The lure of the blank page
...and of Siren notebooks
I was in a shop in Lincoln today and noticed they had some good quality notebooks at heavily discounted prices (40% off). The range included a number of V&A originals. It was all I could do to keep my wallet in my pocket. After all, I really don’t need any more notebooks… Of the ones you can see in the photo above, nearly half are ‘empty’.
There should be a name for such a specific addiction. The closest I can get to is ‘papyrophilia’, which is an obsessive love of paper products.
Today’s experience did get me thinking… Why? What is it that draws me (and so many other writers) to virgin notebooks? What makes me want to own more and more of them?
And I think the answer is POTENTIAL.
Each notebook, each blank page, has the potential to be turned into something wonderful. Not simply at the practical level of being filled with words - and hopefully good ones! - but at the emotional level too.
They can be the vehicles for magical and remarkable journeys; they can be the foundation stones upon which the astounding can be built; they can be portals into new worlds, realms where I can lose myself - or reinvent myself. Or invent absolutely anyone, in any place, in any scenario, in any time.
For a writer, a notebook is the physical manifestation of the potential of the infinite.
And the unique.
Give me and two hundred other writers the same V&A notebook and tell us to write in them; eventually you will end up with 201 different journeys, stories, collections of words; 201 examinations of experience and articulations of emotion.
Isn’t there something magical in that?
But to buy them and leave them empty? Well, perhaps you have to be just a little bit crazy too..!