“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel
When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:
I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.
Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, my gosh! I’m laughing up a storm, not at the challenge of indexing – which try as I may never gets done, but the thought that I don’t do it, and then I see the piles (note the plural) of books, notes, photos, etc that I am now gathering for a long range project. I need an index – so much.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Good Luck with it, LK 😃
LikeLiked by 1 person
It seems the older I get the more time I spend looking for something. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
I know that feeling, Jan, trouble is, I also often forget what it is I’m looking for 😱
LikeLike