I have a drawer in my desk that contains nine notebooks. Three are Moleskines—two ruled, one blank—bought at different points over the last four years, each with the specific intention of starting a morning writing practice. One is a Leuchtturm1917 I picked up because someone whose podcast I half-listened to mentioned bullet journaling, and I thought: sure, this will be the system. Two are generic composition books from a drugstore, purchased at 9:47 PM on a Sunday—the hour when I am most susceptible to the idea that my life is one inexpensive stationery purchase away from becoming organized and meaningful. One is a Field Notes booklet from a bookstore in Portland, because I was traveling and traveling makes me feel like the kind of person who should own a Field Notes booklet. One is a softcover journal with a painting of a mountain on the cover, bought at a museum gift shop because I saw it and thought: the woman who buys this journal writes in it every morning while drinking tea, and I would like to be that woman. The last one is a small green notebook with an elastic closure that I do not remember buying at all.
None of them have more than six pages of writing in them.
The Moleskines have the most—maybe four pages each—because I always start strong. The Leuchtturm has two pages, both of which are an index for a bullet journal system I abandoned before I got to the first actual entry. The composition books have a grocery list and a phone number I don’t recognize. The Field Notes booklet has my Portland Airbnb address written in handwriting that was surprisingly neat, as if the notebook’s small format had temporarily intimidated me into legibility. The mountain journal is completely empty. I opened it once, considered what to write, felt the pressure of the mountain, and closed it. The green one I’m afraid to open because I genuinely don’t remember buying it, which means it might contain something I wrote during a period of my life I wasn’t fully present for, and I’m not sure I want to meet her.
The Woman Who Buys the Notebook
Here is what I know about the woman who buys these notebooks. She wakes up early, probably around six, and she doesn’t check her phone. She makes coffee in a way that involves grinding beans—not scooping from a can—and she sits at a clean desk in a room with natural light. She writes for twenty minutes, longhand, because she has opinions about the connection between handwriting and thinking. What she writes is a mixture of reflection and observation that she’ll later describe, to herself, as her morning practice. She doesn’t call it journaling. She calls it writing. She is not precious about it. She does it the way she does other things that matter: regularly, without announcement, without photographing the notebook open to a page that’s been artfully arranged near a succulent.
This woman does not exist.
I know she doesn’t exist because I’ve been buying notebooks for her for approximately fifteen years, and she has never shown up. She is a fictional character I keep designing merchandise for. I am her merch department and her entire fan base. I purchase items on her behalf and store them in a drawer that she, being fictional, cannot open.
The drawer itself is not metaphorical. It is a real drawer in a real desk, and the notebooks in it are real notebooks with real blank pages, and the money I spent on them was real money I could have spent on things I’d actually use. But the purchase was never about use. The purchase was the point. The moment I handed my credit card to the bookstore cashier—or, more often, clicked “add to cart” at 9:47 PM on a Sunday—I felt something I can only describe as pre-accomplishment. The buying was a form of being. For a brief, shimmering window between the purchase and the arrival of the notebook (or between the purchase and the moment I placed it in the drawer), I was the woman who writes every morning. I had become her by acquiring her equipment.
The fact that I don’t write every morning, and have never written every morning, and have no evidence in my entire life history to suggest I would write every morning even if I had nothing else to do, is irrelevant to the transaction. The notebook is not a tool for writing. It is a talisman for identity. I carry it home from the store the way you might carry home a relic from a pilgrimage—not because it will change you, but because it marks the fact that you went.
The Tool Is Never the Problem
I’ve done this with other things. Running shoes, bought during a period when I was telling people I was “getting back into running,” which is a phrase I’ve used so many times it’s lost all referential meaning. A yoga mat that now lives rolled up under my bed like a sleeping pet. A French press, bought because the woman who grinds her beans also uses a French press, and I wanted to be the kind of person who has opinions about brewing methods. I do have opinions about brewing methods now, but I formed them after buying the French press and using it twice, and the opinions are mostly that French presses are a pain to clean and the coffee tastes the same as from the drip machine. I maintain the opinions anyway, because they’re evidence that I’m the kind of person who would have opinions about brewing methods, which is almost the same as being that person, which is close enough.
