I deface my books because I am in conversation with them.

Do not be afraid to abuse your books*

Working on notes for a recent workshop using quotes from Jenn Ashworth’s The Parallel Path

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• Buy my nature-landscape memoir The Ghost Lake Here.

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At a time when book banning is back in vogue, libraries remind us that truth isn’t about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information.
— Barack Obama

I am a voracious reader. Non fiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, fiction, give them all to me, let me go about my day always with the internal narratives of other writers in my head. Audio books, hard backs, paperbacks. Stacked on every table, in every nook. I keep highlighters, pens and book marks in every room, and I live in fear of one day losing the will to read. It happened once, years ago, during a bout of depression. That was when I discovered poetry, because I could no longer find refuge in reading novels, my concentration sparked to nothing every time I tried to read. Instead, in the haven of the local library, tucked away on a bottom shelf I found a short form emotional defibrillation in the form of Jackie Kay, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Collette Bryce, Katrina Porteus. An awakening occurred, a new literary genre to sink into.

Lately I’ve been running workshops again after a break while my mum had radiotherapy and I felt I couldn’t commit to the hours of thinking and processing that building a decent workshop involves. Plus all the promoting and, of course, being available to turn up and run it. Cancer has eaten through my family over the last three years, leaving death in its wake and sucking away the ability to plan. Right now I am racing through a few weeks of being able to commit to this sort of work.

I’d forgotten the joy of building workshops. Because the joy of building workshop s is about the joy of reading. Last Saturday I ran a three hour workshop called Finding Your Self in the Landscape, about the effect of different view points, societal structures and stereotypes on how we write about our bodies in relation to nature and the environment. This is the longest workshop I’ve done for a while and I was nervous. Thank you, by the way, for the lovely comments I’ve received from attendees, it’s heartening to know that I can still run a decent workshop.

I went back to the creative non fiction and memoir books I’ve read over the last year, and had read when I was working on my memoir, The Ghost Lake and found a mish-mash of note taking techniques in evidence.

From Ruth Allen’s Weathering

My brain jumps about so much that it is difficult to find one simplified way to record and retain information. What I’ve found since writing The Ghost Lake is that, actually, my brain needs two typos of note taking:

1. Notebooks, spreadsheets, post it notes. These are for recording information and where to find it. These are for the stuff that goes in a bibliography, or that an editor might ask me to go back to and check my facts. These are very much writer’s tools, the methodology that stops you getting in a mess later down the line (I speak from experience)

2. A highlighter. This is for the retention of the WOW. This is for the retention of that emotional response to someone capturing a thought, a philosophy, an observation in a book you are reading. This, I have found, does not need to be recorded in a complex system, I just need to flag it. As soon as I re read that highlighted passage my brain goes back to that reaction, and that reaction always contains a thought process of my own in which I can place my experiences within it and move that conversation forward.

This is particularly good when planning workshops, but it is also a particular joy for just reading and enjoying the thoughts and reactions that reading brings. Reading is not simply gathering information. Whatever genre you read, you are in conversation with the writer, and that conversation progresses outside of your own head when a book changes you.

Every book I read has the potential to make me so caught up in the thought process of the writer that I take one of my many pastel highlighters and highlight a line or a word or a passage, and sometimes more, sometimes a YES in the border and sometimes a THIS IS HOW IT FEELS. Because a book is a place of conversation for me, with myself as well as with the writer. I cannot imagine not having that internal narrative that allows for this kind of seeding of thoughts, though I know people do. I don’t know what it is like to walk around without the voices of lots of people speaking of their own lives on the same topics I’m interested in; streams of voices, of experiences, of opinion flowing down hill to the pool where I can collect them.

Give me a highlighter. Just that. It cuts out the middle man. My memory is a kind of notebook and if that opinion or that recognition that I have highlighted in the past has changed, because we, as readers are in a constant state of evolution and a book that I read when I was sixteen will have a different meaning to me now that I am forty seven, then I mark that change. I don’t erase the earlier voice of myself, but add to it.

This is how reading is more than just lifting lines from a page, it is like marking growth, it is like standing each year against the door frame and measuring height with a biro.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
– Mortimer J. Adler

People collect books. I am one of them, I guess, but as I age I find myself much more likely to collect the conversation, the thought process that the book has created in me.

From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain

I stopped trying to beat my own record for reading last year and instead, inspired by Dan Pelzer, began simply recording all the books I’d read and listened to. I hope when I die someone will take it and read some of the titles and know me better, know me at all. Isn’t that what we all want? Perhaps that’s what we want as writers too, just to be known before we are dead. Just to have our internal narrative voices heard.

[books]…are not there to allow you to escape, but to give you information about the human condition, which is a thing you cannot escape.

Hilary Mantel

This I say to you. Don’t hold back. Score the line, make the notation , life’s too short for complex annotations in perfectly neat notes books. I say this as someone who has a complex research system of notebooks, and cannot do without them, as I wade into the lives and letters and diaries and recipe books of all the early modern women whose voices are finding their way into my new novel. Capturing the wow, though, that’s different.

Life is short. A book can be a diary as much as it can be a story.

Annotate your thoughts, your connection points.

Find the point of conversation, live the book.

Until next time

x

*NOT LIBRARY BOOKS. But you already knew that.