooks of others risks sparking artistic envy of course. Not everyone sketches as sloppily as me.

But another person’s sketchbook always reveals that their polished, published work did not come as easily as seems.

Art is never effortless—even for the most skilled artist.

Most importantly, my sketchbook is a place for play. Doodling. Scribbling. Messing around.

Where else can I draw with two pens at once? Where else can I steal art supplies from my children and try them out for myself? Where else am I free to write or draw like someone else for an afternoon?

Where else can I imagine new stories I may not yet have the abilities to tell?

With enough time and practice—and a few more filled sketchbooks—maybe one day I’ll have those skills.

All this magic takes place in a humble, low-stakes environment: Fifty sheets of recycled paper sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard, held together by flimsy spiral rings.

For all my veneration of the sketchbook practice, I tend to treat my actual sketchbooks badly.

They get stained by coffee, crumpled in my backpack, and splashed with pool water. They get baked in the sun and soaked in the rain.

Once I foolishly left my sketchbook on the roof of my car, then drove to work. On my way home I found it on the side of the road, looking a bit like a dead bird.

Humble, indeed.

Once, and only once, I lost a sketchbook and didn’t find it. I’m sure it held the ideas for a bestselling children’s book. A great American novel. Or at least a few decent puns.

If you ever find that lost sketchbook, please return it.

Or better yet, open it. Keep the lost ideas for yourself. Look at the scribbled words, the unselfconscious drawings, the haphazard ideas. Then go out and get a sketchbook of your own.

And start drawing.