The pattern is always the same. There’s a gap between who I am and who I’d like to be, and I try to close it by acquiring the equipment of the person I’d like to be. The equipment arrives. I use it once, or twice, or four times. Then it joins the drawer, the closet, the under-bed region, the back of the pantry. And the gap remains, exactly as wide as before, because the gap was never caused by a lack of equipment. The gap was caused by the fact that I am the person I am, and the person I am doesn’t write every morning, doesn’t run, doesn’t do yoga, and doesn’t grind beans.
But here’s the thing I find most interesting and most embarrassing: the gap isn’t a problem. The gap is just the distance between reality and aspiration, and it’s a distance every human being lives with constantly, and it only becomes painful when you start measuring it. I started measuring it because I live in a culture that told me the gap was fixable—that the distance between who I am and who I want to be is a project, and the project begins with acquiring the right tools.
The Ecosystem of Getting Started
The notebook drawer isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It’s part of an entire economy built around the gap between wanting to do something and doing it. There are apps for this. Planners. Courses and frameworks and systems. There’s a whole genre of product whose marketing logic is: you want to write, but you don’t know where to start, and this tool will help you start. The blank page is a recognized and significant psychological barrier for writers, one that tools and generators are explicitly designed to address, as Reedsy’s plot generator openly acknowledges—the entire premise of the tool is that staring at a blank document is the problem, and the tool is the bridge between wanting to write and actually writing.
I’ve used that tool. I’ve used several of those tools. I’ve downloaded writing apps with elegant interfaces and filled them with the same six pages I would have written in the notebook. I’ve tried outlining software, mind-mapping software, distraction-blocking software, and one app that played ambient coffee shop sounds through my headphones, because the woman who writes every morning apparently does so in a café in Paris, and I thought I could trick my brain into believing I was there.
The apps have one advantage over the notebooks: they sit open on your screen, which means they confront you every time you open your laptop. A notebook can be placed in a drawer and forgotten. A notebook doesn’t send you a notification. A notebook doesn’t appear on your home screen alongside your unread emails and your abandoned meditation streak. A notebook is polite. A notebook lets you forget about it. An app, at least, has the honesty to sit there on your screen, open and blank, while you check Twitter instead.
There’s a tool I’ve been looking at recently called Unsloppy, a writing tool that sits open on your screen rather than in a drawer, and I mention it because the thing that interests me about it is the same thing that interests me about all digital writing tools: they can’t be hidden. They can’t be placed in a drawer. They’re right there, being honest about the fact that you’re not writing in them, which is more than my mountain journal has ever been.
But the question I keep returning to is whether any tool—notebook, app, planner, platform—can survive contact with the person who keeps buying tools instead of using them. Because the problem isn’t the notebook. The problem isn’t the app. The problem is that I’m the kind of person who’d rather buy a notebook than write in one, and no tool has been invented that fixes that, because tools don’t fix people. Tools are used by people who have already decided to do the thing, and the decision is the hard part, and the decision is not available for purchase.
The Professional Version of the Same Problem
I should say that this pattern doesn’t go away when you start writing professionally. It just gets a different costume. I have, at various points, been paid to write things—essays, articles, reviews, the occasional piece of content marketing I’m not proud of but that did buy groceries—and the professional version of the notebook drawer is the research-and-tooling rabbit hole. Instead of buying Moleskines, I download writing software. Instead of browsing the stationery aisle at the bookstore, I browse the features pages of writing platforms. Instead of imagining the woman who writes every morning, I imagine the writer who has a system—a workflow, a process, a set of tools that work together to produce prose with the efficiency of an assembly line.
This writer also doesn’t exist. But I’ve spent a remarkable amount of time pretending she does, and the pretending has taken the form of trying out writing tools, reading about writing tools, comparing writing tools, and writing about writing tools—all of which is writing-adjacent activity that produces no actual writing. It’s the professional equivalent of buying a notebook and placing it in a drawer.
The writing community has been having a version of this conversation lately around AI tools, which are the newest and most complicated addition to the tool drawer. The Authors Guild, which has been thinking about how professional writers should navigate these technologies, published guidelines for authors experimenting with AI that emphasize preserving human voice and the thinking that goes into writing, which is a polite way of saying: the tool is not the work, and confusing the two would be a mistake. Their guidance acknowledges that writers have always used tools—typewriters, word processors, research assistants—but draws a line between tools that support the work and tools that replace the thinking that makes the work worth reading.
I find this useful, not because I’m trying to figure out whether to use AI in my writing, but because the distinction applies to every tool I’ve ever acquired. The notebook supports the writing if I write in it. The notebook replaces the writing if I buy it and put it in a drawer. The running shoes support the running if I run in them. The running shoes replace the running if I buy them and place them by the door as a visual reminder and then step over them every morning on my way to the couch. The tool is neutral. The problem is me, being the person I am, which is a person who acquires tools.
What the Stack Says About Me
Here is what I think the notebook drawer actually says about me. It says that I want to be someone who writes, and that wanting is a real feeling, not a performance. The woman who buys the notebook isn’t a fiction. She’s me, in the moment of purchase, experiencing a genuine desire to be different from how I am. The desire is real. The follow-through is where I fail, and the failure isn’t interesting or instructive. It’s just a failure. The same failure everyone experiences when they want to be different from how they are and then discover that being different requires being different, which is harder than buying something.
The stack of notebooks isn’t a monument to my failure. It’s not a “museum of my former selves” or a “graveyard of aspirations,” though I’ve described it both ways in moments when I was feeling particularly dramatic about my own stationery habits. It’s a stack of notebooks. They’re empty. They’ll probably stay empty, because I’m not going to start writing in them. I might buy another one. I probably will. The next time I’m in a bookstore and I see a notebook with a nice cover and a good weight and an elastic closure, I’ll pick it up and feel the paper and think about the woman who writes every morning, and I’ll buy it, and I’ll bring it home, and I’ll put it in the drawer, and the drawer will close, and the woman will not appear.
But here’s what I’ve stopped doing. I’ve stopped feeling ashamed of this. I used to open the drawer and feel a small wave of guilt—the specific guilt of having spent money on a version of myself who didn’t materialize, which is a cousin of the guilt of having joined a gym and not gone, which is a sibling of the guilt of having told people I was “getting back into running” and then not run. The guilt was its own kind of performance. It was the penance I paid for the sin of aspiration, as if feeling bad about the notebook drawer somehow redeemed the purchase, as if guilt were a form of follow-through.
It isn’t. Guilt is just another thing I’m doing instead of writing.
The Drawer, Revisited
I opened the drawer this morning to count the notebooks, because I wanted to make sure I had the number right for this essay. There were nine. I’m fairly sure there were eight the last time I counted, which means I’ve bought one since then and forgotten, which means the green notebook I don’t remember buying was purchased recently enough that the purchase didn’t even register. This is either a sign that the pattern has become so automatic I no longer notice it, or a sign that I bought it at 9:47 PM on a Sunday, which is the hour when my memory is also not at its best.
I left the drawer open for a while. The notebooks sat there in their stack, with their blank pages and their elastic closures and their varying degrees of aspiration. The mountain journal was on top. The mountain stared at me. I stared back. Neither of us blinked, because neither of us has eyes, but if we had, I think I would have won, because I’m the kind of person who can stare at a mountain journal for a long time without feeling compelled to do anything about it, which is probably the same quality that prevents me from writing in it.
I closed the drawer. I came to my laptop. I started writing this essay, which is not the writing the notebook woman would have done—she would have written something in cursive, probably, in the morning, at a clean desk, with a cup of French press coffee she didn’t resent cleaning—and I’m aware that writing about not writing is its own form of not writing, and that this essay is, in its own way, another notebook. Another purchase. Another way of feeling like I’m doing the thing while not quite doing the thing.
But I am doing it. Right now, on this screen, in this document I can’t put in a drawer, I’m writing. It’s not in a notebook. It’s not in the morning. I’m not the woman. But the words are appearing, one after another, in the order I’m thinking them, which is the only thing that has ever constituted writing, and no notebook has ever helped me do it, and no notebook ever will.
I should probably stop buying them. I probably won’t.